Family Heirloom

Well I’m back to work following a couple rather relaxed weeks. While I do plan on posting an update with details about the past few days (since July 4th), I have to first thank my Aunt Grace for something that was really nice of her. When I was up in Pigeon my Aunt Grace and Uncle Joe came over and my Aunt Grace said she had a gift for me. She then showed me an old picture and filled me in on how I was related to them. Now unless I’ve already screwed this up (correct me if I’m wrong), in the picture was my great-grandpa Henry Elbing, brothers and sisters, and his parents. Then she gave me a small box and when I opened it up there was a really nice woman’s wedding ring. It was my great-great-grandma’s wedding ring. My Aunt Grace wanted the ring to stay in the Elbing name so she gave it to me since I was the only boy on our side…Thanks Aunt Grace.

The Ring

My First YouTube Video

Well I posted my first video on YouTube. It was done in hopes of solving the problem of how to get a video to my advisor, but sadly YouTube compresses the video resulting in too poor of quality for my liking. So I had to seek an alternative solution to the problem (thanks to both Demoree and Sherry for their assistance with that). While the video will look like nothing to everyone that reads my blog I couldn't resist posting it just for the fun of it.

While the YouTube compression did make it look worse, the higher quality video doesn't look all that much different from it. With that being said I also need to thank Ciara since she was the original person that converted the VHS tape to digital format, which required her to watch a lot of video that looked exactly like the 30 secs you just saw.

Happy Birthday to the USA

In typical fashion I'm a little late with it, but to everyone Happy 4th of July!!!

I know that the United States isn't perfect by any means, but quite honestly I don't think she gets the credit is properly due her. Other nations expect/demand that we help them in times of crisis and offer little to no assistance when we are in trouble. However to some extent it adds to my pride in the nation when other countries will show us no respect and still when they are in trouble we are ready to offer help. We're a great nation and I'm proud to be an American.

Sidenote: Foosball is coming to an office near you (if your office is located in the Lay Autolab)

Tigers Game

As promised in my previous post…here are more details from the Tigers game I went to. So basically this outing started with Trudi planning on taking my sister Teresa and Sherry (Sherry and Trudi became friends thanks to blogs and had never met). However Teresa had to work and thus the invitation was extended to me and Demoree…thanks Teresa for working.

Sherry, Trudi, Demoree, and Myself at the baseball game...thanks to the stranger in front of us for taking the picture and Trudi for sending them to me.

So we get to the Comerica Park and go in and start looking for our seats. Trudi had gotten them from her mom (who got them from someone she knows through her job), and her mom said she thought they were good seats. We were walking around the park looking for section 130 and as I looked at what section we were at and the direction we were heading I was thinking these are going to be really close to home plate. Sure enough we get to the section and it is immediately behind home plate. Then we all look at which row we are in…row 15!. To give you an idea of how close that is, we were in the same row as the guy with the radar gun for getting the speed of the pitches. And if that doesn’t give you an idea here is a picture from our seats of Sammy Sosa at bat.

Picture from our seats of Sammy Sosa batting against Kenny Rogers.

The only weird thing about getting such great seats is that you sit with the diehard fans. This is odd only because I’ve always sat next to the casual fans or the people that go just to drink. It was actually kind of neat since if we were talking about some stats or explaining to Sherry the rules of baseball (which are much more difficult to explain then one might think) people around us could immediately provide answers.

Then to top of this awesome experience the Tigers won 5-2 and we got to see a homerun. All and all a pretty good outing…thanks Trudi.

A Week in Fun

While this past week I actually did manage to get work done, I also was able to have quite a bit of fun. First, this past Tuesday I drove up to Pigeon (actually drove up Monday night) to go golfing with my dad and a couple of his buddies. Even though I got pretty sunburned and didn’t win it was still totally worth the trip.

The match was best ball between my dad's team (my dad and Cooper) versus my team (me and Galen). The back story is that every year my dad’s team golfs against Galen and someone else (whom ever my dad gets) and every year my dad loses. So this year I played with Galen, and I’m really not a good golfer by any means. Dad’s team jumps out to a 3 stroke lead after the first 3 holes. With the exception of a stroke gained here lost there the lead remained through hole 13. On hole 14 my team cut the deficit to only 2 strokes and we were feeling pretty good about our situation. Then on hole 15 we quickly gave back the stroke plus one…we were now down 4 strokes with only 3 holes to go. We figured that that ended any hopes of an awesome last minute comeback to win. But then on holes 16 and 17 we gained a stroke on each one leaving only a 2 stroke lead for my dad’s team. Leaving one hole left with a slight chance to comeback (though, if my memory serves me correctly, they hadn’t given us two strokes on a single hole all day).

Now hole 18 I would love to give a blow by blow recap of it, but frankly I just don’t remember how each shot took place. However what I do know is that my team both hit great shots right up near the green while my dad’s team ended up in trouble along the woods with a ditch between them and the hole. When my dad’s partner hit it into the ditch my dad was forced to make the smart decision and play it safe…Galen and I knew we had a chance because it is so difficult to hang onto a lead while having to play it safe. In the end my dad’s team had to make a putt to tie my team…I would have to say that I’ve never been so excited to tie a game in my life.

Then on Thursday I was able to go to the Tigers game against the Rangers. Thank you to Trudi for inviting me to go and to her mom for being able to get such awesome seats for us. Basically Trudi got tickets to the game and invited Sherry, Demoree, and myself to the game. It was a whole lot of fun and I’m actually going to hold off saying too much because I plan on posting more details of the trip once I have acquired pictures from Trudi…so everyone is guaranteed another update shortly.