A nutria is a large brown rodent, a little smaller than a beaver, but with a round tail instead of a flat one. They are native to South America, but were brought to the states for their fur. They thrive in the mild northwest climate, and have no natural predators here. They are widely considered pests, and they inhabit most any body of water they can find, including ponds, creeks, and ditches. They also make a sound that is reminiscent of a cow mooing when imminently threatened.

What can you do when you've done a problem right, you're sure of it, and then you look in the back of the book (because thankfully the problem is an odd number), and most of the numbers are completely different? What can you do? Huh? Well, you could sit and stew. Or you could sweetly resign yourself to the fact that you must be wrong and scour pages and pages of material hoping a light will be shown upon you. Or you could insist that you are right and the book's wrong.

I'm leaning toward insisting that I'm right and the book's wrong. But I need to e-mail the teacher to verify that fact.

I'm almost ready to leave for the coast, where it's sure to be windy. I can't remember ever going there and it not being windy.

I'm feeling pretty good these days. Except for the fact that the Thanksgiving program at school is coming up in a week in a half. We've got a lot of work to do.

That was sort of stupid. Why did I enjoy the plant tour? What kinds of things did they actually do to improve the production system?

Well, there was this chair line with many workstations that required a lot of components assembly. As I understand it, the old way was to assemble them in batches in straight assembly lines or something. Now, however, they have the line set up as a counterclockwise circle that only allows one chair to stack up between workstations, thus substantially reducing inventories.

Also, one other thing I wanted to relate.

I believe I’m an above average driver most of the time, just like the rest of the population. This morning was not one of those times, I freely admit. Every once in awhile I just space out on the roads when it comes to stop signs or red lights. Red lights are the worst. Today, I decided to careen into an intersection to make my left turn, but there was this crazy girl coming straight toward me. Then I looked up and saw the red light. Oops, sort of embarrassing. I stopped and backed up. The girl didn’t give me any looks, but the guy behind her laughed at me like "what are you doing?!"

So that plant tour was cool. A little more "manufacturing engineering" oriented than fits my perfect-world fancy, but still it was cool to see actual lean methods put to practice.

Got my SPC test back! Good news, I rocked it.

This weekend I'm going out to the coast with my cousins and Rosie and Phil. This should be a fun time. The weather's supposed to turn a little nasty here, so maybe that means it'll be nice there. I hope to take it easy, actually do some studying and stuff. We'll see.

I'm about ready to embark on a plant tour up in Newberg or Portland or somewhere. If the van ever gets here. This company that we're going to tour, they make dentist's chairs and they're a company that has really bought into the Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering thing. They take something like 10 interns from OSU every year.

Some people don’t eat out or get gas on Sunday because, though not working themselves, they are in a way contributing to others working on the Lord’s day. I was thinking Sunday night, what about electricity? I suppose there have to be people manning the electrical generating plants out there on the dams to support our lights and dishwashers and heaters.

There were so many strange things happening when I got home Monday morning it’s not even funny. First of all, there was a big old nutria right in front of the house on the walkway. I honked the horn and he scurried off. Then I get out, and all of the house doors are locked. Nobody’d told me anything about that. There’s a light on inside, the computer’s on, and the phone’s ringing. So many bizarre things. I had a cell phone—good thing—so I called dad. He was sleeping of course, so he didn’t answer. He called back a little later and told me where the key was hidden.

There are two extraordinarily tough teachers that I have had, and I’ve liked both of them. I don’t know if it’s a reaction to the people around me slamming them or if their teaching style fits my learning style. They’re both very well-organized, no-nonsense lecturers who have tough tests and are generally seen as hard-nosed. They would not be considered “student teachers” (like players coaches). But I like them for precisely those reasons. They’re demanding, and demanding teachers bring out the best in me because I really learn under them.

Some things that stood out about the wedding and accompanying festivities.

It was a very emotional ceremony, you could tell how much it meant to them and how seriously they both took it. Shannon’s twenty and leaving her family to go across the country and Kon is now the spiritual leader of a home.

This is classic Konrad, just classic. His brother is notorious for clinking the glasses with spoons at weddings, and I didn’t know what Kon would do. I had just told Merry that it would be interesting to see what happened. Shortly thereafter glasses started ringing. Sure enough, Kon and Shannon stand up, he looks into her eyes, takes her hand, and kisses it!

After the wedding we played volleyball. After that, I went over to where the Good’s and Merry were staying and we watched a video of our TAPESTRY tour. And then we sang! And then we sang at Sunnyside Mennonite Church the next morning.

I loved the fellowship with everybody, seeing so many friends, talking. It was great.

Oops, this is a little out of order.

I wrote the essence of this on Friday, November 7, 2003.

The burning question discussed on the way to Darrell’s today was whether UCONN’s women’s basketball team could beat an average, big (as in size of school) high school boy’s basketball team. Dad and Randy were very anti-giving-the-girls-a-chance, they believe the physical difference is just too great. I’m not so sure. I think they underestimate how skilled this women's basketball team is. They have the best player in the nation and have won the last two NCAA titles. I don’t know what the outcome of a game like that would be, but I do think the women could score on the boys fairly consistently, based on their superior skill, system, and level of execution. The athletic gap would be substantial, and on defense, I don’t know how well they’d hold up. But it would be an interesting game.

The first round of seeing lots of people that I don’t normally see happened last night at the rehearsal dinner. Louise did a “green froggy golf” theme in honor of Konrad’s affinity for a particular pukey shade of the color. I didn’t get the memo, so while a lot of people were doing their best to--in the words or our friend Michael Denton--commit “fashion suicide,” I dressed ordinarily. We got to sing “A Frog Went A-Courtin’” to customized lyrics, and Louise furnished us with little green froggy handkerchiefs around our necks, so we weren’t entirely green-less.

The second round was after the rehearsal at a gym. Lots of Bible School friends. Organizationally, nothing was getting done, so Heidi put me in charge. Yippee, that was fun.

The third round will be at the wedding itself, which I’ll be leaving to anytime. As I write it’s 11:23 local time and we must be leaving in the next 15 minutes or so.

Kon’s getting married. Wow.

I'm going to do this in sections. That way, it'll seem like I've been updating this periodically when in fact I haven't for a few days.

I wrote the essence of this on Sunday, November 9, 2003

I was thinking while I was walking in the airport here in Des Moines, imagine that. What if you were the owner of a business that manufactured a demand-driven product (like boomboxes) and it had been in your family for 80 years and suddenly a new technology became available that would allow you to produce this product using automation. Advantages are plenteous, as plenteous as each dollar you’d make. More, quicker, cheaper--a manufacturer’s dream. The disadvantage is that you have to lay off, say, a hundred employees. That’s possibly 100 families that now have no steady source of income. But if you don’t keep up with the technology, you might as well get out of the business, because competitors will eat you up. That’d be a tough decision, one which has been faced by many medium-sized businesses over the years, I'm sure.

This is a little more than two hours later, and I’m now in Cincinatti. It was an uneventful flight, but I am really tired. I kept drifting off to sleep and then this once I slipped into a dream-state, dreamed I needed to flail my arm, and actually flailed at the air with my arm, which woke me up. This was sort of embarrassing, hopefully nobody noticed.

I’m on my way home from Konrad & Shannon’s wedding in Iowa. It was a beautiful wedding, just very good all around, and the weekend was incredible.