Museum of "Art"

From today's Daily Universe:

Lambson said he wants students
to take the opportunity
to see the contemporary exhibits
as they are created with
students in mind.

...

He said he hopes it resonates
with students and that
it speaks to them because
[the art] is meaningful...

...

He said he is particularly
excited for Andrew Sexton’s
“Self-Portrait,” a nearly 6-foot
wide mustache that will be set
on fire for five minutes every 15
minutes.

This is why I'm a computer programmer and not an art curator.

More videos!

This post will have no artistic or literary blogging value, but for those of you interested in watching endless videos of our children I have assembled a sampler plate. Most have been trimmed to a bearable watching length, at least.

In chronological order:


Olivia loves to help give Carmen, and anyone else nearby, a bath.


Self-explanatory, I think.


Carmen's starting to lighten up a little and laugh at our jokes.


Carmen jumping up, just like johnny.


We live close to the airport so we decided to find a place near the airport where we could watch the planes land. That night, Olivia and her best friend kitty were airplanes.


Carmen loves to blow spit bubbles.


This is Carmen trying "solid" food for the first time.


This is from the previous post, about our kiddie pool in the backyard.

Splish splash

Summer is definitely here. Yesterday, Houston set a new record of 104ºF (with 75% humidity). At least, that's what I hear. I go from my air-conditioned house to my garage to take my air-conditioned car to covered parking at my air-conditioned job. With the exception of walking to and from the parking garage at work, it's always in the 70s for me.

Amber, on the other hand, ventures outside to take white kitty on walks, get our car inspected, buy food, and other such trivialities, so she decided to get a kiddie pool for our kiddie-poohs to cool off in.

We set it up in the backyard with the canopy we got for our wedding reception that was cheaper to buy than rent. It actually wasn't so bad in the shade, as long as you didn't move or exert yourself in any way.

Olivia had a great time. Her favorite part was throwing the beach ball in and out of the pool and getting in and out of the pool to go after it. Carmen slept through the whole thing, although I expect she would have been indifferent, as she is to most things.

I expect this pool will get a lot of use.

29 years young

I had my 29th birthday on Saturday. Amber made it a theme birthday by getting me Rock Band 2, American Idol, and Lego Batman for the PS3, and Dan came over for lunch and brought me a gift card to GameStop. The guitar that came with Rock Band didn't work, but since I want 2 anyway Dan and I went and got another one and played for a little while. Now we just need to get it working so we can play online.

Dan and Hyde were kind enough to watch our kids as well so we could go out to a movie. We had heard many good things about the new Star Trek movie and it didn't disappoint. I'm excited to see where this reincarnation goes.

Field Trip

Last weekend I capped off a week of training in petroleum geoscience with a two-day field trip. The company encourages us to get a certain number of training days in each year so this year I decided to supplement my skills with some industry-related training. For 4½ days I learned all about rocks and minerals, tectonic plates and continental drift, depositional environments, well logs and seismic logs, reservoir properties, and much more. It was a very interesting and it made a lot of things I'd been working on a little bit more clear.

We boarded a bus at noon on Friday and drove to Canyon Lake, where a fairly recent release into the "safety valve" during heavy floods had literally washed away the surface revealing some very interesting limestone. We got to see faults and strata, lots and lots of fossils, and even a few dinosaur footprints. One of the main points of the field trip is to give a sense of scale to the reservoirs that exist deep underground. This bit of limestone was pretty large, but tiny in comparison to a normal reservoir.

We stayed at a hotel in New Braunfels, then on Saturday we went to a machine-dug trench to see a real-life cross section of some more limestone, then to a point bar on the Brazos River to see how those form and turn into reservoirs in meandering river systems. Very interesting (don't buy real estate across the river from a point bar!).

When I got home Saturday night, I brought home some fossilized clams and other sea creatures. I had a lot to talk about at dinner and as I talked and gesticulated to explain some of the concepts I'd learned to Amber, Olivia would copy my gestures and words exactly, big words and all. She thought it was very funny (as did I).

The release valve area.

A little fault. (Who's fault is it?)

Dinosaur footprints.

Millions of fossils everywhere.

Point bar on the Brazos River.

Backyard

Last night we had one of those nights that made the long commutes and yardwork worth it. Olivia woke up late from her nap and we didn't have chance to play before dinner, so seeing the picnic blanket still out from our Sunday good-bye picnic with Doug & Amanda I told her we'd have a dessert picnic after dinner. By then the sun was down low enough that we had plenty of light but we weren't in direct sunlight and the temperature had cooled down so it was perfect. We laid on the blanket in the backyard and ate ice cream, then ran around, went down the slide, and bounced kitty in green blankie (like the parachute game) until Olivia was worn out.