TuzigootJournal: We're Home

Dear Family and Friends:

We got home Thursday noon. But first, a report on the visit last weekend of Malia, Jeff, and Valerie to Monterey.

On Saturday we headed for the Monterey Aquarium. Time after time when we told people we were going to Monterey for three months, they said, Go see the aquarium. We put off going until we had company to take. Malia had gotten excited at the Denver Aquarium, so the acclaimed Monterey Bay version was one of Jeff and Valerie's priorities.

And it was spectacular. We took it in morning and afternoon sessions, sandwiched around lunch at Bubba Gump's Shrimp Factory. Malia was a little jet-lagged in the morning, but by afternoon was pretty active. You'll have to rely on web-site pictures -- too dark for my camera.

I was really impressed by the jellyfish. They're regarded as a simple animal, but they've got all these shapes and appendages and are transparent to boot. Fascinating.

We were lucky: Forest Gump was sitting outside the restaurant with his suitcase and box of chocolates. Jeff, a Forest fan, was thrilled; Malia's still thinking about it.

We ended the active part of the day at the Dennis the Menace Park -- Cartoonist Hank Ketcham was a Monterey Peninsula resident -- I've seen references to Carmel and Pebble Beach as the site of his residence (he died in 2001).

Sunday morning we took the 17 mile drive through Pebble Beach. The plan was to go on down the coast to the Rocky Point restaurant where we had gone for Mother's Day lunch with Heidi, Mandi, and Paul. But when we got to the Pebble Beach Lodge, overlooking the 18th hole of the golf course, I had an inspiration: Let's go to Father's Day brunch here! In contrast to Mother's Day they had space available. Check out this view:

Great brunch spread, too. Pebble Beach is the site of the 2010 U.S. Open and it's not too early to buy souvenirs. Proably can't reserve this table now for the final day of the tournament.

We continued on down the coast until Valerie and Susie had seen enough cliffs and high bridges, then turned around and looped inland via the Carmel Valley to return home.

Monday, in search of sun and a warmer beach, we drove up to Santa Cruz, by way of the lettuce and strawberry fields in the Salinas Valley. (We'd been told that we'd know it was summer in Monterey when the fog set in -- that seemed to be what was happening this weekend, as you can see from the pix.) On Saturday, Jeff, Malia, and I had gone down to the Marina Beach. Showing Malia the ocean was another item on Jeff's checklist of things to do. We were standing near the wave line when an above-average wave came ashore that got our feet wet and that was a bit of a shock for Malia. This perch at Santa Cruz was close enough for her.

We also enjoyed a stroll down the Santa Cruz Boardwalk -- pretty good crowd for a Monday it seemed to us.

After that we hiked through the big redwoods near Santa Cruz, then headed over the coastal range for a late lunch, a stop at a Los Gatos park for running, swinging, and sliding by youknowwho, and then to the San Jose airport where the kids had a late flight back to Denver. We had a great time and were really glad they came to see us.

My last class had been on Thursday and I had prepared my final exam, scheduled for Tuesday, early in anticipation of spending most of the weekend hosting and touring. On Thursday morning, right before class I got the inspiration to make the test a take-home exam. I had a problem in the exam that needed some reflection and thinking, and that can be hard to do in a two-hour exam. So, idealist that I am, I decided I wanted to give my students a chance to show me their best work and that meant giving them the weekend to work on it.

And it paid off. A couple of potential Bs moved up to A and some borderline Cs moved up to solid Bs. I'm a real softie. I want them to realize this stuff I'm peddling can help them in their career, so I don't want to feed the negative impression so many people have of statistics.

Incidentally, my Bahrain-Navy, Annapolis-graduate, student won a prestigious award for his thesis -- he developed a computer-based, easy to use method for determining how to deploy Coast Guard vessels around a port to defend against small-boat attacks such as hit the U. S. Cole. It's interesting, in class and office visits, he, Abdul, is very quiet and deferential. In making his thesis presentation, competing against four others, he was really dynamic: "This works, it's been successfully used, you can use it now, so I'm really glad to have the opportunity to tell you about it." He made the sale.

Got some other good feedback. My civilian student, who works for a Fort Ord organization, said this was the first stat test that made her think, instead of being just "chug and plug." One of the professors in the department sent a note saying that the thesis of one of her students was improved by being in my class and by my consulting with him. He also had a class project that was very difficult to analyze and we spent a lot of time working through that. My Korean AF officer was very appreciative. He wrote: "Thanks you sir! I could learn a lot of insights from you. And I had enjoyed your class." I got a lot of insights from him, too. He sat front row, center, and usually had questions before class started that told me where I needed to hit some topics again.

One of the things I like about being on campus is the opportunity to attend a variety of seminars. An Academic Center in the same building as my office is aimed at studying and improving the military-civilian interface ; they had some interesting speakers -- one from Save the Children and one from the FBI forensic lab were two of the people I heard. I also heard a lot of Operations Research seminars about various R&D efforts aimed at improving military operations, such as the above harbor protection example. Another example had to do with a portable camera tower that could be used to scan an area looking for activity that suggested bad guys planting IEDs (improvised explosive devices, I believe) while being able to distinguish such activity from a local gardener hoeing weeds. Tactics for deploying UAVs (unmanned airborne vehicles; so many acronyms, so little time: I learned that SME was a subject-matter expert. I've used that term repeatedly in my class and didn't know there was a time-saving acronym) was another seminar topic. I doubt that the general public has much idea about how much research is done to improve military things -- we hear mostly about the problems, failures, and cost overruns.

I had thought I'd spend Tuesday grading and we'd leave for home on Wednesday or Thursday, but since I had a couple of weeks before grades were due, and because Matt and family were in Albq on business, staying in what they called Hotel Easterling, I collected the exams on Tuesday morning and we left at noon. As we left, Susie said: I know it'll be hot along the way and at home, but (after three months of Pacific-chilled weather) I promise not to complain about hot weather.

Got to Bakersfield for the night. Next day was a long one -- 13 hours, 570 miles -- to Holbrook, AZ. I kept a close eye on Tuzi's temperature gage and any time it strayed above 200 degrees, I'd gear down, let the engine rev a bit and cool itself off. (Until last summer, when we got an overheating warning light on the way to Taos, I'd just let the automatic transmission shift when it wanted. After reading the manual, decided I needed to do some peremptory shifting.) We went through Needles, CA about noon, so avoided the worst of the triple-digit heat. A/C worked well enough that we kept cool -- that wasn't the case in the original Tuzigoot.

Oh, one good thing: We had gassed up not too far from Monterey on the way out in March and when we left Tuesday we had about 3/4 of a tank. That enabled us to get into AZ before having to fill up. CA diesel prices are about a dollar per gallon higher than they are in AZ.

We stopped briefly in Winslow to visit the La Posada Hotel. They've added a large Mary Coulter room gift shop and are landscaping the front entrance. They've got videos playing in the lobby describing the restoration process and also Tina Mion's art. She's the wife of the owner. The owner, Allen Affeldt, who we got to know a few years ago, wasn't around, so we didn't have a chance to visit with him. We'd thought about having dinner there, even went so far as to freshen up a bit, but we just weren't in an elegant-meal mood, versus a let's get parked for the night mood, so we continued on to Holbrook for the night. Same KOA we'd stayed at in March on the way out.

Got home Thursday noon and had a nice day with Matt and family, all except Kaci who is in the Cleveland area for the summer.

One last shot of the Marina Dunes and Pacific Ocean: