Our offer was accepted recently on some land in the Ada/Lowell area. We took some pictures when we were looking around, and you can check them out in the gallery. We have plot two of three on the survey, with the private road (the farmhouse's old driveway) running through the center.

Remember the telephone game? Here's what happens when you do it with movie dialog, translating from English to Chinese back to English: Star War Episode III: The Backstroke of the West Thanks John, well worth the time spent reading.

This is almost a month late, but we hope everybody had a good holiday season. Ours was nice; very relaxing despite our yearly Odyssey across Michigan. Here are the pictures. Heidi started her paid internship this month. She's responsible for more schools now, which results in more work and more driving. We're really looking forward to the added income though. Hopefully we'll finally be able to save up some money, and get out of apartments.

I attended a class at work called Introduction to Avionics, which was intended to bring up to speed those of us new to the aerospace industry. It briefly covered the technologies used to keep private, commercial, and military planes in the air. One of our last classes consisted of a trip to Western's College of Aviation, where we got to fly their 737 simulator. The pictures I recently posted cover our flight, and some of the other things we got to see.

The flooded apartment didn't end up doing a whole lot of damage. We have some peeling paint on the lower couple inches of the walls, and some of my books are a lot less flat than they used to be. The computer is also displaying some very strange behavior. Strangely, this is the computer that was off when the water hit, but the one that was on at the time was completely fine.

Just a quick note: our apartment got flooded tonight. We'll be living in another one for a week or so until ours is less damp. Apparently a pipe burst while we were away today, and we ended up with around 3 inches of water on the floor. We won't have internet, but our phones will work.

Hello again, I'm back from my trip... HUGOMORE42 I got back Tuesday afternoon, and it's good to be home. The hiking was great, Big South Fork is a beautiful park (pictures). Considering that neither of us had done much hiking since high school, it was extremely successful. Travelling wasn't so good though, and I can't say I'm anxious to try greyhound again. We got to the park a little after noon on Thursday, September 1.

I'll be leaving soon for a hiking trip... HUGOMORE42 The first day will consist of an 11 hour bus ride to Kentucky, where I'll meet Joe and begin a 4 hour drive to the Big South Fork National Park in Tennessee. Then we'll actually start hiking, which will be good since I'll be pretty tired of riding by then. So far it's looking like excellent weather for hiking, despite the hurricane.

We recently finished moving to Grand Rapids... HUGOMORE42 It took a few weeks, and we're very glad to be done. You don't realize how much crap you have until you have to move it all. Thanks to everybody who gave us a hand, it would have taken forever without you. We like the new place for the most part. It's a quiet complex, and we have lots of room. The downsides are mostly little things, such as the kitchen cupboards and drawers all being narrower, which creates a surprising amount of trouble.

It has been a while since my last update, so here it is... HUGOMORE42 I've gotten past the "reading at my desk stage" at Smiths, and have mostly taken over (with ongoing help from my predecessor) as our project's Code Librarian. That means I take others' changes to the application, pull them together, build it, and test to make sure there aren't problems. I'm also putting part of my time toward the part of the application that controls the radios, but there hasn't been much time for that lately.