I’ve been strangely absent from blogging recently, with only one highly cynical post in the last few months.

Well, it’s all for a good reason.

I’ve been putting in some “free” hours at work (and at home) on a new project. For once in the last year and a half, fun and work are not mutually exclusive. I’ve been working on a DARPA “Challenge” with a few other companies. The goal is to build an autonomous robot that can navigate though a city, avoid hitting cars, light poles, pedestrians, pot holes, etc… and do it as quickly as possible.

I can’t talk much about it, or anything else I do at work, but it’s teaching me a heck of a lot more about engineering that my current position. I get to play with LADAR units, play with MATLAB, design programs to interface with hardware, and watch a robot be built. All in all, things like this keep a engineer happy.

Lauren and I officially arrived in Tucson one year ago today!!! It’s amazing that it’s been so long since we moved here.

We entered the state a year ago yesterday and stayed up in Flagstaff for the night before the final leg of our moved down to Tucson. Before moving into our apartment on Aug. 1st of last year, we stayed with her uncle for a few days and have called Tucson home ever since!

Lots of things have changed since moving here; most notably, we are now engaged. We have made some amazing friends along the way and have both gotten into our own little worlds of work and school.

Though we were both unsure of the move here, it’s been quite nice to live in the South West and to get to see parts of the country that we had never experienced before. Our adventure here is far from over and we look forward to more years of fun and excitement touring the South West.

In total, we purchased 7 fish for our tank: 4 Neon Tetra, 2 Silver Mollies, and 1 Zebra Mollie. We still have more room in the tank for some other fish, but have to wait a while before getting them so that our tank can adjust and get the bacteria levels working correctly. We were thinking about getting Angel Fish, but are not 100% set on what our next ones will be.

Artistic picture of Sophie

Originally uploaded by GeoffKerr.

I loved how well the last image of Miles turned out, so I created one of Sophie. The intention is to get them printed now and have some artistic photos of our babies on our walls 🙂

Artistic picture of Miles

Originally uploaded by GeoffKerr.

I found this cute picture of Miles and decided to photoshop it a touch and try my hand at being artsy. I think it came out quite well.