Congratulations

Congratulations Rosie on your 3rd place finish at the Cross Country final race! and...congratulations to Pratt for the championship! We are all so happy for you!
Madeleine, we are all so glad that you are better! I so missed the smile in your voice on the phone.
By the way, we are having a very fun birthday celebration day here for Samuel Clay who turns over into the two digits tomorrow! He is reveling in the birthdayness of it all!
Also, a note. I love the fall, the colors of the trees are continually astounding me this year and we are all looking at our trees waiting for them to show their true (Ok, I won't say it)! We have a gorgeous red maple in the back yard and the two front maples are gold with bits of orange. The cemetary down the road is chock-full of beautiful round gollden brown oaks. Illinois is incredible in the fall.

My steel B

Drawing from a model.

this is an eye I made for 3D class as well

More of steel B.

I'm am at the end of our hour and a half lunch break, killing time screwing around on the computer. In 15 minutes I will head back to my 3-D class where my crazy but smart and extremely interesting professor will lead a discussion on mine and a few other student's projects.
Our assignment was to create a 3-D representation of any style of printed letter, and it can be as abstract as you want, but it must be well designed.
here are a few things to watch when designing quality 3-D works:
Function
Process
Cost/time
craftsmanship
philosophy
And there were a couple other things too, but I forget. My 3-D letter is B. I made it out of scrap sheet metal and twisted it with needle nose pliers in all different directions, I shaped two pieces of the twisted metal into curves and balanced one on the other, then I bolted it together.
I'll see if i can get pictures up here, anyway, I'm off to class.

Oh yeah, Cross Country championship on Sat, exciting!

needing baths

Markie proudly says - I disgusting!

The Shepherd's Dog

This past year I haven't been that into music, so I went out this month to pick up some of the CDs that I've missed. This week I bought Iron and Wine's new album The Shepherd's Dog, and I can't stop listening to it.

The sound of this CD is a lot more varied and produced than previous albums by them, and some of the songs go so far as to sound electronic. At first glance, it definitely doesn't sound like an album by the folk band that (so I'm told) recorded their first album, The Creek Drank the Cradle, into a tape recorder in a home studio. On closer listening, though, it's obvious that the new ideas and denser sound don't diminish the id of the band at all; Sam Beam's voice and guitar are still the center of the music.

ps:

oh yeah, I forgot here are two of our baby fish!
ok mom, here it is, but I looked silly in the picture ( i took it off because I find it deeply mortifying!)

pictures

here are some recent pictures (matthew built an entire block city himself! it's all or nothing with that boy).

Photos

Now that's what I was afraid of. #%!@ computers. Where are those photos? Oh, here they are!! yeah.

Road trip - and my first post

Thanks Madie for setting up my account. I can finally post on my own . But I don't want to hurt myself with overly much effort, so I'll start with a short one. My goal is to actually describe what I do at work and make it understandable by means of some white magic. But that is for later. A couple of weeks ago I visited Rosie at Pratt, and we wandered around trains and buses in Brooklyn and walked around the Williamsburg neighborhood. I had so much fun just hanging out with Rosie.

Then an Amtrak train down to Philadelphia and a week spent training new members on the Fixed Income Risk team, etc.

I'll just slap some photos on here and call it a night. If all works I'll have a photo of Rosie, one of Ben playing soccer, and one of me in an ultralight. Oh yeah, I should do an entry on my fantastic ultra-light flight too. I had a blast zooming 20 feet above fields and along the Rock river. And when we went up high, we could see to Rockford and Rochelle. thanks for that present!

Love,

Dad/Mark