Allan's Photoblog
Farewell, Father Dan
Father Dan White was the Parochial Vicar (formerly titled Associate Pastor) at our parish, and this past Sunday was his last day (and Mass) before moving on to his new assignment.
Father Dan is probably my favorite priest of all the priests I’ve known, rivaled only by Father Willard Jabusch, who married me and Hsuan in Chicago.
Father Dan is unusual — though maybe less unusual nowadays — in that he came to the priesthood later in life. In fact, he was an electronics engineer working in Southern California before he entered the priesthood. That alone made me feel very close to him, because we had the same scientific or technical frame of mind generally. We talked a lot about engineering and science, about the web, about technology…
He was central in getting the parish school to start holding science fairs, instead of allowing the teachers to assign group science projects. I helped judge the first two years of their science fair, and now that Father Dan is leaving, I’ll try to help more and maybe get the school to send students to the LA County Science Fair.
He was also involved on and off during his career with Boy Scouts, so we talked about camping and hiking. He was often familiar with camping in the areas that W and I would go, particularly north of LA. Additionally, he reviewed J's work on Parvuli Dei, the Cub Scouts Catholic Religious Emblem, and he signed off on J's work so that he could receive the emblem.
(After he reviewed J’s Parvuli Dei workbook, he showed us YouTube videos of the current firefighting aircraft used by California firefighting crews to fight massive wildfires.)
Additionally, he wrote letters of recommendation for W at both of the boys’ Catholic high schools to which he applied and was accepted.
Father Dan’s parents still live in the west valleys, so he got his wish for his next assignment to be closer to them, in Northridge. He takes looks after them during his “vacations."
Accelerator Run
I spent about 9 days at Texas A&M University in College Station, TX, earlier this month, along with our SPP EPI-Hi team, using TAMU’s cyclotron to test our instrument. I suppose there are some things I shouldn’t make public, so basically, the photo at the top is of me in front of the huge, thick door to one of the caves (or beam rooms, where the accelerated particles are let through a pipe in a beam to expose whatever a user group wants exposed to the energetic particles). The lower photo is of us in one of our work areas above the cave where our instrument would be exposed to the beam.
My workspace was at the blue chair in the background. My primary responsibility was to set up and run the ground support equipment, i.e. the computers and network to provide real-time data display (as best as we could get it given the state of our flight and GSE software) and to distribute data to the rest of our users for near-realtime or later analysis.
In looking at this photo, I’m struck by the relatively high percentage of bald guys that I work with.
Congratulations, Boys!
J got promoted from lower school to middle school (5th grade to 6th grade), and W graduated from middle school entirely and will enter another high school later this year.
In addition to his diploma, W was one of the students who got an academic achievement award, basically for having a high grade point average.
Along with all of his classmates, J gave a short speech recounting his favorite memories of lower school.
Mr. F, the head of school (seen above with W), had been avoiding me for a couple of months, seemingly thinking that I was somehow angry at him or the school. I most certainly never was, but I was really bothered by his apparently avoiding me, so yesterday and today, I finally cornered Mr. F at each event and shook his hand and thanked him. Today especially, the relief in his response to me was palpable, and he relaxed enough to ask what our summer vacation plans were.
After graduation, we spent time congratulating W’s classmates and their parents. This evening, Hsuan and I took the boys out to dinner at Roy’s, and I gave W his graduation present — an iPad mini 4.