Will it be willingly or unwilling for you…?!

It is finished. He is risen!

Christ arose!

He is our salvation, hope, and peace!!!

Just a cool looking gun handle at the range

You know you’re doing it right…

 …if your Jeep drops mud while sitting in the garage. :)

It’s so nice to have the right gearing again…

My Jeep can hold highway speeds nicely now.  It's no longer a struggle.  If you're running bigger tires, you need bigger gears to match!

The Power of the Cross!

We had a very nice Good Friday service last night.  We sang one of my favorite songs.  This picture set the somber mood for remembering the death of our savior Jesus on the cross.  Praise the Lord for tomorrow to come!

I’m back baby!

 Shake down run complete last weekend! I enjoyed some time over at Haspin Acres in Indiana.  You can’t get too far from help there, so it’s a good place to test things.  It evolved into a full on off-road thrashing once the shakedown went so well. I can’t believe the stuff I climbed. The pictures posted today are the easy obstacles I hit.  This weekend, I’m headed to SE Ohio with a couple club members to hit the unmaintained “roads”.  Using the word road for these is really a misnomer.  They are hardly recognizable as passible by anything other than serious off-road equipment in most cases.  Should be fun.  Will be a good test of my repairs…. 

It does seem to be a good balance of power, torque, traction and robustness.  Love the lockers, they’re like cheating… I can spin all four wheels on decently solid dirt and not break anything, all while crawling right up over the obstacle at hand.  We see how it holds up.  I know I need to give my springs, steering, control arms and shocks some attention, but hopefully that can wait until later in the year.

Coming down the hard side of “Nope HIll”

The first time we went to this park, Julie saw the decent on the easy side from the passenger seat and said, "Nope!" I agreed, so we turned around.  So, we've called it Nope Hill ever since.  Nowadays, we go up and down the easy and hard side without any trouble at all.

Nice parking spot…

 Notice my new handle is directly over top of the rear tire! Quite an angle.  It made for an interesting climb back in.  It was more of a pull-up exercise than anything else, hahahaha.

These handles are awesome!

Super stout, super easy to install (two bolts each), only ~$35 each, and it makes climbing up into my Jeep super easy.  They even look good and give me a place to hang stuff.

He died for OUR sins!

Julie getting ready for one of her runs, taking out the garbage!

 Thin as a dime…!  Julie was cold.  One of the instructors noticed and said something like, “Well yeah, you’re thin as a dime!”

We took two whole squads to Buckeye Blast.

We filled up a whole table.  It was pretty chilly first thing in the morning, but turned into a really nice day for the afternoon.  

The view from our hotel parking lot in Portsmouth

The lights on the bridge were almost in the UV spectrum and looked cool against all the trees that were in bloom.  We checked in in prep for out competition the next day.  

THIS is a good way to spend an evening after shooting!

Severl of the range folks met up at our friend's place for some ballistic therapy.  Pam brought some awesome steaks and seasoned them up.  I got to cook them for everybody and they were GOOOOOOOD!  It was fun to sit around laughing, telling stories, and just relaxing.  

We also hit Burger King for lunch…

I figured I better have at least one more Whopper before they disappear for good.  Too many BK's going out of business.  I grabbed a photo to remember them by.  It isn't quite focused right, but figured I better keep it just in case!

Andy and I enjoyed an orange cream Frosty this past weekend!

Wendy's was running a special flavor.  They were GOOD!

Sometimes, the wand picks the wizard…

They handed these out at our company meeting.  I'm on the way home and thought I better get a picture.  It also started snowing pretty heavily as the day neared an end while I was passing through the Lake Erie region…

Some of the team showing off the shirts Pam made!

Train to win!  That has a nice ring to it.

https://sim-trainer.com/

Banana Now and Laters carefully stacked…

I like the subtle tweaks Pam made to the range logo

Andy’s first official, on-the-job isometric layout :)

More AI humor…

From left to right counter clockwise.

A kick-butt Cognex application engineer, what the superhero CEO of of high tech company should look like, and depicting the epic battle for sales domination of our rival colleagues in Europe. Fun from our Sales VP at our annual kick-off meetings last week.

AI generated “kick butt Cognex sales engineer”

This is how the VP of sales stared the meeting off.  Fun place!

I just thought the hotel and flag made a cool pic

Our CEO giving his view of the last year and the coming one.

All the VPs were wearing their wizard capes and hats, hahaha.

Cool mood lighting on the way into the room for our annual meeting…

The Harry Potter theme continues.

Cognex puts in a lot of effort to make the annual meeting themes special.  

Where dinner was served after the meeting!

One thing for sure, we don't take ourselves too seriously at Cognex!

Site of our annual all employee meeting!

Only cognex could come up with THIS banquet center as the location for their Hogwarts themed annual report and gathering.  It was a fun afternoon and evening.  

President’s awards!

One of the agenda items from this past week was our CEO visiting each department and handing out loads of cash for the annual president's awards.  It's fun that they recognize special achievement this way.  It's impressive to see them rolling it into the room.  Obviously, there isn't really cash in there, but they do hand out some nice awards.  

Heading into work one morning this past week. :)

I guess the Jeeps are following me around.  One parked right next to me.

The same but different

 This wallpaper from my hotel this past week looks like it is just a repeating pattern, but then you closely and realize there are lots of odd little differences in some of the pictures.  Zoom in and see how many you find. ;)

Numbers!

The hotel decor was as quirky as we are…

Cool Eddie the Yeti hat!

Part of what was in our SWAG bag.  

A nice greeting when I check into my hotel room

I headed out to our headquarters near Boston this week

We were having several different meetings.  It was nice to get to participate in them in person!

Cat in a wheel…

I was dropping my Jeep off for its recheck after my break-in period.  The shop owner's kitten is quite the little character!  Here she's peeking in and out of one of his rims.

My first image generated by AI…

I thought I would play with artificial intelligence and image generation a bit.  My prompt: "give me an image of offroading, a dark green jeep TJ wrangler".  It did a decent job. ;)

Beautiful view on the way from working on my mom’s tax returns

I love how the rays looked and showed up well in the pic!

Andy worried us with how he treats Percy…

Cognex takes a fun approach to annual reports.

These are the cover pages over the last decade or two.

Zoe falling asleep waiting for permission to get in my lap…

How do the spammers know I have a special place in my heart for Tupperware…?

It did make me fondly remember all the Tupperware products my mom used over the years.  It's crazy how well it holds up.  She still uses lots of it today from back when we're tiny kids.  I especially remember the green cookie containers (upper left), the lunch boxes (red lower center), and the various toys like the shake sphere (next to the lunch box).  The good ole days…

Pepper being pretty this past weekend.

I guess I wore Zoe out with all her hard “work” this weekend…? ;)

It takes a lot of energy to lay in the yard and watch what I'm doing!

Just like I left it last fall…

Covered in mud, hahaha. Started right up for the spring and put in a good day's work running around our places getting things.  It makes picking up sticks nice and easy!

Julie made “cheezits” out of cheese

Toasty, nicely seasoned, and lots of golden brown and delicious!  It was a nice snack while working on the mowers. :)

You’ve know you’ve arrived when you have a need for something like THIS… hahaha.

I had to special order a wrench big enough for the spindle nuts on the two mowers.  Not even Farm & fleet carried anything bigger than 1 1/4". 

I missed my flip top mower deck!

I let the dealership talk me into including a built in jack with the deal when I bought this mower.  But it hasn't ever worked right.  So, this past weekend I disconnected it and am back to enjoying the manual version of being able to access underneath for deck and belt mainentance.  Simple and easy. :)