Month: February 2010

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A New Addition To The Family

We added another rescue pup to our family today. We have been looking for a compatible breed for over a month now and finally found what we believe will be a good match for Zeus. Zeus is our 4.5 year old Pug/Dachshund who seems to get along well with other Pugs, Puggles and Dachshunds when we go to the dog park or for walks around the neighborhood.

The pup we found is a 2 year old puggle, but we believe he actually has some Chihuahua in him as well and could even be a Chug (Chihuahua/Pug). Event though he looks like a puggle puppy, he is just too skinny to be an adult puggle.

I look good from this side.                                      I look good from this side too.

At any rate, the two boys have been getting along pretty well so far meaning Zeus is putting up with the new rookie. I think if they were going to kill each other they would have done it in the first couple of hours. The next few days will determine how much hand (paw) holding we need to do with this new guy in order to get him acclimated to our schedule and Zeus’s schedule. According to the foster parents, he did not get to go on long walks with them and Zeus likes his 2 miler every day so we will see how that goes.

The god of thunder must have a sidekick, so we named this one Apollo. He came to us with a different name but all the research I did suggested that it is OK to change the dogs name and can even be beneficial if he comes from a puppy mill or other bad background.

Welcome home Apollo.

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Oxy Acetylene

Back to Oxy today so I could complete a few of the labs that I skipped when the instructor asked me to jump ahead into Shielded Metal Arc (SMAW). Today I was able to complete the pad with filler and corner joint.

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The pad with filler exercise is creating a uniform line on the piece of metal using a a filler rod. As the metal is melted with the torch, the filler is added by lightly pushing the filler rod into the molten pool of metal. The rod melts and bonds with the base metal creating a unified bead running across the plate.

 

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The corner joint is created by leaning two metal pieces together to form a tepee then tacking the opposite corners together. After the corners are tacked, we weld the whole length of the joint so that both pieces form one curved piece of metal.

Today was a good day as I was able to complete both tasks in just a few hours, with time left to clean up and study for next weeks midterm. I will take the test next week and then continue on with the last Oxy task, the dreaded but joint and hopefully also complete the shielded metal arc but joint. If I can do that I will be way ahead of the game and can feel good about missing one class in April when I need to travel to Minneapolis for a volleyball tournament.

Two big games tomorrow. USA vs Canada in hockey, and Purdue vs Michigan State in basketball. The Boilers will be playing without Robbie Hummel who is out for the season with a torn ACL so the rest of the team will need to step up and fill that gap. Both games overlap so thank goodness for Picture in picture and the DVR.

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Mile Marker

Mileage 5
Time 8PM
Location Indoors – Treadmill
Weather Snow

5 miles tonight. Felt a bit sluggish as I have not been sleeping well. We are looking at adopting another rescue pup and I have been spending many late nights researching a compatible breed for Zeus. I think we have settled on a Puggle as he gets along great with Pugs at the park.

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Mile Marker

Mileage 4
Time 6PM
Location Indoors – Treadmill
Weather Snow

Another quick 4 miles this evening. I really need to separate the miles from the rest of the blog as this is not too interesting to anyone but myself at this pint. A redesign is in order.

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Mile Marker

Mileage 5
Time 1PM
Location Indoors – Treadmill
Weather Snow

Another quick 5 miles at lunch. Watching the replay of the Canada vs USA hockey match from last night. Amazing open net goal by Ryan Kelser. GO USA!!!

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Volleyball Is Back In Session

After taking a few weeks off from tournament play, the girls are back doing pool play this weekend. Unfortunately, their lack of tournament play or at least playing together as a team is showing. They have been accustomed to always finishing the day as one of the top three teams but yesterday they finished 7th which dropped them down a bracket for today’s play. They lost the first match in 2 games and they seemed very uptight which I attribute to lack of real game time. They have been practicing as usual for the past few weeks but nothing can replace the experience of  real game pressure.

Jen’s team did end up winning their next two matches in two games straight each so I am a little more hopeful but it still looks like they have a long road back to get to where they were before the break. I have read many times that if you stop running for a month you can loose up to 70% of you capacity. There must be a similar statistic for staying away from real game play but that one I am sure is harder to quantify.

At any rate, I will continue to be a supportive parent despite my competitive urge to yell and scream at the matches (I have not done that since I was coaching soccer). They need to gel by the first week in March otherwise the Denver qualifier will be a painful experience.

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An Exercise In Frustration

We continued with the butt joint weld today in class and boy was it a pain in mine. I started off pretty well and actually 30 minutes into the lab work I did my best weld. It had a nice buildup on the top with total penetration about 4/5’s of the way across the whole length of the joint. I just need that last 5th to have an excellent weld. I should have quit there. But not being a quitter I kept on for the rest of the day experimenting with different gaps, heat levels, travel speed and work angel. I even tried adjusting the way I was sitting on the stool and holding the electrode. I had many good attempts and some terrible ones, but that is why we are there. To practice, to try new things and to get better.

I am confident that I will ‘get it’ next week. Now off to Caribou to check in with FourSquare and get some coffee.

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Party Like It’s 1979

My older brother had a party tonight for all of his patients, family and friends. He wanted to have an open house at his dental practice in Hinsdale, to show appreciation for all the people who have helped him become a successful cosmetic dentist. He has done cosmetic work for many of the news personalities you see on TV every day and various Olympic athletes who have sustained tooth damage during events.

Anyway I had planned on stopping by for a quick visit to see Mike and the rest of the family (Mom, Dad and my brother Joe and his kids were there as well), but I ended up staying for almost 3.5 hours. Turns out many of our old classmates were there so this was a good chance to catch up. None of them were in my graduating class but they were guys I knew from the class ahead and the class behind me.

One of the attendees was Bob Briskey of Briskey Photography who had shot my wedding and has been doing before/after photos for Mike for quite a while now. I had not seen Bob (my fault) for about 10 years and I found out that in addition to his day job, he is teaching photo classes at Morton College in Cicero Illinois. I wish I could do weeknight classes as I would love to attend some of Bob’s sessions. If you have ever thought about getting better with your camera or want to expand your creativity, I highly recommend Bob as an instructor. Check out their class schedules and look under ART to find his classes (he is listed as R Briskey).

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Another Mileage Entry

Mileage 4
Time 8PM
Location Indoors – Treadmill
Weather Snow

As I add more miles to my legs and treadmill, I am trying to decide what am I going to call these frequent posts. I like to give all the posts a unique (if possible) name, but there are only so many ways to say I did ‘X’ amount of miles today. I have decided (after this one) to just make the heading ‘Mile Marker’ if the post does not contain anything else of real value to anyone besides me. That way the posts can be filtered to exclude ‘Mile Marker’ entries from feeds or can be filtered to show only those posts.

While I was running tonight, I was listening to ‘This Week in Google’ podcast episode 26 and Leo Laporte made a very keen observation as to why some of us, me included, have no interest in the iPad. He said that the iPad is a device for consumers of content and many of his podcast listeners are instead producers of content, myself included. Since the iPad has no real keyboard (I don’t want to carry around the add on stand/keyboard thing), it is not a device on which we can feed our blogs, twitter feeds, Facebook accounts etc. I am sure it will have a market among the consumers of content but most of the geeks I know have no interest in something that does not really replace anything we already have. I don’t want to carry around yet another device in my backpack of tech. It it had a keyboard and maybe a stylus I would take another look, but until then, I will save the $800.00