Pageant geek

Grandma Joan got a good pic of Kimberlyn all ready for the ball gown competition with me. That's what I call a smile. ;o)


That's my girl...

My Father

For nine and a half years, I have hung onto my first laptop, a Compaq with a 486 processor (that's pre-Pentium) and Windows 3.11, because it was the only place that my eulogy for my Father existed. The floppy disk drive has been out of alignment for a long time, it had been dropped heavily from the top of a bookcase that had fallen over and the battery falls out, the hard drive opening cover won't close, but it still boots and runs Word for Windows, but there was no way to install drivers for a network card, reinstall a modem driver or copy the file to a floppy disk, even.... So yesterday, I plugged it in and booted it up and hand typed the eulogy into my Thinkpad T510 and saved the file in various formats in various locations, never to be lost again. There is much more that could be said.....

My Father was raised on a hardscrabble farm in the piney woods of East Texas. With three older brothers he had no say in the operations of the farm and a strong desire to be the master of his own destiny. In the spring of 1944, he enlisted in the Army Air Corps. The destiny he had chosen was to fly.

You may not realize how preposterous a goal this was. At the beginning of World War II, it was possible to be a pilot and still be an enlisted man. By the end of the war, ALL pilots were officers. At the beginning of the war, an Officer Candidate needed to be 21 and have at least a year of college. By the end of the war, an Officer Candidate had to have at least a bachelor’s degree. For an eighteen year old in 1944, who had only completed high school, flight school was out of the question.

My father found a way to fly. After basic training, he passed the rigorous testing for a paratroop, and then passed the additional testing in mathematics and physics to qualify for training as a glider pilot. Shortly after he qualified and before he began training, the disastrous 101st Airborne landings behind Normandy Beach convinced American high command to discontinue the glider program. However, the trainee pilots had a contract and to honor the contract, they were offered an opportunity. If they could qualify by testing, they would be sent to Flight School to graduate as an officer and a pilot. An eighteen year old with a high school diploma from a two room school in the back woods was given two weeks of self study to prepare for a test designed for college graduates, preferably with engineering degrees, who were applying for flight school. He passed. If anyone ever told you my father wasn’t smart, he was wrong.

Private Melbourne Ernest Harris, still only eighteen, of Point, Texas was promoted to Sergeant and was going to flight school to become a pilot, and an officer and a gentleman.....

He was taught the physics of flight and trained in the art of flying basic flight school. Near the end of flight school, he had tested for advanced training as a fighter pilot and had qualified and been assigned to be trained in the Black Widow night fighter, which I think was designated the F-60 and was an Army Air Corps version of the Navy’s F6F Hellcat, fitted for night combat, and one of the latest designs.

On his final solo flight in Basic Flight School, a bad landing resulted in an injury to his head. A routine post-crash examination failed to uncover a detached retina and a few days later he lost the sight of his left eye, his binocular vision and his chance at flight school and becoming an officer...and his impossible dream.

He could have mustered out on a physical disability. He chose complete his term of enlistment and mustered out as a Master Sergeant Aircraft Mechanic. He used his GI Bill benefits to obtain a degree in Industrial Arts from East Texas State Teacher’s College and embarked on a career in teaching. He met and married Beatrice Joan Anderson and gave life and love to three children – Bruce David, Kim Alan (that’s me) and Gayle Lee. To improve his circumstances, he moved his family to Washington State to take a teaching position at Lincoln School, here in Sunnyside. He obtained Master’s Degree in Education from Texas State College by correspondence and summer sessions.

He undertook home improvement projects, including customized bedrooms perfect for a daughter who would become Miss Sunnyside and a son who is still a book collector. He took the family on summer tours of the Western United States stopping at every historical site and National Park or museum of interest west of the Mississippi.

He saw to it that all three of his children obtained the College Degree that he saw as his ticket to a self sufficient life.

And in between all that, he taught twenty-nine classes of elementary school students in Sunnyside.....

In retirement, he continued to indulge his passion for home improvement, and when called upon to provide day care for my daughter, taught her to read before she was four, just as he had done with his own children.

On March 27th of this year (2001), Melbourne Ernest Harris, aged 75, who in his youth had wanted to be a pilot, and in his maturity succeeded in becoming a teacher, died quietly of untreatable cancer in the Veteran’s Hospital in Walla Walla.

I miss him today, and I’ll miss him until we are rejoined.

Art

Kimberlyn's latest work, a combination of old and new. The original colored pencil sketch was scanned into the computer. Using the GIMP (the Graphics Image Manipulation Program), an open source image editor, she converted it to a line drawing then inked it layer by layer with the coloring tools the GIMP provides. The text was added with Picasa, a simple photo editor, also open source, supported by Google. I post it here for everybody, 'cause she never posts on her own blog anymore....

Parental fear moment, I think she's getting psyched for the Rave at RadCon. She had too much fun at SpoCon....

Painting Trim

So, the weather was quite nice today finally, so I got outside and painted the trim around the new windows. Rather than try to match the dark grey trim, we bought a pretty new blue color that would blend well with the grey base color. So I painted it all up and then took a picture. In the picture I noticed that the pretty new blue color seems to be pretty much almost precisely the exact same shade as painter's trim tape. ;op

Ok, when I redo the sofits (they are some sort of cheap wood substitute that has not weathered well and need to be replaced with actual pine one by four) next spring, it should look a little less like it's all ready to be painted... If you enlarge the photo, you can see the paint and it looks a lot better. It really is a pretty color.

Newnessness.

Kimberlyn turns into a gurl for her sixteenth birthday, pierced ears, high heels and everything.


And we have a bay window.

Update

I know I haven' t been keeping my blog up lately, but I haven't been completely useless. Here ar the completed Hill Martians. It's been hard to watch the Mariner's, high expectations have been alarmingly disappointed and so progress was much slower than it should have been.

Last weekend we went up to Mom's cabin on Lake Coeur d'Alene. My pile o' blocks looks just like it did when I left it, should be good for quite a while.








Mom had just returned from a trip to California and a visit with older brother Bruce. He sent us this gift made with his own hands:

















And this is what it takes to actually qualify as a blowhard in this family.... ;o)































And, of course, every trip needs a visit to a tourist attraction, this one is in Worley, Idaho.

I need a faster upload --

Mini-Faire, June 14, 2008

It's not as easy as I'd thought, but here it is.

Kennewick High School Divas, Swingin' at Basie's Place

Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is pretty much over as a holiday, but I have much to be thankful for. I had a wonderful meal prepared by my wonderful wife with help from my wonderful daughter. What a wonderful world... ;o)

Jen's sister Jeannie came for Thanksgiving and enjoyed the meal. Jen did some custom tailoring for her and while the sewing was going on, she and Andrew played Star Wars Trivial Pursuit and I read the questions.

During the day, before the meal, I installed Ubuntu Linux on this old laptop.... I am using it to create this post. It installed without any problems, setting up all the hardware without having to hunt down drivers (which made for a complicated Windows XP install) and I set up Evolution to run my POP3 E-mail from Verizon. I've had some problems setting it up but now that I solved the thermal issues, it runs like a champ... though a bit slow. It's been rather painless except for install issues caused by it's thermal issues. After I stuck a CoolPad underneath it, it's been flawless.

Gettin' it done....

The family spent the weekend at Mom's cabin on Lake Coeur d' Alene and I added to the Pile o' Blocks....






I'm still not entirely happy with it. The wall with the paving stones on top makes a seat for tall people, but too tall for short people. I used all the bricks I had with me, so I'll take another one up sometime and put a second brick on the singleton at the top of the steps to make a seat for shorter people.
The other major modification would be to lift the steps, pour concrete, then set the pavers in the concrete so you don't have to keep pouring sand on them. The sand holding the pavers doesn't work on the steps very well, because it just washes away. If you enlarge the photo (just click on it) you can see the top step is uneven and the sand just washes out from between the pavers on the lower steps. Concreting them in will be for next spring though.

The Mariners ended up with a split with the cellar dwelling Rangers after the loss again today (Sunday). That is NOT getting it done. They stay two games back of the Angel's, and are only a game and a half up on the Yankees for the wild card. If they don't win the homestand against the Angels this week, they are no better than tied for the wild card and buried out of the running for the division, since they have an away series with the Yankees coming up, and three games in Oakland and four games in (Not) Los Angeles to close out travel for the season. By that time, three games at home with the Rangers probably won't matter unless they win some away series'.

Kim

Family photos

We had professional photos done at the mini-fair. These are a preview for the grandparents for whom they were taken and to share with the rest of my dear readers, if any.... ;o)

And of course, since grandparents only really care about the grandkids (their parents are able to manage on their own now, you would think...)



Surely they are the fairest and noblest of children as no one can disagree.

Kim

I am an Anderson of that Ilk

Pride in family

My niece, Alexis Joan Fairbanks, is Washington's Junior Miss and bound for the America's Junior Miss pageant in Atlanta for the next two weeks. The photo is from the local paper, the Moscow-Pullman Daily News. She's using lentils, the primary local crop, for a theme for the state of Washington. She is, ehhh... out standing in the field.