Trumbo

Posted December 1, 2015 by joebowker
Categories: Movies, Reviews
Tags: , ,

TrumboPaula and I went to the movies tonight to see the movie “Trumbo” starring Brian Cranston. This is the true story of screen writer Dalton Trumbo. Dalton Trumbo was one of many Hollywood screenwriters in the 40’s and 50’s who were jailed for refusing to testify to the House Un-american Activities Committee.

Trumbo won two Academy awards for screenplays written under a pseudonym while on the Hollywood blacklist. The movies were “Roman Holiday” and “Spartacus”.

The movie also stars John Goodman as a low-budget film producer named Frank King. Helen Mirren does a bang up job of playing Hedda Hopper (legendary Hollywood reporter).

I don’t think this is going to be a huge box office hit. There were only about a dozen people in the theater. It was early Monday film, but still.

I am continually amazed at the range of Brian Cranston. I would have loved to see him do LBJ on Broadway. I am slowly working my through “Breaking Bad” (I just started watching season 3).

Great film. Go see it.

On the way home we stopped and picked up a bucket of chicken at KFC. Tasted great.

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Christmas Letters

Posted November 29, 2015 by joebowker
Categories: Uncategorized

Every about this time I start working on my Christmas Letter. I started doing this annual letter back about 1998 or 1999. I felt that sending a Christmas card with just a signature was too little work and hand writing news on each and every card was way too much. My in-laws had been doing Christmas letters for as long as I have known them. Back then Mary did the writing and typing on her IBM Selectric and took it to the copy shop for duplication. Computers made my job so much easier.

I still have copies of previous editions going back to 1999. Some years, I would send my email. But I didn’t like that very much. The initial editions just had generic Christmas clip-art. Eventually, I started including pictures. I figured our friends would rather see a few pictures than some lame clip-art.

Now a days, I do a press run of 120 copies. 120 is a nice round number. There are 30 address labels per page and 24 e-stamps per page. Both numbers divide evenly into 120. I still send a few email copies for folks not in the USA. Besides, going past 120 gets into serious money for postage.

So I already have a rough draft done. And I have started printing stamps and labels. Some years when I was working, I didn’t get the letter out until after Christmas.

So without further ado, here is my 1999 Christmas letter (this was the text only version sent by email):

December 1999

Well it is December again and time to do some writing to our friends and family wherever you may be. This year Paula and I decided that she would write her Christmas cards the normal way (ie. Christmas card, pen, envelope, stamp, etc.).

I decided to do another Christmas letter, but this year I would send it via email. I have added several hyperlinks for your web-surfing enjoyment. So without further ado, here is the latest news at the Bowker family:

Mike finished his freshman year at Northeastern University. He made the Dean’s list for the Spring Quarter. He is majoring in Electrical Engineering or as Dave Barry calls it “Big Scary Equations”. This fall he is working at his Co-op assignment at Ezenia Corporation in Burlington.

He continues to be active in NUHOC (NU Hiking and Outing Club). Click here to see a picture of him last winter at a NUHOC Ice Climbing event. He is eagerly awaiting the first good snow of the season. It has been unseasonably warm in New England this December and for that Mike is quite unhappy.

Mike continues to train at Kwon’s Tai Kwon Do in Tewksbury. He tested and received his 2nd Dan (2nd Degree) Black Belt in December. He will be returning to campus in January, to start his sophomore academic work (Physics, Math, Circuits).

Neil is in his junior year at Shawsheen Vocational Technical High School where his shop specialty is Air Conditioning and Refrigeration (ACR). Neil spent the summer working at a local Air Conditioning contractor. He was spent many a weekend diving off of Cape Ann. He passed his Advanced Open Water Dive certification. 

Neil got his drivers license this spring and Billerica roads have not been the same since. In June, he decided that he really needed a car, so we found him a 1990 Jeep Wrangler. Neil is rapidly learning the hassles of owning a car.

Paula is still working at Chelmsford Pediatrics as a staff nurse. There are unfortunately no web pages for Chelmsford Pediatrics. Paula and I try to spend as many weekends as we can up at our condo in Plymouth, NH.  We never seem to have enough time to get away. Here are a couple of pictures of the place. The condo is located at Tenney Mountain in Plymouth, NH.

I have been asked by some of our west coast friends whether we would be out in LA this Christmas. Unfortunately we will not be traveling this Christmas. One of the reasons for staying home is that I will be working over the New Year’s weekend keeping the world safe from the Y2K problems. Paula’s parents will however be coming out to visit for Christmas.  We are looking forward to their visit.

I continue to work for Compaq (or as we are fond of calling it: the company formerly known as DEC). I am doing more or less the same job in Customer Services doing either solving complex customer problems or consulting in the High Availability Systems area. I am currently working on a project for AT&T where I get to spend weekends in New Jersey. This is not quite the international travel I was becoming used to. Whatever, it’s a job.

This past weekend we finally had a taste of winter. Temperature got down to 32F and winds of 25 knots gusting to 30-40 knots. BRRRRRRR!!!!. Paula and I spent Saturday Christmas shopping starting with Amazon.com to gift shops to Wal-Mart and so forth. Mike decided to forego the pleasure of joining us and went skiing instead.

Well, that’s enough. May all of you and happy and joyous Christmas. Keep in touch.

Joe, Paula, Mike and Neil Bowker

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Thanksgiving

Posted November 27, 2015 by joebowker
Categories: Family, Mary, Music
Tags: , , ,

Well another Thanksgiving Day is in the record books. We had a delightful day. Our current tradition is to visit Theresa’s cousin Eric up in Rancho Palos Verdes. it has become a fairly large family gathering. We have children ranging in age from 14 down to 1 years old.

We do it at Eric’s house because he has the largest house available for the occasion. We end up with three tables. One for the seniors (minimum age of 60), one for the little kids, and one for the young adults.

Our contribution to the festivities was wine. I was instructed to bring 4-5 bottles of wine. So I brought two bottles of Beuajolais Nouveau, one of Chardonnay, a Reisling and a Gewurstraminer. I went home with an empty bag.

There are pluses and minuses to going to other people’s homes for Thanksgiving. On the plus side, we don’t have to cook. We just come and bring what we are told to bring. On the minus side, there are no left overs and I have less control over the menu. Like no mashed potatoes or pumpkin pie. But the food was all good. It was a mixture of American and Chinese cuisines.

Mary did pretty good. The terrain is a bit tough for her. Eric’s home has a steep, long driveway. We had to be extra careful. No falls or trips to the ER, thank you very much. We didn’t have any white zin for her so she had to make do with the riesling.

It was fun to watch the little ones play. Jonathan was keeping pretty good. Sarah is improving her toddling skills.

Sarah, keeping up with the big boys.

 

Jonathan’s Yellow Wheels

So the family room had football playing on the big screen. Guests were shooed out of the kitchen. Everyone got some piano playing time. I know enough to bring my iPad so that I have my music. Eric has a beautiful Steinway baby grand. Everyone in the family takes piano lessons.
We were home by 8pm.

1125alice01No dishes to do. Mary was all worn out. She headed off to her bedroom and went to bed. Paula and I sat down to watch Arlo Guthrie perform “Alice’s Restaurant” on PBS. I had recorded it on the DVR so I could skip through the pledge breaks.  Here’s a link to a live recording of Alice’s Restauarant done in 2005. That ditty sure has staying power. The pledge-persons on the LA PBS station seemed to be more annoying than usual, but I could skip over the breaks. Young man in suit and tie, woman of similar age. You couldn’t pick two people more unlike Arlo Guthrie than these two. It was a good concert if you ignore the pledge breaks.

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JPL Tour

Posted November 19, 2015 by joebowker
Categories: Research, Technology
Tags: , , , , ,

EPSON MFP image

On Tuesday, We attended a tour of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Labs in Pasadena. This was a private tour that was arranged by our son Mike who works there. We had a group of about 20 people, most of whom were members of Mike’s 9SOPS unit at Vandenberg AFB.

The tour started at a small theater to view a video about JPL. The lab was started by a couple of grad students at Caltech who were doing research on rocket motors. Here’s the wiki article. Around the edge of the room were several models of JPL space craft including a 1/2 size model of the two spacecrafts Voyager which were  launched in 1977. Voyager 1 and 2 continue to operate today returning data from interstellar space.

 


From the auditorium, we headed to a small museum with more examples of JPL’s projects including Mars Exploration Rover Mission and other space craft for exploring the surface of Mars. We were given ample time to look at all of the models and take pictures. But we couldn’t stay all afternoon because there was another group scheduled right behind us.


 After we were done with the museum we hiked up to the building where the control center lives. They have a glassed in balcony where visitors can watch the business of managing spacecraft millions of miles from planet Earth. The center is manned 24/7/365. Here are a couple of pictures. By this point in the tour my knees were talking back to me.


The final stop in the tour was another glassed in balcony for visitors of one of the large clean room assembly areas where robotic space craft are built and readied for their journey to the outer reaches of outer space. On the far wall in the picture below are the mission symbols for all of the space craft that have come through this building.


It was a great tour. It was a lot easier than trying to go to the public open house held last month.

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The Chair

Posted November 13, 2015 by joebowker
Categories: Aging, Mary
Tags: ,

2015-11-06 15.14.21So we’ve been living with Paula’s mother now for a bit over three years. Sometimes the woman just drives me absolutely crazy. One can’t have an argument with her. Logic just doesn’t work. She can’t remember anything that happened a week or a month ago.

So I asked her the other day, do you know how long we have been living with you? I get a dazed, deer in the headlights stare back. Not a clue.

So a few weeks ago I told her that I wanted to replace the reclining chair in our living room that I usually sit in when we are watching TV. I told her that I have trouble getting up from it. The chair is a combination rocker/recliner. So when one wants to get up, you lean forward and the chair dips low making it difficult to get up. A problem aggravated by my bad knees.

I told Mary that she has trouble getting up, too. No, I don’t she says. Not going to win this argument.

So I told Paula, that we’re getting a new chair with or without her approval. Her only choice is what we’re going to do with the old chair. The old chair can go out with the trash or it can go into her room. To put it in her room we need to make a space. There is much clutter in her room with stuff that she can’t live without. She has a massage table that she wants to keep. It doesn’t matter that she hasn’t used it in years. How do I know that? You might say? Well to use it one would have to take the boxes of stuff off of it. So we managed to move some stuff around and made space for the chair. So last Friday, Paula and I go out to the local LaZ-Boy show room to buy a chair. I am happy. Not sure how we will break the news to Mary.

Then, on Monday, she says “I guess it would be okay for you to get a new chair”. I didn’t want to tell her that we’d already bought the chair and it would be delivered on Thursday. At any rate, the chair was delivered and Mary has forgotten all about the argument. I’m happy. She’s happy (I guess)

By the way, she is doing pretty good. No illness, no falls. She is going pretty slow though. We try to have extra time built into our appointments for her. Two speeds, slow and slower.

We had lunch with Theresa and the grand-kids last Sunday after church. She loves to see the grand-kids. Here’s a picture.

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Mary helping Jonathan with his crayons and coloring.

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Grammy Museum

Posted November 2, 2015 by joebowker
Categories: California, Los Angeles, Museums
Tags: , , ,

2015-11-01 15.52.32 HDR-2It’s been a busy weekend here in LA. Paula, Andrea and I went to church then lunch at the Gaffey Street Diner. We then went home so that Paula could check on her mother. Then we headed to the Grammy Museum in downtown LA. We wanted to see the Frank Sinatra exhibit. The Grammy museum is located downtown near the Staples Center and the LA Convention Center. There was some sort of event at the convention center. It was some sort of comic-con event. Lots of people dressed in strange costumes. We thought, oh oh parking may be a challenge.

Not so, we got into a parking lot nearby for $10 for three hours. So we got in for $10.95 for senior tickets. Nobody ever cards us to prove we are older than dirt. This is the second time we’ve been to the Grammy museum. Three floors of recording star memorabilia. Always interesting. The displays change from time to time.

We had been here a few months ago to see the exhibit on Whitney Houston. A very sad event indeed. Usually they start you on the fourth floor and work your way down. The Sinatra exhibit was on the second floor. That’s where we started.

There was lots of Sinatra memorabilia from the early days to the later period. They were showing a short video in the Clive Davis theater of a Sinatra concert. Here are some pictures.

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Here’s a youtube link to Frank Sinatra singing “New York, New York”

After we were done with the Sinatra exhibit we went up stairs to look at the exhibits on “The Supremes”. Here are some pictures. I loved the gowns.

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And finally a youtube clip from the Supremes.

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Getty Museum

Posted October 30, 2015 by joebowker
Categories: California, Los Angeles, Museums
Tags: , ,

Our friend Andrea flew down from Sacramento for the weekend so that we could visit the Getty Museum in LA. Our primary goal was to see the Hellenistic Sculpture exhibit. Photography not allowed in the exhibit, so best I could do is take a picture of the poster. 

  
Admission was free. Only had to pay $15 for parking. What a bargain. 

The museum is located just off the 405 north of LAX in the Santa Monica mountains. This is some prime real estate with views to die for.  So you park in the garage and take free shuttle to the center. The center has free WiFi and is probably the fastest public WiFi I’ve ever seen. 

  

We went on a tour of the sculpture exhibit with a very knowledgable docent. The tour was free too. Here is a link to the Getty web site that many pictures of the sculptures. I expect that link will come down soon after the exhibit closes on Sunday. So go surf the Getty images on their web site while you can. 

Here are some pictures of the architecture and the grand views. 

   
    

   

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Memories

Posted October 18, 2015 by joebowker
Categories: Aging, Mary
Tags: , ,

Yesterday, I was sitting with Mary as she ate some lunch. Paula was off doing a silent retreat with the ladies of Ocean View Baptist. So I asked Mary if she would like to go for a walk. We have a nice sheltered courtyard that is nice and flat. Excellent for Mary’s walks. So Mary asks me if she could use her walker instead of her cane. Sure, I say. And I go get the walker. Maybe we will take a trip to a store that sells walkers or other durable medical equipment to find one that might fit her needs.

Now the walker has been sitting in her room gathering dust since we returned from SLC last year after her hip surgery. Over the past couple of weeks, Mary has had a couple of close calls with respect to falls. One happened at church where someone was close by to catch her before she went down. Sometimes, she just gets dizzy and if she doesn’t have something or someone to hold on to, she will fall.

Maybe she is beginning to recognize this and is willing to try the walker again. So we got into a discussion on how she got the walker. She sort of remembered the PT staff giving it to her before she checked out of the hospital. Here’s where it gets fuzzy. She doesn’t remember how she got from the hospital in SLC to our home in San Pedro. So she doesn’t remember that Paula and I flew up to SLC, picked her up, boarded the plane together and flew home, When I told her that we were with her, she gives me a look that says “that’s crazy talk”.

There was another occasion in May of 2013 where Paula took her to her high school reunion in Wichita, KS. I had begged off. I had been to one of these shindigs before and I would rather have my teeth pulled without Novocaine. Of course, you can’t get a non-stop flight from LAX to Wichita. You have to stop somewhere. Trying to explain this to Mary is like trying to explain it to a five year old. So remember this trip was before the hip surgery and shoulder surgery. So one fine day, we are talking with Mary and she mentions that she would like to go back to Kansas. We did, we tell her. When? she says.

So her memory is fading. Everything that happened over the past 4 years is becoming more and more blurry. She remembers some people from her past, but not everyone. There is no logic to it. She remembers stuff from 20 years ago. Short term memory is getting iffy too. Sometimes she will ask what the agenda is for today? I will explain what’s going on and ten minutes later she’ll ask the same question all over again. She doesn’t have any trouble remembering who we are but can’t remember or process what I said ten minutes ago.

So enough. Time for a change of pace. Here a video of “Memories” from the musical “Cats” for your listening and viewing pleasure.

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Haggen’s Revisited

Posted October 12, 2015 by joebowker
Categories: California
Tags: , ,

Haggens SignI had to do some grocery shopping today. Over the past few weeks we have pretty much switched over to shopping at “Ralph’s” but today I thought I would go back to Haggen’s to see how they’re doing as the chain works it’s way through bankruptcy court. Plus I thought I would like to say good bye to many of the people who work there who we have seen over the past few years.

I know that today is a holiday (Columbus Day) but still the store looked bleak. My first stop was Starbuck’s to get my grande iced coffee, no sweetener, leave room for cream. The Starbuck’s here is different because they remember our names and know pretty much what we will be ordering. Sometimes, I throw them  curve ball and ask for a venti (ie. large). We chatted a bit about the situation. They told us that the Starbuck’s on Western would cease operations on 10/24 or 10/31.

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I talked with my meat guy. Same sad story. I think he will land on his feet. He said that he already has a job in the meat dept. at Costco. So, I took the liberty of taking some pictures. First picture is of the meat department. Right now the display is barely half full. It will get worse. My meat guy said no more supply after next week, then everything goes on sale. Then on to the bread aisle. Not much there to speak of. Most of the local suppliers have stopped doing business with Haggen’s for fear of not getting paid. Can’t say that I blame them.

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On some of the aisles, they are trying to mask the lack of product. A mile wide and one inch deep. Here’s the soda aisle. At any rate, there in the final stages of shutting down or get bought by a competitor. Final date for closing will be 11/24. We’ll see how it turns out.

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Jet Propulsion Labratory

Posted October 10, 2015 by joebowker
Categories: Technology
Tags: , , ,

JPL CampusLast week our son Mike told us that JPL would be holding an open house this weekend (Saturday and Sunday). So we thought that sounds like fun. Maybe we should take a ride up to Pasadena and see what’s happening at JPL. So I checked out JPL’s web site for directions and information. It was a straight shot up the 110 to Pasadena.

The web site recommended to get an early start as parking would be a challenge. Well we didn’t get much of an early start. We finally got going at about 10 AM.

It turns out that not only was JPL having a big event, there was a big soccer game between USA and Mexico at the Rose bowl. Not good.

So we got into the JPL neighborhood and found a traffic jam of biblical proportions. Cars parked on side streets. One gate was closed to traffic. Signage was poor. So after about an hour of poking around the Pasadena neighborhood, we decided to give up. The rent was due on the morning’s coffee and no bathrooms in sight.

So JPL can put hardware onto Mars and send spacecraft to Pluto, but has trouble managing traffic. So we turned around and reprogrammed our GPS for home with intermediate stops at the Happy Diner in San Pedro and Trader Joe’s supermarket.

So, in lieu of a personal account of the open house. Here a few facts and pictures culled from Wikipedia and JPL’s web site.

First, here is the Wikipedia entry for JPL. And here is the link to JPL’s web site. Go check them out. There are a lot of neat pictures.

Curiosity Rover

Curiosity Rover

JPL has been responsible for several projects related to Mars. One of the recent projects was a launched in 2011 and landed on Mars in 2012. This picture is Rover’s selfie. Here’s the wiki link.

While I’m thinking about it, go see Matt Damon’s new film titled “The Martian”. I wrote a blog post a few weeks ago about the book. Here’s the link to the IMDB entry.

So that’s about it. Maybe we’ll get up there next year, Pasadena that is not Mars.

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