The new gym at school is moving right along which is good. I no longer have a tiny slice of daylight by which to gauge the weather which is not good. My tiny slice of the outdoors is now a metal studded hallway with between us and the soon-to-be gym. Our little yellow building used to be one of the largest buildings on campus. This is no longer the case.
Speaking of school, I wanted to show you this cute little car some brave student drives to school every day. It's nicely cared for, not over restored. Just nice. I thought it was a Ford Pinto but Bob says it's a Mercury Bobcat. Anyway, my point is that you just don't see these cars on the road anymore and every time I see it, I'm taken back to the days of JoAnn's "Pinterra".
This week was the regional robotic competition at Auburn High School. You can see our team wearing bright green and the Trojan helmets.
Different schools bring their robots together for regional competitions and the cream of the crop robots find themselves and their operators at Nationals. This is the 2015 official NW Championship playing field. The video for this competition hasn't been uploaded to YouTube yet, but if you want to watch the competition from Auburn Mountainview's competition, click here.
These robots are built by folks that can expect to get a wedgie 364 days of the year. On this day, however, these geeks can let their nerd flags fly with pride.
You can almost cut the nerd-ness with a knife. The machines they've created are built with the materials from the specified list and are programmed from scratch by the uber-nerds of the club.
Although these robots all look distinctly different, they are all designed to fulfill the exact same requirements.
This year the requirements were to pick up plastic bins and move them to another area...along with some other techno-babble non roboters didn't understand.
Each year the task is different. Sometimes it's putting balls through hoops, a maze, stacking items, a variety of things but each year each teams robot has to be created to do exactly the same task as every other robot engaging in competition for the year.
Snatches of conversation heard as I walked through the pit area included discussion on which computer language is best, which OTG (over the glasses) safety glasses they like, and the merits of plastic vs. rubber wheels on the feed mechanism of robots among other topics I did not understand.
We spent the weekend at the cabin and after a run to the Astoria Costco for a super-sized bottle of Mucinex, we came home for a nap. Well, two out of three of us took a nap. One of us had a little bit too much decongestant to sleep so just listened to our book then got bored and took pictures of the others while they slept.
Nothing beats a nice long afternoon nap like another nap in front of the fire.
After a basically non-eventful weekend, it was time to dig Nitro out from his "hiding" place, harness him up, and head for home.
Normally Nitro rides on my lap in style like this. He likes to look around and not miss a thing. Growl at motorcycles, stare at the drivers of vehicles we are passing, and generally take in the scenery. However, since I am providing him the platform on which to view the world rushing by, I thought it was time he learned how to ride in the back seat like a respectable cat, thereby allowing me freedom to sit however I wanted.
As you can see, he was none too happy to be relegated to the back seat like a commoner.
This was made clear by standing on our armrests with a "screw you" look.
I'd chase him back to the back seat only to have him come stand on the armrests again.
I figured maybe if Nitro didn't have his nice bed on my lap to ride on, he wouldn't stay. I was dead wrong. The problem with this plan was that each time we cornered, Nitro would dig in to stabilize himself. Ouch!
This brought back memories of Logo demanding her way only to find that it didn't work out according to her plan. Rather than admit she was wrong, she'd act like this is what she meant to do all along.
More awkward moments with Nitro dreaming up ways to kill us in our sleep.
Nitro 1: Tanya 0
Gotta love a good nap.
Stop. Enough with the pictures, Mom!
Reagan has been riding ferry boats from an early age. What?
Orca whales again?
And the chef du jour is Reagan Walker!
If Mom feeds me oatmeal one more time, I swear I'm gonna...
Reagan takes after her Grampa and Great Grampa and likes to work on her cars herself. She's not too subtle about how she gets to the bottom of the problem yet, however.
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