Schneider Times Christmas 1996
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Oma’s Difficult year. It has
been a arduous year for Walt’s mother, Oma. At the end of December in 1995 we
found out that she had esophageal cancer. After Walt’s efforts to negotiate the
medical options Oma went through six weeks of radiation therapy and five months
of chemotherapy. It was quite taxing to deal with the complications of cancer
with no indications that the considerable treatment induced sickness is having
a beneficial effect. It was good that Oma was next door so Sue could provide
care and transport her to daily hospital visits. Oma and the family maintained hope during the
many dark months. Oma was very appreciative of our help. We commented that she cared for us as
children and of course we would care for her.
She, in her wisdom commented, that “Caring for babies is lots of trouble
but a joy due to them growing every day.
In contrast dealing with cancer is painful because there are days of
troubles but it gets worse day after day”. In May when the chemotherapy was
terminated, we got our first word that there was no sign of the cancer. Her most recent check-up also showed no sign
of cancer. We are blessed by successful
treatment of a difficult-to-treat cancer.
Oma still has difficulty eating, but is generally in reasonable health
and mentally alert for 84 years. We are pleased for the gift of sharing
Christmas with her.
Girl Scout “camping” & Such. The Falk Junior and
Cadet troops packed their bags for
At summer’s end and we
were off to the Autumn Jamboree. It
rained the whole weekend. At my lonely
unit there were huge puddles, several mud slicks, a ghost, lots of wind, giant
spiders in the bathroom, leaky tents and a good chance of flash floods. Nothing a few well-prepared girlscouts with
raincoats can’t handle. We bested the
elements and put on a goofy circus of seals and their trainer, Jean being one
of the seals.
We survived that trip
and were quickly off to The Grove for one last trip there. The Girl Scout counsel didn’t have the money to
maintain it and fix its problems. There
have been problems with it: the water quit, the heater went out, the place got
snowed in once. Anyhow we bid the Grove
a fond farewell and now anxiously await our winter camping trip in February.
Sue continues to help
lead Jean’s troop. Cadets focus on
service projects, as well as camping.
One especially fun project was to act as hostesses for the local
storytelling workshop. By Jean.
Kids in school. This should be a pretty good year for each of
them. David is in the same classroom as
last year, but this year he's a fifth grader (top of the totem pole) and knows
the ropes. David has a fair amount of homework this year. He seems to have finally decided he likes
school (we are blessed). He has found a
little wisdom this semester. He said
“homework is easier and class more fun if you do the work when it is assigned
or before” (music to his parents ears). However he still feels school is a poor use
of time compared to playing the computer games "Legends of Might and
Magic" where he is slaying dragons and minotaur.
Jean
is cracking the books. Seventh grade is
hard, but she's trying to become more efficient at her studies. I certainly hope she succeeds! She especially likes Spanish and art, is
doing well in algebra (it's a real test of Sue’s education to see if she can
help her out in algebra after some 30 years).
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Jean
and Walt teamed up to do a physics project, building a catapult. After several weeks of working in class with
poor results (projecting a tennis ball 4 feet), Walt began making some
suggestions. “Let’s start with a “novel”
approach - if you want to build something you’ve never done before, lets look
it up” (given what we pay for schooling this might be taught, oh well). Jean learned there were 2 types of catapults,
lever arm (like in movies of medial times) and elastic pole type (like bending
a young sampling for the spring). Given
the constraint of having the catapult base fit in a cubic foot they used the
elastic pole method and did testing (destructive) on PVC pipe elasticity, pole
angles, projectile weight, and platform stabilization (tent stakes). The design, basically a cubic foot block of
wood with two 4 foot PVC pipes for arms) did over a hundred feet at home and
took the official record of 24 meters, about five times the distance of the
other contenders. Jean learned the
lesson that problem solving is often best done after consulting the literature.
Malawians visit. We had the opportunity to repay some of the
hospitality Sue received when she was in
Sue’s Work. In September Sue started working part-time
for our software company, PST, as an icon designer. This means staring at a 32x32 square grid on
the computer screen all day making interpretable (hopefully) pictures to
represent various concepts and functions for the next release of our software,
due this summer.
Chelsea, our English cocker.
Weekend get aways. We did get away for a couple of long
weekends. One was a visit to our friend
Kathryn in
Labor
Day, we took our new tent and camped at
We
discovered we like “Tubing”---floating down the river in big inner tubes. The rocky bottomed river was fairly shallow
at this time of year, so the shouted warning of "Bottoms up!" took on
new meaning as we tried to keep from getting scraped. We even attempted some synchronized Tubing
maneuvers, first linking hands, then reversing to link feet--pretty silly, but
fun.
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Walt’s work. Walt has
had a pretty good year. The brain imaging is going well and the business,
Psychology Software Tools (PST), is developing major products. Walt can now do full brain scans with tenth
of an inch resolution in 5.6 seconds for a single individual. The brain activation signals are surprisingly
strong allowing measuring how the brain function changes as skill is acquired.
He has the potential to get initial answers to some historic questions - where
in the brain can attention start (answer - area V1 the first cortical visual
stage) and is there a common “teacher circuit” involved in learning new tasks
(e.g., learning faces, phone numbers, and words; it looks like there is). He has good staff at the University (ten
people), and at PST (ten people). PST has had its best year with substantial
sales and strong development efforts in an National Science Foundation grant to
produce an experimental design studio and an Office of Naval Research grant for
developing a turnkey system for doing functional magnetic resonance brain
imaging work. (For details see the Web site http://www.pstnet.com)
Spring time fun with Plastic. On a very windy day in April Walt took out
the family to a hill top with a 20’x20’ plastic drop cloth. With a 30 mile per hour wind we had enough
force to lift children into the air. The
loud flutter of plastic, the force of holding on to the earth, the undulating
waves of plastic made a unique sensory experience.