"Picking up in Primary Class, where I left off with last week's thoughtlet (0729.html), I read from the lesson manual and I asked the Bishops daughter to finish the following situation in a way that shows being responsible: "Your mother asks you to watch your little sister." Grace Harlan could not comprehend the question. She said, "I don't have a little sister." So I suggested it could be a little brother. She informed me "I don't have a little brother either. In fact, in our house, even the dog is older than me." This was one of those priceless moments one can only find as a Primary Teacher.
When we got home, and after eating and a nap, I spent most of the rest of the day working on my Colorado County Proposal, since there was not time to do this on Saturday and to put in 12 hours lining Andrea's closet with cedar. I did call Scott Whitrock, only to get an answering machine, and when I hung up to learn from Andrea he has moved to Austin to live with some of his friends. So I officially do not have a Home Teaching companion once again. Oh well! And I failed Scott. In these circumstances I will always remember listening to the Apostle LeGrand Richards talk about how you could put him in any largely inactive ward in the church, divide the ward, make him Bishop over half of the Ward, and leave the other Bishop over the other half of the Ward, and within 2 years he would have almost everyone in his half of the ward active. I believe it was true, and I have attempted to do this in calling after calling, only to realize how short of the mark I fall. Oh well! When I went Home Teaching to the Minors, I gave Scott articles on the discovery of the first planet in another galaxy identified as having water and temperatures making it suitable for they type of life we have on Earth. He forgot he was interested in this. Oh well! Hope was with her sister in San Antonio. Sister Minor selected the song: "Thanks to My Mom and Dad." It was written back in 1973, and I probably hadn't sung it since then. When I copied it to my new song book, I did not copy the cords for the chorus, and so I struggled singing it. When I got home, I found it in my original song notebook, and fixed the missing chords. I will sing it again next time I go, and hopefully I will realize how thankful I am for my Mom and Dad, and get over being angry at my Mom. However, why should I do that? After all, it would mean several of you would no longer be able to point to me as the bad example for your anger! Singing this song reminded me of the good feelings I get when I visit Melanie and Jared and look at the painting of my Mom and Dad in their living room. This was my first thoughts this week about the pictures in the Prime Words Packets I have given out for years. About a half hour after I got home, Tim Gebauer and Andrew Salt came to Home Teach us. Andrew leaves for BYU in a few weeks, and this was probably his last time to Home Teach us. He does a good job on his lessons. I showed Tim Andrea's closet. It smelled really good, since there were no clothes to soak up the Cedar smell.
Monday I was quite sore from working in Andrea's cedar closet for so many hours on Saturday. So I didn't walk the stairs. I spent most of the day and most of my lunch hour working on the Corprofundo business plan. I enjoyed this work, and it will be interesting to see if anything comes of it. It has been a long time since I have worked this hard on something for Geokinetics. Sad admission! When I got home, I worked on the web pages describing geopressure pods in Colorado County. They are at http://www.walden3d.com/colorado/Plan, and you need to call me for a username and password if you want to review these pages. I think this is a very exciting exploration story.
Tuesday I spent most of the day working on the offshore Angola 3-D seismic interpretation. This is another good project I can get into. Hopefully things are turning around. Although I expect the issue is with me and bureaucracy and feeling like I've been lied to and not having budget nor authority to go out an implement my ideas like The Exploration Game. Oh well! After work, I drove George and I to the temple. Andrea rode to the temple with Becky, via taking Bret and Lorie to the airport to go back to Provo. Andrea and I were the witnesses for the temple session. It was the first day the temple was open after the summer cleaning, and there were only six folks in our session. When we went into the Celestial Room, Roetta Jones was there. We had a nice conversation. She is very optimistic, even though the cancer has returned. They are doing gene therapy and will not do a white cell swap again. Roetta is more self confident than I ever remember seeing her. When I got back in the dressing room, Gary was doing the new names. He was excited to be there, and it showed in his interaction with patrons. Andrea wanted to go by the bookstore, and I spent most of the time reading from a book written by a Washington newscaster about Mitt Romney. As we were driving home, I decided to take Andrea out to dinner. We went to a Japanese buffet on 1960. Good food. Expensive. Ate too much. This dinner really blew my first first week of new cycle of swallows sheets. Oh well!
Wednesday I worked hard on the Angola interpretation, because it is needed for the depth migration that is being done. Luis Viertel likes to come into my office and visit. Lately, largely because he knows how disappointed I have been in how my job is going, he has been complaining about how his job is going. On this particular day he noticed the painting over my file cabinet had changed. He asked if I changed them out every once in a while. I told him he was the second person to notice the change. Then I showed him the copy of Prime Words on my bookshelf. He liked the paintings a lot, and I ended up giving him one of the Prime Words Packets I had next to the book. It was the first time I have given one of these away since the 3rd of November and the 6th of August of 2005, both of which were sets given to missionaries who came to eat dinner with us. I always considered this effort the most important effort of my life, and yet it is obvious Prime Words is not a point of discussion with any of you, and it seems irrelevant to life. Other than those days I write a new possible stanza, and include it in a Thoughtlet. Oh well!
About 10:30 AM my friend Doug Harless called and said he wanted to talk to me. He wanted to brainstorm about how to help Geokinetics get a more powerful PC cluster. He had run up against the angry and bitter and rude person controlling budget and access to working with Geokinetics on hardware systems. It was an interesting conversation. I think I helped him, and it should be of tremendous benefit to Geokinetics. Time will tell. During the course of the conversation, Mike Dunn called from Mexico, and I spent 15 minutes on the phone with him. I pointed Doug, and his co-worker Dick Linville to my painting of the Second Coming to St. George, and gave them the copy of Prime Words to look at while I was on the phone. It was very interesting where the conversation went. I ended up giving each of them a Prime Words Packet. Three in one day, after about 2 years of not giving any out. I guess I have in my mind the yet to be done paintings for Matt at Camp Liendo, for Rachel at the Michaelangelo statue, for Audrey at Stratford-on-Avon, and for Heather riding her bicycle in Southern Utah. And, of course, there are two issues: (1) whether any of you even want these paintings; and (2) when I can afford to commission them. Oh well! It felt good to see the reaction of three friends to the paintings, and to give them each a Prime Words packet. I contemplated this as I interpreted in the afternoon. I also listened to a couple of "Trends" CD's from AudioTech as I interpreted seismic.
In the evening I worked on the Colorado County AMI Confidentiality Agreement, and finished putting together a 26 page presentation on geopressure cells in Colorado County. There was a trip to Office Depot to get a packet and plastic sleeves. And I was working to get ready for a lunch meeting until about 10:30 PM. During the evening Lyle Rowbury about the BBQ dinner he and Bill Hagen were putting on for the Missionary Couples in the Mission on Saturday, and we ended up talking about "0 Deerwood Drive," and what would be involved in purchasing this property. Lyle is going to help me find out if this is even possible.
Thursday was a big day. A week ago I got a call from Bob Burton's administrative assistant Amy at Krescent Energy asking about a permit to collect seismic. It was obviously a wrong message, and I used the opportunity to walk across Post Oak Lane and say hi to Bob. Bob was Rick Zimmerman's Landman at Texas Independent when I first met him. A search of past Thoughtlets shows that I signed a deal with him to show MKS some of his prospects and I got a percentage of the deal. This was written about in the song "Light at the End of the Tunnel" (../0214.html and ../0215.html). Then there were follow-up notes in Thoughtlets ../0216.html and ../0239.html. Nothing came of the discussions and the agreement, and I never got out of the tunnel. Anyway, it turned out there is a Royce that works for Geokinetics, and when he told Amy to call Royce, he said Roice Nelson. Cindi, Geokinetics operator, put Amy through to my answering machine, and so I ended up catching up with Bob Burton. I told him about my Colorado County geopressure cells project, and its applicability to the entire Gulf Coast. He sounded interested. On Wednesday I called Bob as a follow-up, and he agreed to meet me for lunch the next day. I had a very professional presentation in plastic sleeves and a nice folder for him to look at, and a non-disclosure. I showed him everything at the beginning of the lunch, and ended up letting him take the packet without signing the non-disclosure at the end of the lunch. During most of the lunch we talked about Rick Zimmerman. It will be interesting to see if I finally get my exploration ideas funded because of a professional rivalry. It was a nice lunch. I paid, because I was selling. I made one fupa, which could be a killer. At one point I said, "I do not judge business partners very well. I have always ended up being taken advantage of when I enter into a business relationship." Then I caught myself, and said, "But Bob, that won't happen with you, will it?" He smiled. Oh well! Time will tell.
I was wiped out when I got home. And so I vegged out for the evening. Andrea and I watched "The Italian Job," and I spent the advertisements working on filter displays for Primary Sharing Time on Sunday. I solved the color issues with the text, so that when the red and blue Open Mind filter glasses are put on the text disappears. By overlaying different sets of text the text is not easy to read without the glasses. The glasses teach the kids about filters. I choose the following text:
| What are little boys made of, made of? What are little boys made of? Snips and snails, and puppy dog tails, That's what little boys are made of. |
overlaid with:
| What are little girls made of, made of? What are little girls made of? Sugar and spice, and everything nice, That's what little girls are made of. |
Then on the bottom of the overlaid text, I placed Rob's Family Reunion painting from the Prime Words Packets. I made 25 color copies for boys, with 25 blue glasses, and 25 color copies for girls, with 25 red glasses. Turned out this was plenty of extra handouts.
Then I made a separate handout for the adults. In the back ground was black text, extracted from the preface to An Open Mind:
| We all have filters. Colors emphasize the power of filters. Hopefully within those words we don't choose to filter out, we will find a framework for continuous improvement. |
This was overlaid in green quoting the first reference to "rose colored glasses" I could find on the Internet:
| Oxford was a sot of Utopia to the Captain. He continued to behold towers, quadrangles, and chapels, through rose-colored glasses." Tom Brown at Oxford, 1861. |
Again these two sets of overlaid text were at the top of the page, and Rob's Family Reunion painting from the Prime Words Packets was at the bottom of the page. The way I got the text to overlay was to print one image, then put this paper back in the printer, and print the other color on top of it. Then I put the Family Reunion Painting from the Prime Words Packets under the the merged text copy, and made 25 copies. It took a bit of creativity to create the images of the text, and then to get the text in a color which would disappear with the Open Mind colored filter glasses. I was quite pleased with how the pages turned out.
Friday was busy at work. I was working with David from Seisnetics. They have developed a software package which automatically picks patches of seismic horizons for each peak and/or each trough over the entire seismic volume using a genetic algorithm. The idea is to break each trace of the entire seismic volume into pieces at the zero crossings. Then wavelets from arbitrary traces within blocks of the seismic volume are compared. If they match, they become a genotype. All wavelets from zero-crossing to zero-crossing in the entire seismic volume are then compared with individual genotypes. Matches are made for each genotype, and the result are a stack of horizons. We did the first test on a Pemex data set, and showed the results to Luis Viertel, Lee Bell, and Fred Hilterman. It is an interesting approach. When I got home, Andrea did not want to go out. It is the end of the month, and budgets are spent. So we stayed home and watched "Monk" and "Numbers," and read Time magazines.
Saturday morning I started filling up the plastic boxes in the garage, and mowed the lawns. By the time I quit, which was about 2:30 PM I had filled 39 boxes, identified 13 boxes full of professional journals and magazines I need to sort through and toss, and I was quite tired. As mentioned above, we had been invited to go out to Hagen's Ranch with Senior Missionaries from our mission for a BBQ dinner being put on by Lyle Rowbury and Bill Hagen. After getting cleaned up I sat down and looked at the weather, and there was a big storm right over the ranch. I could tell it was moving through the area, and this still became our deciding factor on staying home. Paul and Kate and the kids were visiting Marti in the morning, and they called and said they wanted to come over and go swimming about 5:30. So this clinched our decision to stay home. I cooked hamburgers and hot dogs on the grill, and Andrea made the fixings and cooked a dutch oven cobbler in the oven. There are 31 digital photos and one movie from the St. Louis Nelsons visit to Katy at http://www.walden3d.com/photos/Family/03_PaulKate/070728-29_Paul_family_Rob. The photo I like best, is to the right and is a composite made of the backyard from the same location as Paul's painting about the Creation from the Prime Words Packets was made. 
Note how Grant moved between shots, and he is in there like a ghost a second time. After swimming and dinner we ended up watching "Happy Feet" with the kids. I think they had already seen it. Andrea and I had not, and we enjoyed it, especially the computer graphics. We stayed up and talked until about 11:00 PM. Paul is doing very good, and he has trials associated with the uncertainty of not knowing how long his contract with Boeing is going to last. There is no question about the fact trials are a part of life. No matter who we are nor where we hide, they will always find us.
Sunday was my Primary Class' semi-annual Sharing Time, so I had to get to church early to get set up. I took Rob's painting down and set it up at the front of the Primary Class. Then I had the boys, the girls, and the adult handouts. There was also the words to the song "I Once Saw a Family" (../9652.html, ../9825.html, ../9836.html, ../9901.html, ../0003.html, ../0037.html, ../0218.html, ../0250.html, ../0406.html, ../0448.html, and 0720.html) so each of the kids in my class could sing along. Brother Keller came in and said, "3-D?" I replied, "No, filters." He said, "Oh, neat!" Guys know how to communicate. After setting this up I cleaned out my classroom and switched the fluorescent lights which were not working to the back of the class so kids could see me and not be in the dark. Paul and Kate and family were all sitting down when I got into Sacrament Meeting. It was wonderful to have family with us in Sacrament Meeting. It was an effort, and I appreciate the effort. Sacrament Meeting was OK. I wrote two possible stanzas for Prime Words, based on Raymond O'Brian's talk. It was his last talk before going on his mission to the San Palo area of Brazil. The possible stanzas are:
Paul and Kate and Grant and Ella came to Primary Opening Exercises, and stayed to see our Sharing Time. I thought it went well. The part the kids liked the best was when I rolled out the Nelson Pedigree Chart, and talked about our family. I think the adults were split on liking the filtered images and the painting. A couple of folks especially called out the song. There are four digital images and 3 movies immortalizing our sharing time on-line (see http://www.walden3d.com/photos/NottinghamCountryWard/07_CTR-8/070729_Sharing_Time. The first movie covers the 1st and 2nd verses, the second movie covers part of the 3rd verse, and the last movie covers part of the 4th verse. I thought class went pretty good. Kate and Dallin came down and helped me start off the class. The lesson was about how our parents help us, and Dallin was a case history of someone helpless. After class I gave Lyle Rowbury the map I had made of the "0 Deerwood" property, and briefly talked about my goals there. He is going to find out if the property is for sale for me. He also had some wild boar that he and Bill Hagen had killed and BBQ'd which he wanted me to come over and pick up. It was really good. John Turner came out while we were talking and I confirmed he bought Tom Hamilton's house, and that it is the house with the giant cedar closet in it. Andrea fixed spaghetti for lunch. I took Ella in for a nap, and she sang me to sleep, then came back in and checked on me to make sure I was still asleep. I was. Oh well! I had great plans. When I woke up two hours later everyone was asleep except Grant and Andrea. Grant was playing with Lincoln Logs. And then we built stuff with the Zoom Tools. Before you knew it, it was time for them to leave and go back to Clear Lake. Paul has a consulting assignment with Boeing, and they used it to have a vacation in the Houston area. Then they left, and the house was too quiet again. I did not feel like working on Thoughtlets. However, as the week ended, I did together letters for several of my Primary kids who were not at church, with filter glasses, overlaid words, and a copy of the family reunion painting from the Prime Words Packets."