Monday, March 18, 2024

My Vision

Tuesday, January 30, 2024

In my post last Thursday, I mentioned that I had seen our future house in a vision before we had even been offered a job in Bassano. I mentioned that I had drawn a picture of the house I had seen in my journal. I decided to find that journal and include a copy of it here. I found it, and I decided that I would include a portion of the journal entry here along with the picture.

Here is an excerpt from my journal dated June 19, 1983.

After my graduation I feel much better about my future, but Lisa and I still planned a trip to the temple hoping to get some answers. On Friday, 10 June we headed for Cardston and on Saturday we were in the first session.

I had prepared well for this trip, and I felt close to the Lord. As I sat in the Terrestrial room, I closed my eyes and asked my Father in Heaven to please give me some indication as to which direction my life is to be directed. At that moment, with eyes still closed, everything got very bright and as if I was looking through a morning mist, I saw an older, stucco house. I knew that someday Lisa and I would live in this house, and I also knew that this house was in Rosemary. Rosemary is very close to Bassano. This whole vision lasted only an instant, but I would recognize this house if I saw it, even though I find it difficult to describe it.

It seems to me that it was on the east side of a gravel street. The street was fairly well treed, and the main entrance to the house was not facing the street, it was an older style, box-like house (not too attractive).

Above is an attempt at drawing what I saw. I found it difficult at first to accept this as a message from my God, but I know that it is. As I told Lisa about it, she began to cry. Later as I told my parents, my Father told me that he had asked God to give some me some sort of confirmation about my future, while I was at the temple that day. I assume that the Lord was telling me that I would at some time in the future get a job in Bassano and that when I did, I was to move to Rosemary. Rosemary is where the ward meets.

I then went looking for a photograph of our home in Rosemary, but I couldn’t find one in the time I had. Kira was able to find this photograph, but you can’t see the whole house. Let me go through my description, it is rather amazing.


I said the house was on the east side of a gravel street. The street was gravel, but the house is actually on the west side of the street. When I saw the house, I thought I was looking at the front of the house, but I was actually looking at the back of the house. This meant that I was facing east at the time so it is understandable that I would mistakenly think that the house was on the east side of the street.

The street is very well treed, just as I said.

There is a door in the front of the house but we never used it. We always used the door on the side of the house. In addition, I was looking at the back of the house so there was no door on what I “thought” was the front of the house.

It was definitely, an older style box-like house.

While it was dear to us, it is not a very attractive house.

It isn’t stucco but that is only a minor detail that I will choose to ignore. I did only see it for a moment.

This picture is taken from the back of the house and is the view that I saw. Unfortunately, you can’t see the left side of the house but let’s compare it to my drawing. Ignoring the tiny little basement window and the tiny bathroom window there is a big window on the right (Kitchen) and there is a big window on the left (baby room). In the picture you can’t see the window on the left. You can see the huge willow tree to the right of the house and the tree to the left of the house. The one difference that I didn’t notice is that in the photograph, the roof slopes off to the left and right but in the drawing the roof forms a peak on the left and right. Also, in the photograph the chimney is in the center of the house and in the drawing the chimney is to the right of center. Except for those small discrepancies I think the similarity is remarkable for something I only saw for a moment. Remember, I saw this and drew the picture long before I had even had a job offer.

Reading about this in my journal brought back all the memories of what a wonderful experience this was for me.

Wednesday, March 13, 2024

Mark & Dixie

Monday, January 29, 2024

Almost every year in January Mark attends a concrete convention in Vegas where he can take classes and maintain his Professional Engineering certification. I love it, because usually they will stop in for a visit either before or after the convention. They arrived a week ago last Thursday and stayed until Sunday. It was good to see them. Usually when they come, we try and do something fun but since Dixie had her knee’s replaced a few months back and then promptly fell and broke her femur she wasn’t up to a lot of walking.
Thursday night we just sat and visited and then we started doing some family history. We aren’t ignoring each other on our phones, we are comparing our DNA to see how much we got from who. It is surprising to see how we pulled quite differently from mom and dad.
Friday Lisa had to work (work really gets in the way) so after a relaxing morning we went for a walk on the beach. Our beaches are beautiful and sandy in the summer, but winter storms can take away the sand and leave them rather rocky. It was still beautiful though.
Saturday, we went for a harbor cruise. It was very informative but unfortunately it started raining rather hard towards the last part of the cruise. We went on the spirit of San Diego.

We went under the Coronado bridge.
We saw lots of military ships. They were all protected by a floating barrier. In this picture they are removing the barrier so that the ship can get out.
Our tour guide was very knowledgeable and told us all about each ship, but I don’t remember any of it.

I found this fascinating. It is a dry dock and as best as I can tell, the entire structure is lowered in the water, the ship is sailed into it and then the structure is raised again. You can see that the ship inside of it is undergoing maintenance.
Saturday afternoon Dixie and Mark came with Lisa and I to our Leadership meeting because it was Stake Conference weekend. In the evening, we put together a puzzle of the Hotel Del that Sarah gave us for Christmas. I’m not much into puzzles but it was fun to sit around the table together and visit.
Sunday morning, we headed to conference, and they headed to Las Vegas. They had to pick Tyler up at the airport, so they had a deadline they had to meet. It was great to see my sister.
--------------------trivia--------------------
Hippos are the closest living relatives to whales
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Tuesday, March 12, 2024

Dad, Tell Me About the Time…(20)

Thursday, January 25, 2024

Why do you work where you do?

Living in Alberta whose main economy is based on the oil patch, I assumed I would work for an oil company specializing in welding processes. When I graduated in 1981 there was not a job to be found for anyone. One day I was riding the elevator with one of my professors and he said to me, “how would you like to live in Bassano?”. I had no idea where Bassano was, and I asked him what country it was in?

He had recently spoken with someone from Global Thermoelectric. The thermoelectric generator used on the Apollo missions was called the SNAP-27 and it was designed and fabricated by the 3M company. This is a picture of Apollo 12 astronaut Alan L. Bean removing the SNAP-27 fuel-cask assembly from the Lunar Module. The SNAP-27 converter is shown in front of Bean ready to receive the fuel-cask assembly.
3M and several other companies got into thermoelectrics in a big way when everyone thought that they would eventually compete with the internal combustion engine as a source of power. When that never happened, 3M decided to abandon the technology, but they had developed a very reliable thermoelectric generator that was fueled by propane and used where reliable power was essential such as microwave repeaters in remote locations and cathodic protection on pipelines.
Several of the employees in the thermoelectric group decided to start a company to continue making and selling this generator.

Microwave repeaters, like this one, are often inaccessible during the winter and they need a power source that can go for months with no maintenance. A large tank of propane is flown in on a helicopter and a thermoelectric generator can power the repeater and heat the batteries for years with no maintenance.
The new company was called Global Thermoelectric, and they were located in Bassano because Alberta was their biggest customer, a big rancher in the area chose to invest in them and the Alberta government offered incentives to businesses who set up in rural area’s. I felt strongly inspired to meet with Global and while they weren’t hiring, they met with me and we had a great discussion.

On that same trip we attended the temple in Cardston. During that session I saw a small house in a vision. The house was under a huge tree. It was summertime and the shade of that tree made this house look extremely cozy. I knew that this house was in Rosemary, and I knew that we would start our family in this house.

If not for this vision I would have moved on and given up on Global because they weren’t hiring, but a few weeks later I felt inspired to meet with them again. In this discussion we talked about the possibility of hiring me. After a few more visits I was eventually hired on and given the job of learning about thermoelectrics. They had a room full of files from 3M but nobody knew anything about thermoelectrics. I soon became the world authority on PbTe thermoelectric alloys, and my career had begun.

It was a few years later that we moved from Bassano to Rosemary and bought a perfect starter home that was being foreclosed on by the bank. We offered the bank $23k and we were the proud owners of a new home. One day I was working in the backyard, and I looked up at the house and realized that it was the house I’d seen in my vision. I hadn’t recognized it from the front because it had a small deck but from the back it was almost identical to a drawing I’d made in my journal. I’ll look for that journal and see if I can include the drawing here.

About ten years later I was attending a Thermoelectric Conference in Wales. I was having a discussion with Jack Bass, and I finally told him that he needed to come work at Global. He responded that, no, I needed to go work at Hi-Z. We both laughed and moved on, but I thought about that discussion constantly.

I finally decided to pray about whether I should move my young family 1,500 miles away and to a completely different country. My mind was in such a turmoil that I could never get a clear answer but after a week of this I finally realized that the answer I was seeking was so big that I needed to simplify my question.

I finally prayed and asked my Lord if I should call Hi-Z and open a discussion. This time my answer was a very clear, “yes”, call Hi-Z. The discussions finally led to a job offer and I started work at Hi-Z in June of 1992. My family followed on the fourth of July.
Come 1998 I was struggling. I loved working at Hi-Z, I loved the people, I loved the work, but I couldn’t survive on the pay I was receiving. I asked Norb for a raise, but he told me that I was being paid the “going rate”. At the time I was in a graduate program at UCSD and one of my classmates told me that Qualcomm was hiring and suggested that I apply there. I did and was promptly hired on the spot. When I gave my notice, Norb offered to match my pay but it had been my observations that once you give notice you really can’t go back. You will resent them for not giving you the raise you asked for and they will resent you for threatening to leave. 

At the time I was being paid about $45k at Hi-Z and I started at Qualcomm at about $65 and within two years I was being paid $100k. The job wasn’t nearly as much fun, but our lifestyles changed dramatically.
Just to complete the answer to the question, in 2002 Qualcomm was sold to Kyocera. My job and title stayed the same and I continued in the same office, but I now worked for a different company until in 2009 Kyocera moved the bulk of their operations back to Japan and laid off nearly all their American employees. Since they had a battery team in Japan, I was no longer needed. I went back to Hi-Z for more than double what they were paying me before.

A few years after I started at Hi-Z, Norb, the president died and his daughter, Jill, took over. While Jill meant well, she was an accountant and the company continued to go downhill. By 2019 I had been promoted to Vice President but was now down to working three days a week and my pay had been cut drastically. I decided I didn’t want to go down with the ship, so I started my own company. I offered to make Hi-Z a partner in the company, her response was to change all the locks on the doors and she told me to work from home. That worked great for me because I was able to work three days a week for Hi-Z and two days a week for Vulcan Energy. I did that until 2021 when I found other sources of money at which point, I cut all ties with Hi-Z and directed all my efforts towards Vulcan.

--------------------trivia-------------------
A high proportion of engineers, scientists and mathematicians have aspergers syndrome. It appears that people with aspergers tend to gravitate to careers that are strong in math and science and don't require strong social skills. New evidence suggests (not proves) that the rapid rise in children with aspergers may result in the rapid rise in women entering the work force and in particular careers in math and science. Since people tend to date other people with characteristics similar to their own the increased number of women in careers strong in math and science may have resulted in more couples having children with a double dose of the genes that make them weak in social skills. According to some researchers, aspergers is at least partially a result of genetics.
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Friday, March 08, 2024

Dad, Tell Me About the Time…(19)

Wednesday, January 24, 2024

Which job would you never want to have again? Why?

I never really hated any job I ever had because I learned amazing stuff at each of them, but some were more difficult than others. While I would do it again under the right circumstances, the least rewarding job I ever had was at Canadian Liquid Air where I worked during the summer I got married. The worst part of that job was that it was shift work and I worked from the afternoon until late at night. That was not fun. The second worst part was that it was very monotonous repeating the same thing all day long. We’d roll the oxygen cylinders onto the ramp, fill them with gas and then roll them off the ramp and repeat that continuously.

What was fascinating is that the plant was basically a fracking tower for air. I did everything I could to learn all about it. They cool air until the CO2 freezes and falls out like snow. They shovel it up with a snow shovel and sell it as dry ice.

The rest of the air eventually becomes a liquid, and they separate the nitrogen, oxygen, and argon in a fracking tower. I got to look into a giant ten-foot-tall tank of liquid oxygen, and it was an amazing sky-blue color.
The other tough part of that job is that the workers were all a bunch of perverts who would tell crude jokes all day long and talk about all the gross stuff they did the night before.

How did you choose your career?

My career kind of chose me. I was registered in Civil Engineering at BYU before my mission but when I entered the U of A after my mission the first-year engineers were all in general classes and you didn’t pick your specialty until after your first year. I took classes that aligned with Civil Engineering but one of the mandatory classes I took was a materials science class. I loved it, and at the same time I realized that Civil Engineering would be too boring for me. A civil engineer basically follows recipes that other people have created (except for Uncle Mark). If you want a bridge then use this design, you need a parking lot then here is how you do it. While I would have loved to be any kind of engineer, I loved the materials engineering class and was eventually accepted into the Metallurgical Engineering department. This was before Materials Engineers were a thing so even though my degree says Metallurgical Engineering, I studied all inorganic materials including semiconductors which is what I eventually did for my career in thermoelectric materials and systems.

--------------------trivia--------------------
Every human born, has between 10 to 100 mutuations that we didn't get from our parents. Most other species have less than one, some much less than one.
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Taking Down Christmas

Tuesday, January 23, 2024

Once everyone was gone and the house was somewhat restored, we figured it was time to take down the Christmas decorations. We didn’t mind leaving them up for an extra week since we didn’t get them set up until the week before Christmas. It was about this time that I got around to enjoying my many gifts. Let me make a list of the gifts that I got. Probably the coolest gift I got was a piece of Trinitite from Lisa. My cool piece of trinitite is explained in these photographs.


In addition to my trinitite I also got:

· a trilobite fossil (Lisa)
· a hard case wallet (Lisa)
· a schematic of the starship enterprise that I can hang on my wall (Palmers)
· a fanny pack wallet for our trip to Europe to hold my passport and cash (Lisa)
· a card with many of the names of Christ on it (Lisa)
· a homemade card (Angelina)
· a subscription to snacks from around the world (Brandon & Ally)

I got Lisa a laser printer because our ink jet printer is always messing up our prints. It usually does fine with grey scale print jobs but is usually bad with color print jobs.

I also got her a robotic vacuum cleaner. I love playing with that thing and it does an amazing job. Someone created a lot of fancy code to make that thing work. I love how it can deal with just about anything left on the floor. It doesn’t handle electrical cords very well though. It may sound like I bought the vacuum for myself but trust me, even though Lisa isn’t interested in how the vacuum works, she loves having the floors cleaned every day.

--------------------trivia--------------------
New research shows that if you feel an illness coming on, 
strenuous aerobic excerise before you get too sick may improve your recovery time.
Strenuous aerobic excersize increases your T cell levels.
T cells fight infections.
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Wednesday, March 06, 2024

Auschwitz

Monday, January 22, 2024

After everyone had left and gone home, mom and I sat and recovered for the remainder of New Years Day and then we spent the rest of the week restoring our house. We found a number of items that had been left behind and actually created a tote in the garage that we have labelled “Lost & Found”. That is where things we find in our house go when we think that the owner may actually want to keep it.

By the end of the week we decided that we needed to get out. Lisa has been wanting to go to an Auschwitz museum that is being held at the Reagan library for some time and when she heard that it was being extended to the end of January we decided it was time to pay Vicky and Thomas a visit. The Reagan library is only minutes from the McCormacks.
The exhibit was very sobering. We got there shortly after noon and we hadn’t finished by 5:00 when they kicked us out. They had thousands of artifacts that they recovered when the Allieds went in and cleaned it up. Hundreds of stories were shared that I couldn’t possibly remember. I learned a lot about Auschwitz that I never knew. I will try and summarize volumes of books in a couple of paragraphs.

Hitler sincerely believed that Jews were subhuman and that by allowing them to interbreed with higher levels of humans, it degraded the human race. It was his goal to exterminate every Jew. As it became obvious that Germans may lose the war, they stepped up their efforts to kill them faster.

Every Jew they could find anywhere in Europe (along with blacks, gays and gypsys) were loaded onto cattle cars like this one and shipped to Auschwitz.
Upon arrival, they were sorted. Anyone who looked like they could work was sent in one direction and all the children, sick and elderly were sent in another direction. To prevent too much disturbance, any caregivers were sent with the children they cared for.

More than 1,100,000 people were sent to Auschwitz and 900,000 of them went straight to the gas chambers. All the stories you hear about were told by the remaining 200,000 who were subject to starving, extreme labor or “medical” experiments.

Those sent to the gas chambers were told that they had to be decontaminated and told to strip and go take a shower to get rid of the lice etc. They removed all of their clothing and neatly stacked it away for when they returned and then they were sent into the showers. Once inside, the doors were locked and the room was filled with poisonous gas that was a pesticide to exterminate bugs.

The working prisonors were then sent in to cut the hair off the women and pull any gold teeth they could find and then haul the bodies to the incinerators. The clothing, jewellery and other artifacts were then hauled of to storage rooms. The storage rooms were called Kanada because Canada had a reputation of being a place that was full of riches but difficult to get to and to survive in.

When the Germans saw the Russians coming they tried to destroy everything but they didn’t get it all. They were finding artifacts for decades afterwards. Hundreds of teeth, seven tons of hair (can you imagine how many women it would take to make seven tons of hair?), clothing, utensiles etc. All the shoes they found were collected and some of them were shown in this exhibit and they singled out a single shoe to represent the tragic end of a woman who just recently had enjoyed a happy and fulfilling life.
It is hard to imagine how one human being could do something like this another. It was a strange day.

--------------------trivia--------------------
Hitler is responsible for the deaths of 20,000,000 people
Stalin is responsible for the deaths of 40,000,000 people
General Mao is responsible for the deaths of 65,000,000 people
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New Years Eve

Friday, January 19, 2024

Sunday Alycia and her family headed to Seaworld and Mom and I along with Kira, Cameron and Piper headed to church. It was a first for me because the Bishop and Derek were out of town so I presided over the meeting. My very good friend, Dave Evans is in the Elders Quorum presidency so he sat with me. It was kind of cool.
After church we all headed down to Sea World to meet up with Alycia.

Sea World, as always, was wonderful. We saw all the shows and checked out all the exhibits. It was just fun being there with two of my daughters.
Kira has been getting much braver as she gets older. Until just recently she refused to get on any roller coaster, period. Lately though, she has been working her way up to bigger and bigger ones.
Today she decided to go on the Manta Ray. She actually was ready to do that the last time we were at Sea World but unfortunately it was closed.

Today, however, she not only did the Manta Ray but I was able to talk her into going on the “Emperor” which is arguably the scariest ride in Sea World and is definitely classified among one of the great roller coasters.

Mom watched the kids while Alycia, Trevor, Kira and I went on the ride. I know mom would have liked to go on the ride but she wanted Kira to be able to go and she knew how much I love that ride. Thank you, mom.

The Sea World fireworks started going the moment the roller coaster reached the top. It was quite amazing to watch them from the top of the roller coaster. After the ride, I grabbed this cool shot of Kira with the roller coaster highlighted by the fireworks.
Once we got home we watched a movie and before we knew it we had completely missed the New Year and it was 2024.

On New Years morning we would have all slept in, but Alycia and Trevor wanted to get ahead of all the traffic and left around 7:30 in the morning. The rest of us enjoyed the Rose Bowl parade and reminissed about the year that Kira marched a Sousaphone in the Rose Bowl parade with the Mount Carmel band. She left for home right after lunch.

--------------------trivia--------------------
75% of Americans are chronically dehydrated.
(This likely applies to half the world population)
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Monday, March 04, 2024

Saturday

Thursday, January 18, 2024

Saturday we headed to the Midway Museum. We had lunch at the Carnitas Shack first and then headed to the ship.
While my favorite part of the ship is below decks in the engine room and the crews quarters, the kids obviously love the top deck with all the planes. I do have to admit that that is also fascinating.
I think some of these kids may have a future in navigation. We spent hours in the ship and we didn’t leave unitl they kicked us out.
After the Midway, we wandered over to Sea Port Village. There isn’t a single shop in Sea Port village that I would care to visit, but the atmosphere of the place is amazing.
It is right on the water and surrounding by some pretty amazing views.

--------------------trivia--------------------
Doctors have successfully cured a woman with terminal cancer
by using the measles virus.
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Saturday, March 02, 2024

Thursday & Friday

Wednesday, January 17, 2024
 
On Thursday Mom, Kira, Alycia and the kids went to the Wild Animal Park (I think it is now the Safari Park) while I tried to get some work done. 
That night we went to a bonfire at the beach that Jeff & Tiffany had invited us to. 
It was a good time and a first for Angelina who had never had smores before. 

The kids had a lot of fun but once they started dropping we figured it was time to take them home.
It was also fun to see Cassidy playing with other kids her own age. Cassidy is Ambers (Tiffany’s sister) daughter.
From the moment they arrived, Sawyer has been begging me to do some engineering stuff with him. He is full of ideas of things we could build together and is suggesting machines that can talk to us or cars that can drive themselves. He has great suggestions but they are projects that would take a team of engineers years to do. Finally I suggested that we build a rocket. He was very excited. Thursday we built a water rocket.
All we did was fill a two liter bottle half full of water, put a cork in one end and then pump it full of air until the cork pops out and the water shoots it into the air. On our first attempt I decided to use a hand pump so I had more control over the water pressure and I had Sawyer try and pump it. I was quite worried because he had his head right over the rocket which would have nailed him in the face. I finally had to take over because he didn’t have the strength.

Even though I was careful not to have my head over the rocket, the tube was short and I was obviously too close to the rocket. It nailed me right in the face. It hit my glasses and cut my eyebrow. After that I told everyone that we were going for an electronic ignition system and I went and got my electric pump. It worked spectacularly.
I then showed Sawyer how we could optimize the sytem by putting more or less water in the rocket to see how high it would go. Once it was optimized the rocket went very high.

--------------------trivia--------------------
It would take 1,200,000 mosquitoes, each sucking once,
to completely drain the average human of blood.
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