Three years and still on our honey moon

We got these great aprons and hats from my family for our wedding anniversary. Three years and one baby later, I'm more in love than ever--many more of both still to come.

Of course it's safe

Mom and Dad let me take the Johnny Jump-up with me while I was in town to defend my thesis. It caused a small stir in airport security (what is that thing), but we made it home safe. Emily loves it. She'll jump for a long time, especially if she has an audience cheering her on. This video is from a little while back, but it gives a good taste of the fun we have. She loves, in particular, the ends of the straps that stick out at just the right height where she can suck on them. Mmmm... we should probably figure out a way to clean those.

Emily's First Christmas

Christmas has come and gone and we had a great, although quiet day with just the three of us. Poor Em has been recovering from a cold but that didn't stop her from enjoying her presents. She loved tearing the wrapping paper off the boxes, and once that was taken away and tucked out of sight, she noticed that she had unwrapped toys and loved those too.


Thanks, everyone for the thoughtful presents! We hope you all had a fabulous Christmas as well.




I just had to add this picture of Em's ornament. The body is a jingle bell.
Isn't it cute?

Family time

I really enjoy my classes, but it sure is fun to have a little time with my family during the break. We made a sugar cookie house today. Sugar cookie does not meet earthquake building code as well as gingerbread, but it has the advantage of generating a house that is actually edible. I don't care for the taste of gingerbread at all.
We cut out the windows in the cookie dough and then put hard candies in them before baking. The candy melts and makes cool window panes. I melted some sugar on the stove to fasten the sides together. That worked pretty well for the two corners that I could just dip into the pot. Then things started getting ugly as the melted sugar began to harden. One of the walls didn't fasten so well and I was out of luck for the roof. So we just attached the roof pieces with the cream cheese frosting. A plastic bag worked well enough to apply the frosting.
The final product... needs a little help. We had a lot of fun though and I expect it will be yummy as long as we don't leave it sitting out too long.

Petunias

Christmas is just five days away and Joseph and I are scrambling to finish buying gifts and to get everything ready. I was pondering the reason we are running so late this year. Could it be because it was almost 75 degrees today and sunny? Maybe because the gardeners just came to our complex and planted petunias everywhere? Or is it because we had our air conditioner running in the car and our baby in short sleeves? Whatever the reason, it sure doesn't feel very Christmassy in Texas. I have a feeling we won't be getting that white Christmas this year.

And here is a picture of Emily eating her feet, just because it's habit now to have her in every post.

Jumping

While I've been trying to teach silly, simplified models just to balance, Emily has been learning how to jump (and apparently how to Dragon punch as well). Whatever her learning algorithm is, I wish I could program it. Then I'd have my PhD lickety-split.

Balancing

Imitating a project I saw on the web (by Tyler Streeter at Iowa State), I built a system for training a humanoid robot to balance. It didn't learn very well, but it looked cool. It definitely produced some interesting behaviors. It generated some very convincing seizures and death scenes. Tyler's was better.
He typically fell over a lot. But he tried to counter balance.
I attempted to hard-code a solution that would let the humanoid balance. My solution didn't work so well. It tended to overreact... a lot. When it started to tip one direction, it would violently flail in the opposite direction; usually that meant that he flipped and landed on his head.
One of the best solutions the learning approach could find was to gracefully fall into a sitting position. Then it was still somewhat upright, but not unstable like an inverted pendulum. He looked like he was tired of trying. Amanda always felt so bad for the character whenever she came over. The poor thing spent a lot of time writhing on the ground and Amanda's empathy couldn't bear it.

Back to the Blogging World!

We lost the internet for a couple of days, but now we're back up and running! Not too much has been going on in our lives lately. Joseph is working like crazy to finish up the semester. He just has one (huge) project left, due on Friday. I have started teaching piano lessons to a couple of the kids in the ward. Not much else to say today besides Merry Christmas!