NovaTorque

The new company I work for is NovaTorque in Sunnyvale California. Our website has been revised and is now live. Click on the links to access the website. The Leadership Team part of the website talks about and has photos of my boss, Emily Liggett and the rest of the leadership, including me. The coolest part of the website is the animated demonstration of how our motor is made and how it works. It is very different from the kinds of motors I have designed for the last 30+ years.

Visit to the Pumpkin Patch

Becky posted a blog several days ago with photos from our trip to the pumpkin patch. Since she took most of the photos she posted, she was not in very many of them.
There were lots of pumpkins to buy that did not even include the giant piramid.

Mom found a shortcut through the corn to get to the place where we found the small pie pumpkins. Becky and I both took photos of Mom at about the same time. Mom was having fun. This was the section next to the corn field where the $2 size pie pumpkins were. All four of us each picked out a pumpkin.

John and Becky picked out cute pumpkins, except John found the only upside down one.

Idid not get a photo of the really large ones, so I copied this one from Becky's blog. The pumpkin between John and me was the 2nd heavyest one. It was over 1300 lbs. The heavyest one was 1390 lbs but it did not look as large because it spread out more under its own weight.

For the last several years there has been a new world record set for the heavyest pumpkin. This year the new record is 1810.5 lbs for a pumpkin grown in Wisconsin. The 2009 record was 1725 lbs in Ohio. If you are intersted in reading more about giant pumpkin records, check out this link:

http://www.pumpkinnook.com/giants/giantpumpkins.htm

Elder Crapo vs the Coconut

A few weeks ago, we received the first memory card from Elder Joseph Crapo's camera that included photos from the MTC and photos and videos from Pohnpei. I selected and posted 16 of the photos on Facebook. They can be viewed with the followining link on Facebook:

I was going to post some videos on this blog post, but Blogspot limits the videos to 100MB and the largest of the three videos is over 250MB. Click on the Facebook links to the three videos. In the first video, Elder Crapo explains where he got the coconut. In the second video, Elder Crapo does battle with the coconut. In the third video, Elder Crapo enjoys the spoils of victory over the coconut.

Geocaching in the Hills Above San Jose

On Saturday evening, while Mom and Becky went to the Relief Society Dinner and satellite broadcast, John and I decided to search for a few geocaches. The first ones we looked for were in the hills of the south part of San Jose (South of where Leigh Avenue ends). We found the first geocache right where we expected to find it in a pine tree, but the area was protected by a guard lizard. John was not afraid and he caught the little guy. Once the lizard found that John's had was warm, he decided that he liked it.

The next two geocaches were higher up on two hills. As we started up the hill on the trail, this was the view of San Jose.

We found both of the next two geocaches also. This was the view from the third cache.

From this view, you can see that it was a bit of a hike up the hill. Next time we go into these hills for other geocaches, we will have to take rocky with us. He would love the trails.

We looked for three additional geocaches down in the city close to Brian's house. We could only find one of the three. It was dark by then, so it was difficult. We told ourselves that we would be able to see better if there was more light.

We then went to the store and bought ice cream and went back to John and Becky's house. When Mom and Becky got home from the RS broadcast, we had ice cream and magic shell. It was quite tasty.

How does a one year old chug ice cream?

We had a big family dinner at Grandma and Grandpa Blank's house Sunday evening. There were lots of incredibly good foods, including two kinds of homemade ice cream. The ice cream batches were large to have enough for everyone and the ice cream was somewhat runny but tasted really really good.

Lucas had a glass of the runny ice cream. He liked it so much that he chugged almost half of the glass without breathing.
Some of the ice cream did not go all of the way in his mouth.

Oh oh, I think he has a brain freeze.

Some of it got on the shirt. Oh well, Mom will wash it.

I need more, how does this scooper thing work.

It still looks empty.

I'll just have to lick the scooper.

Our New Old House

With help from friends and family, Mom has don an amazing job of transforming our old house in St. Louis to an amazing looking new house. It is now listed on the Coldwell Banker website. There are lots of photos showing almost every room inside and many views of the outside of the house. Cick on "More Images" to see all of the photos. When I saw the website, I thought "This looks great. I could live in a house like that." Hopefully, someone looking for a new house in north St. Louis county will also be impressed and want to buy it.

Elder Crapo at Pohnpei Zone Conference

In the links on the left is a link to Joseph's mission blog Micronisia Guam Mission. In the last entry, there are photos of the various zone conferences. Many of you have already seen the photo of Joseph at his zone conference, but for those that have not looked at it, I am putting it in here.

Joseph is behind the mission President on the left. I noticed that in most of the zone conferences that there were one or two senior couples. Mom and I could enjoy doing that in a few years.