Grandpa Coates

David Coates passed away on January, 24 2009. He is survived by his wife, Ethel Coates, his 5 children Mark, Linda, Adel, Diane, and Margaret, 17 grandchildren, and 6 great-grand children. We know he is still in good hands, still doing great things, with people he loves, in heaven. We will miss him :o) He has left behind a wonderful legacy. :o)


I am so grateful Mark and I were able to visit with him in the summer. It was really great for Mark to get to be with his grand dad again, and I am grateful for the opportunity to have known him better.

A funeral was held in Reno. Afterward, the family to Lynman Wyoming for the intermnet. On their way to the interment, they stopped in Salt Lake City.

We are glad that Mark was able to be there. Here are some pictures.

The display at the funeral in Reno:








The interment in Lyman:





Grandpa coates served in the Air Force during the Korean War. At the interment, he had a military burial (see the flag above) with a 12 gun salute to commemorate his service during that war.



right to left, Adel Pfeil, Ethel Coats, and Grandma Coates Aunt (name TBA...sorry!)





We love you Grandpa Coates!

Festive Chess and the Attack of the Santa Claws

My mom decided to decorate my dad's chess board. My dad has a bout a maZILLION chess sets around the house. He loves to play chess. This chess board is on the coffee table in the living room. My mom and the goose devised a play to make these thuper adorable santa hats for the chess sets... and then see how long it took for daddy to notice that they were there. SO CUTE!

:o)

They have little bells on the top too!! :-D



And here are the Santa Claws, as modeled by the goose:



Figure 1: At first, the Santa Claws seem perfectly harmless, docilely displayed on the talons of the Goose

Figure 2: With time, the devious nature of the claws weakens the goothies resolve--THE INNER BEAST ESCAPES!! RUN LITTLE PAWNS! RUUUUUUN!! ;-)

thehe! :-D Love you gooth!

Mark and the Grad School Adventure

So! The semester after Christimas was was Mark's first semester in grad school! Yay! Mark was accepted into grad school, and after interviewing with a lot of different professors and looking at a few different programs he could work with, Mark accepted an offer to work at Zucrow Laboratories with Dr. Steve Son. Mark had been in AFROTC, but with having to do research for his RA appointment, there was physically not enough time in the day for him to be in the AF as well as school and church and work. So! We don't know what the future will hold for where we will go work, but it sure will be an adventure figuring it out :o)

So! For grad school Mark gets to work with "Energetic Materials"...which is just an impressive way to say explosives :o) he he he :o)

He works on several projects for Dr. Son, one of which involves introducing nano-particles into liquid rocket fuel. Pretty cool. The other project is a rocket called "ALICE" for Aluminum-ICE (I think coming up with clever acronyms is a prerequisite for research; it must be on the GRE somewhere). They take little itty bitty pieces of aluminum dust and mix it with water and freeze it...then they burn it!!

That is Marks favorite part :o)

I must say it is pretty intense when they run a test. I was able to go to a few of them. You have to wear ear plugs, and guys are dressed up in fire proof suits and face masks to load the fuel grain into the test tube. Then they are like running the checks, and everything is going so fast and anticipation is building, and then they start the count, and then SCHWOOM!! the ground starts vibrating and there is this really really big bright flash!

and like a second later, it is all over!!

It is really intense. After it is done, people are laughing and talking about how it went, and talking about the pressure and stuff, and purging the chamber. A couple of times Mark had to dash out behind the building with a bucket of water to put out the weeds that they caught on fire (Whoopse!) :o)

The labs that they have out there are really awesome and he loves working there. The facilities are really unique so he gets the chance to work on a lot of really different sorts of projects and get lots of experiences handling and mixing rocket fuel and stuff. And, I am really glad they have buildings with blast walls (REALLY thick reinforced walls) so that if bad things happen behind the walls...they stay safe :o) Staying safe is DEFINITELY the goal :o)

We will see about getting permission to post a video of marks work for you guys to see! Stay tuned!!

SNOW!

Yes, it is September...but I am trying to post in chronological order, so I am still, oh, around January in blog-land. Unfortunately, I found this video from mid December that I didn't post then...whoopse! So, I am posting it now. :o) Hopefully by the end of this weekend I can be roughly caught up so I wont be living in the past anymore. Its kinnda hard to not get confused :o)

We had a light winter as far as the snow was concerned. I wanted to build a SNOW CASTLE!! :-D We never did get enough :o( My view is, if it is going to be SO COLD...we may as well get to play in it ;o)

Hopefully we will get a chance this year!




Enjoy the snow!

FAMILY PHOTOS!!

When we were visiting my parents, we took family photos. Nani and the Remy were there, we were just missing the Teek and the Alex and alex and chio. We took JUMPING PICTURES!! They were so fun. Here is a sideshow of all the good times!



I love jumping photos since people in them always look so happy. And taking them is a blast. The thing about the jumping photo is the timing. ESPECIALLY when you have a group of people ;o). My particular favorites are the pictures in weird squatting positions.

Then we took couple pictures! :-D Cute Cute!

Me and Mark:



Nani and Remy



and Mom and Dad and the Goose!



SO MUCH FUN!!

Here are the Favs of the afternoon:









hehe! daddy is so cute! :o)


Fun times! :-D

LOVE YOU GUYS!! Next time, we will have to have the Teeks fam there too! :-D

The Invitations...da da daaaaahn...

So! My friend Amanda Baer was having a baby, and I was making invitations for her baby shower. My mommy said that we could make the invitations when we were visiting them in NM. Weeeelll, we didn't get to doing them, oh, until the night before we left. WHOOPSIES!!

We were up...SO LATE...doing card stuff. Again, I was filled with guilt (AND SUPER GRATITUDE) for the slave labor of my mom, the goose, and the handsome mark. Of coarse, I had to choose a card that had moving parts and little bows and was really complicated (I learned my lesson! )

Goose and Mark had a competition going for cutting up the little baby carriages. Mark was winning...and then Goose discovered that Mark wasn't cutting out the details, he was only cutting out the outline, so she declared herself the winner :o) We watched Monk while we were doing it :o) Thanks so much! It was really fun :o)

Here is the final product:



I brought back all the pieces we made and assembled a lot of the cards back in IN, and I decided that I wanted to make these cutesie little bears to go in them. I printed them off in the Purdue computer lab and colored them in class (I paid attention too)
I cut them out and made the cards in the NUCL louge, it was pretty fun. They have a paper cutter there...it worked out great :o)

New Year's Hair

The Nani is THUPER talented and she did me and the goosies hair for New Years! Mark and me and the mom and the daddy and the goosie went to the youths New Years dance ; goose went to scout out cute boys, and the mom and the daddy and me and mark went to chaperon! It was really fun. (Nani and the Remy had a previous engagment, so we missed them!) Here is the pictures of our hair:



Nani is THO talented! :-D