The Honeymoon Baby is Here

Kaylynn has a new little cousin as of an hour ago. A baby boy was born at 5:12 a.m. on August 31. He weighed 7 lbs. 5 oz. No name yet. Look for updates and pictures on their blog once they get a chance to post. We can't wait to home and meet the new little guy.

Fun at the Fair!

If you ask Kaylynn what her favorite part of the MN State Fair was she will say "the rides" and her favorite food was the "pig lickers" - chocolate-covered bacon! (Mine was the cheese curds and fried pickles with cream cheese! Oh, and the cookies and the Key Lime Pie dipped in chocolate on a stick and the mini donuts and the strawberries and cream...) She liked riding on the John Deere tractors and petting the baby animals too. She saw a 1-day old calf and lamb and a 2-day old pig. There was also a pig in labor, but we didn't hang around to see that! Here are a bunch of pictures from our fun at the fair.

Miracle of Birth Center:


Ye Ole' Mill ride:

Nothing runs like a Deere:



Rides, rides, rides...10 times!



She even taught all the kids how to hold up their hands!
And her favorite:

Research Flight

About a week ago I was able to go up on a research flight on the Navy P3, which holds the radar that I am helping out with. The picture you see here isn't very recent, but because we are on an Air Force Base I am not allowed to take pictures on the flight line since there are other military aircraft around. The plane has now been painted gray all over. The ELDORA radar is the white thing protruding from the back.

The plane can hold 15 people. 7 of those seats are typically reserved for Navy crew: pilots, navigators, safety officers, etc. The other 8 are filled with scientists and engineers. There are two other instruments of interest on the place, each with their own operators. There is a dropsonde system which is used to drop radiosondes out of the bottom of the aircraft, where they record temperature, dewpoint, and winds as they fall to the surface. Think of it as a radiosonde (weather balloon) in reverse. The other is a lidar, which uses beams of light (or "lasers" as Dr. Evil would say) to take measurements around the aircraft. I believe this is a cloud lidar so it is measuring some of the properties of clouds.

Once everyone was settled in we were off. The typical flight lasts anywhere from 6 to 10 hours. The one I was on was a 7 hour flight. Yes, there is a bathroom, along with a microwave and refrigerator. We have the option to buy a lunch from the Air Force before we leave, which most everyone does since it's such a long flight. $4 got me 2 tuna sandwiches, an apple, a bottle of water, a can of pop, a can of fruit juice, a bag of chips, a granola bar, a container of yogurt, and a rice krispie treat. Not a bad deal.

Because the weather is not always right around us we often have to ferry to get to the interesting stuff. This day was no different as we flew for probably an hour before getting into the weather we wanted. The radar is on the whole time and gives measurements that can be used to help us decide where to go. We were flying in and around developing thunderstorms and the idea is the get very close to them but not inside. We mostly succeeded. There are some times when there is no way out but to punch through the core of a developing one. That happened twice on this flight. It got a little bumpy but not too bad. The area we were flying in was a developing tropical system so none of the thunderstorms were very mature at this point. The day after we flew it it became a tropical storm and the day after that it was known as Typhoon Nuri.

On the flight I was mostly an observer, which entailed no real responsibility and gave me the freedom to wander around and ask lots of questions. The pilots encouraged anyone to come up front and have a look out those windows, which is great for putting the images from the radar into context. Plus, it's always fun to get to see out of the front of a plane for once. Not sure if I'll get to go up again while I'm here. Seats are at a premium on this project, but at least I got one chance to do it so I can't complain. I didn't bring my camera on this flight so the in-plane pictures below are courtesy of my friend Carlos.

The view from the galley (kitchen) in the back looking toward the front. The guy on the right is the dropsonde operator. The tube in which he inserts the dropsondes to go out of the bottom of the plane can be seen in the bottom middle of the image. The other two seats are used by engineers for the radar and the communications system.

Here I am looking at the radar displays during the flight.

Keeping busy

There are so many fun things to do in MN! Kaylynn has been busy...

playing dolls,

practicing casting,

petting the (fake) snakes - now that she knows she's not alergic to them!

going to the concert in the park, dancing, and getting arm paintings,

enjoying Grandma's pretty flowers (and watering them),
visiting with Great Grandma,

having a tea party,

(love those sugar cubes!)

listening to cousin Sami play her new guitar,

and her favorite activity...jumping on the trampoline (which she does about 4 times a day)!!

We also went to Como Park Zoo with Godmother Nicole. Nic has those pictures on her camera so I will have to post those some other time! Kaylynn really liked the baby Orangutan and Nala and Simba! She even saw a mouse in the lion's den - good eyes! I wonder how long that survived?!

We are off to the State Fair tomorrow...we will eats lots of stuff on a stick and, my personal favorite, cheese curds!!! More to come.

Pinchy??

On Wednesday a few of us went over to a village where they were having a festival. There was a bunch of booths selling all sorts of food and trinkets along with music and dancing. I ate some chicken and pork on a stick and saw a kid with a giant hermit crab that he kept on a leash. As you can see he even let people hold it if they wanted to.

What exactly, is it, ya do here?

So, some of you may be wondering, "What is Cory doing in Guam when he's not on the beach?". Well, it's not just snorkeling and swimming while I'm here. There's also bars to be seen, restaurants to try, and, oh yeah, we work a little bit.

Our operation's center here is in a house on Anderson Air Force Base. It's actually kind of a duplex with a door between them so we have control of the entire building.

All of the different groups have their own room. The computer guys set up a network throughout the entire house so all the computers can communicate. There's a kitchen with snacks and we have most of the comforts of home. My favorite part is the clocks on the wall telling us what time it is in all of the places that people in the project are from.

Every day there is a daily planning meeting, where the people of the project get together (mostly over the Internet) and decide what the plan for the next few days is going to be. There's always a weather briefing as well. This is one of the living rooms at the house, which is where people gather for the planning meetings and the debriefings after the flights.


Once the planning meetings are done and the flights scheduled then we go our separate ways and either get things ready for the next flight or work on data from the last one. The flights will take off the next morning early (usually between 2 am and 8 am). While they are in the air the next planning meeting is held to decide what to do the next day, and on it goes. I was lucky enough to go up on a flight on Sunday, so my next post will talk about that experience.

Greetings from Guam

Wow, no posts for a month and now two within 24 hours of each other? Faithful readers of this blog (all 2 of you) will find that very hard to believe, but it's happening.

As most of you know, I'm in Guam right now for the TPARC field program where we're studying formation and transition of tropical cyclones. There will be more on that phase of the trip once I get some more pictures. This post is about what I've seen around Guam so far. Guam is very much like the U.S., and it should be considering it's part of our country. (However, it does have it's own Olympic team, as we found out watching the opening ceremonies.) When you look around it seems like a more run down version of Hawaii. That doesn't mean people are living in squalor, that's just what it seems like. Most of the things you'd see in a typical American town are here. Like Home Depot, Kmart, McDonalds, and Subway. No Walmart, though, so they've got that going for them.

Gas is definitely more expensive here. The cheapest I've seen is $4.44. According to those who have been here for a while with the project it was as high as $4.92 a few weeks ago before the price dropped. Yikes.

I'm staying in a pretty nice hotel on the beach. So far I haven't had a chance to explore around here too much, but I'll leave you all with a couple of pictures from my balcony.

Long overdue!

Wow, where does the time go? It has been a month since we have posted. We haven't done anything too terribly exciting, but we have done a few fun things in the past month. Here are the highlights.

Every Tuesday night during the summer there is a concert in the park in Longmont. Kaylynn was a big fan of the music and the "face" painting, which she preferred to get on her arm! This picture also shows her opening a birthday present from Godmother Nicole. She loves dressing the princess in this sticker book.

This is also a picture of a birthday present. It is a marble game that you can set up on the stairs. She loves this one (I think it is fun too)!!

She is still in to playing in the sink. Will she grow out of this phase?

Look at the concentration while building this block tower...

...and she did it!

Finally, Kaylynn and I went to Mother-Daughter Tea at church. We got all dressed up and guess what dress Kaylynn decided to wear?!! Here is Kaylynn with her friend Anna from Sunday School.

We had great finger foods and, yes, we both really drank tea! (Though Kaylynn's cup was less than half full with TWO sugar cubes!!)

But, she did enjoy it.