Somebody got confused and put this sign in our yard and was so embarrassed by their mistake they left it there for a month.
| Dear Randall trivia readers; A lot has happened to the Randall’s extended family in 2017. Let’s get the bad news out of the way first: John is now the oldest living Randall in this immediate family (a scary thought!). The good/bad news is that the way John became the oldest Randall is that after 95 Glorious years, John’s mother Vee has passed on, in about the most dignified and pleasant way that we could hope for. Other significant events: Patrice follows her painting muse, ALL of John’s 2017 predictions fail to materialize, A massive mistake was made by our neighborhood's Best Yard of the Month committee, Ian becomes a flipper and gets a steady girlfriend, Ashley (and animals) moves to California and has gained a significant other, Houston Floods!, California Burns! We could, ... and we will, ... go on. | Somebody got confused and put this sign in our yard and was so embarrassed by their mistake they left it there for a month. |
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Ashley Activities: Ashley (having moved in with John and Patrice last year) continued to live with us through the spring, before she
made good on her promise to move to California. Wolfie sulked for weeks (missing Ashley's dog Mambo), John
had Gwen and Beau (Ashley's Cats) withdrawals, and Patrice, while happy for Ashley, was sad about the departure of her
daughter. We were comforted that she was joining her now steady (we think cohabitation qualifies as "steady") boyfriend
Ian Roettger who, in our humble opinion, is a fine, intellegent, hardworking, and very pleasant young man that we think might
be worthy of Ashley. He likes jazz so he can't be all bad, according to John. We will continue to refer to him as LA Ian to avoid
confusion with Dallas Ian (Ashley's Brother). Ashley and LA Ian live in a beautiful house in the Redondo Beach area, a short
distance from the beach which they frequent. Ashley is working 3 jobs as she builds her client base for her couple's intimacy coach
business. LA Ian works for his family's business which is selling electrical components to ocean going vessels. In between dodging
southern California wildfires, Ashley and LA Ian came to Dallas for an extended weekend with us, Dallas Ian, and the Beautiful
Sarah. The visit turned out to be a tiring forced march which included, Rock activities, Jazz concerts, Indian food, Movies, Mexican Food,
12 days of Christmas, Texas BarBQ, and much drinking.
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Ian Update: Ian has moved so many times that John can't keep track. He always seems to bring
some roomates with him. His latest abode is a nice apartment complex somewhere a little north of downtown Dallas.
Ian continues to do well as a personal trainer at Equinox in Highland Park where he has begun training as a manager.
Ian for quite some time has been itching to do something entreprenurial. He finally pulled the trigger and purchased a
Condo that he is renovating and hoping to flip soon. John and Patrice provide cheap manual labor in the renovation
effort. We have demoed, sanded, scraped, wired, painted, etc. ad nauseum for many weekends now and hope the
project will be done soon. We mentioned in last year's version of this Cadillac Journal of annual Randall Trivia, that Ian had seemed to have found a steady girlfriend. Things have continued well enough for us to mention that the beautiful young lady is Sarah Spellman. Patice and John had Thanksgiving dinner with the Spellmans (which included Sarah's parents, her sister, her sister's husband and too many dogs to count). We had a wonderful time. Oh yeah, Ian was there too. Speaking of dogs, Ian collected a puppy from an abandoned litter of puppies which seem to have a lot of yellow labrador in them. John and Patrice got to spend some quality time with Ian's pup, Cooper, who is ridiculously cute.
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Mambo, Gwen, and Senor Beau enjoyed Texas:
While Ashley was still here, Mambo and Wolfie continued to wear John out playing tug-of-war, chase the bubbles and icecubes, and their favorite
game: Please scatch my Butt! As menitoned above Wolfie definitely misses Mambo and was particularly confused when
he smelled the Mambo scent on LA Ian when he and Ashley visited recently. John was fond of snuggling with Gwen and Senor Beau
(separately) because they both enjoyed it so much. Wolfie: Wolfie, when not missing Mambo is, according to Patrice, either sleeping, begging for food, licking the floor, or waiting for John to come home. Wolfie is not as young as he used to be and John has reduced Wolfie's runs to one and a half miles when he used to run five miles. His age however, has not reduced in any way the ability to produce such copious amounts of shedded dog fur in the house, that failure to vacuum for more than a few days produces many dog fur tumbleweeds. Wolfie, in addition to liking to play a bizarre brand of soccer with ice cubes, is also very fond of being a Bubble Puppy. Push the Arrow to start the video of Wolfie attacking bubbles, look carefully for the bubbles. OK the Video takes forever to download, but for those of you with patience, it will be fun to watch. Wolfie continues to provide musical accompaniment (if you can call insane barking and loud, variously pitched howls musical) whenever John practices the saxophone. Patrice claims the duets are clearly audible to the neighbors. |
| Patrice Stays Busy
Patrice is missing having Ashley around but talks to her on a very regular basis, (or at least Patrice claims that
she is talking to Ashley on the phone everytime John calls her and she does not answer). For a while Patrice
filled the Ashley void by getting into her art painting passion, producing several solar systems worth of two
dimensional planets (see the photo where a subset of these aforementioned planets/coral reef circles drifted out of Patrice's head
and stuck to the wall). But before she could decide how to construct her universe of planets,
she was overcome by her passion to put the house back in order after we finally seemed to have conquered all
of the many (small but annoying) roof leaks that had been resisting repair for almost a decade. More work is anticipated in the new year.
Patrice has also been consumed by Ian's
passion to buy a house. The misalignment of what Patrice thinks about houses and neighborhoods with Ian's housing value
system has led to many involved discussions where a consensous was not achieved. When finally they both agreed to view a
mid-century modern house in a mutally agreeable neighborhood, they convinced John (who has done his best to stay out of
this hornet's nest of opinions) to come and view this wonderful house. What we got to see was in many ways a midcentury
delight. What is was not, was level. There was not a wall that did not have cracks, nor a floor that did not have several local
minimas and maximas. The 3 of us decided that the only way to fix that house was with a bulldozer.
Patrice and Ian have managed to agree on a couple of houses and offers were made, but sellers have
been completely unreasonable in accepting offers that were obviously too high. The search continues while Patrice continues
to bemoan the ridiculous increase in house prices.
|  Patrice thinks about art. |
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John expands the scope of his bizarre activities: John has been busy expanding the
scope of his bizarre activities from geographical, human interests, technological points of view. Lets talk about the geography first.
John traveled for the first time to South America, (Santiago Chile) to attend a very interesting conference (described later). While he was there,
in addtion to hearing a piano/Cosmos duet (really!), he managed to get in a 3 mile run. This means that John has run on 5 (North
America, South America, Australia, Europe, and Asia) of the 7 contients leaving only Antartica, and Africa. John was so proud of
this he made a rare facebook post which resulted in several of his well meaning friends suggesting which continent to tackle next.
He also traveled for the first time to Portugal for a wonderful MNE conference and some wonderful Portugese culture and wine.
Inspired by the Cosmic Music that he heard in Chile, John also took a brief trip to space (not really) and had a vision of Andromeda
and reproduced it on the painting robot that he built. On the left is a picture of the completed galaxy. Below is a video of the painting
robot making stars one at a time. Push the arrow to start the Video.
OK the Video takes forever to download, but for those of you with patience, it will be fun to watch.
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On the human interest side, John will try to take a little credit (all of the credit really belongs to Rahul Saini) for moving NanoRetina
(a biomedical device company Zyvex Labs is working with) to the brink of human trials for the artificial retina we have been working on for
almost 9 years, which means that with a little luck we will in the first part of 2018 start to heal the blind. It does not get much cooler than that.
In a less dramatic way John continues to try to improve the human condition by encouraging young immpresionable minds into careers in engineering.
He is doing this by posing as High Tech Company Executive, Nanofabricator (telling small lies), Girl Scout, and Adjunct Professor. John is also
making a gift to mankind by restricitng his saxophone playing to small audiences comprised principally of friends and neighbors. John after sitting on it for almost a decade, has decided to try to convince other nanofabricators that the path to the glorious future of nanotechnology is a DIGITAL approach where the binary process is the making and breaking of chemical bonds and processing errors are corrected with error detection and correction schemes borrowed from digital information technology. Really, I am not kidding.
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The Relativity Report: Surviving (and leaving the planet) in Houston Houston Hurricane Harvey Horrifics: For those of you who missed the news, as much as FOUR FEET and FOUR INCHES of rain fell on Houston and surrounding areas over the several days of misery that Hurricane Harvey dumped on Houston. The various Randall related domiciles had mixed luck, John's sister Cindy and brother Mike both came within inches of having flooded houses, both stayed dry. John's niece Shelly and her in-laws (the Averys) were much less lucky. Shelly got 2 feet of water in her house and the Averys got 5 feet of water in their house. The Randall's Beach house, which has led a charmed life surviving many hurricanes since the 1970's more or less dodged another bullet. It had significant roof damage but has once again survived. Patrice and John were intending to go down to the beach house the week of Harvey. The Stepchinskis' faired better. Patrice's brother Nigel, having been the victim of one house flood, had the good sense to move to higher ground and his new house was high and dry. Patrice's brother Patrick also rode out the storm near Clear Lake with no serious consequences. John's Mother Vee passed away in the spring shortly after her 95th birthday, in as dignified and peaceful way as we could possibly have hoped for. You can read a eulogy of her by clicking MADRE The Randall Roundup: The Randalls continue to remain productive. Shelly (John's sister(Cindy)'s daughter) gave birth to beautiful baby girl. Now Shelly and her husband Matt Avery, have one of each. John likes the symmetry. Now they won't be denied the anxiety of a first date from either perspective. Shelly's sister Kelsie (not to be confused with Kelsie Randall) is Cindy's (John's sister) other daughter and her (Kelsie's) daughter Rilynn are also in Houston doing well. Cindy and Skip are still traveling to Gymnastics meets selling sequened outfits and on-demand T-shirts to young gymnasts all over the state. Cindy's knee was bothering her so she opted for a new Stem-Cell therapy which requires extracting fat cells from the patient's abdomen and collecting Stem-cells to inject in the knee. The problem is that Cindy, still lean and mean, did not have enough fat in her abdomen so they had to collect more fat from elsewhere. Cindy is proud of this. Brother Michael and wonderful wife Margaret are still bicycling fanatics. Margaret still teaches at University of St. Thomas, where Mike and Patrice were once contemporary students. Mike and Margaret are scheduled to spend Christmas with John and Patrice in Dallas. Mike's daughter Kalli is still living in Brainerd Minnesota, and is working hard as a hair stylist (in two locations) and working as a veterinary technician. But the big news is that she is engaged to the handsome lad Dave Badeaux. Mike's son Cody, wife Kelsie, and daughter Parker are done with El Paso and are headed to Alaska! Cody is in the Army and is a Sargent now but mainly gets to yell at satellites instead of privates. The Stepchinski Saga: Patrice’s brothers and families are mainly still afloat in Houston. Patrick, Patrice’s older brother is still very busy working as a mechanical engineer. Patrick and wife Erica are now empty nesters. Leanne is now a Scientist (Geology and Hydrogeology) at Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio (we believe she is still active as BatGirl!). She is looking at graduate programs in various universities around the nation. Alan will graduate from UT Austin becoming a Biomedical Engineer in May 2018 and already has accepted a job with Epic in Wisconsin. Patrice’s younger (but not smaller) brother Nigel and wife Rhonda are now both retired, but have kept busy with their grandchild Annabelle (Caitlin's child) and at the same time are trying not to be identified as grandparents (at least Nigel is still trying to be Uncle Nigel). Their daughter Caitlin is in nursing school and Caitlin's husband Tyler is staying very busy with job and family. Nigel and Rhonda's son Kyle is off in AggieLand and we suspect that he will eventually graduate into the real world.
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The Randalls wish you all a Happy and Prosperous 2018!