Dear Dave,
I was elected to be a Director at large for the California Institute of the Arts Alumni Association Board of Directors in December. The Board has assigned me to help plan the 40th Anniversary Reunion for the Founding of CalArts. I am also doing a little reunion within the reunion for my class which will have its 35th Anniversary as being the Inaugural class for the Disney Character Animation Program at Calarts which I attended briefly but was too grief stricken with the loss of my little brother Gerard the year before to stay. I was guest lecturing for the art of animation class at UC Berkeley last year in the computer science department with people from Pixar which is nearby in Emeryville, CA. The last class was the presentation of the student’s works. I shared guest lecturer duties with Dr. Alvy Ray who was one of the early co-founders of Pixar. They canceled the art of animation class this semester due to budget cuts so helping at Calarts seems like what I was supposed to be doing this year. The Reunion date is John Lennon’s birthday. Just a coincidence but it has given us a sense of purpose for an art school. We might commemorate him in some way. He was an artist too you know.
The Reunion planning has been a lot of fun so far. It will be a lot of work later. I was co-director of Refocus one year. I was thinking of having a mini film festival for all the graduates to show their work. We had four nominated for academy awards this March. Two received awards one for directing “Up” and one for editing “The Hurt Locker.” My two classmates that were nominated were shut out. Oh well. Maybe next year.
My youngest son Thomas made it to the State Science Olympiad competition which will be held next Saturday at Valencia High School in Placentia, California. They have a north and south competition with around 26 schools competing at each. Out of each competition there is only one winner who then goes on to the national Science Olympiad in Illinois. They have 23 events and Thomas’s Cerro Villa Middle School Science Olympiad team only has 12 or 13 student participants so each has to do two or three events as most of the events are two man teams. It is kind of neat. They have a website with all kinds of good advise and you get to see what other students are doing all over the country. Makes you feel like you are not alone!
Thomas and his team has me helping with the bridge building event. He won with a 30 gram bridge at the regional competition held at Santa Ana College three weeks ago. He also thought he broke his pinky finger horsing around but the xrays said no break, just a lot of bruising. He jammed it hitting a stair railing running to get an ice cream cone during one of the intermissions. I was proctoring Orinthology and wasn’t with him. His team’s bridge was just good enough to squeak out 6th place. And the team squeaked out 5th place to make it to State. I was at a Board meeting at Calarts that evening so I didn’t see the award ceremony but I texted back and forth and Mrs. Jennifer Wong the teacher was elated. They managed to pull off a squeaker!!!
So we have been working three days a week and next week it will be four days a week every afternoon to get ready, with the Easter recess. Thomas picked up two more events, Orinthology and a Junk Yard Challenge I think, if I have the name right. He gets to use Peterson’s Field Guide for birds and he has to fill a box of 60x40x40 centimeters with junk and then assemble it and have it set off four mouse traps in 60 seconds. I am corn-fused as to how they score the junk yard challenge event. They have one golf ball that is supposed to trigger other stuff to set off the mouse traps, kind of like a Rube Goldberg contraption if you all remember Mr. Rube Goldberg and his newpaper strip. My kids don’t!
Jeffrey will be 20 April 18. He is technically a senior at Berkeley this year with 2 years of AP credit. He was able to transfer into Bioengineering and has been working his rear end off with that. Robby my 18 year old is at UC San Diego and he is technically a junior with 2 years of AP credit also. He is enrolled in economics. David my 24 year old is at UC Irvine in Digital Media. He is close to home and I have him working on projects. He helped me with a clean room for Christie Digital which makes the Digital projectors that are in the movie theaters. They are building a large facility in China now and are from Canada.
I had a robot that I wanted a friend at Pixar to write the control software for, that I have been slow to get patented. Actually it is one and four spinoff robots of varying sizes. It is an assistant for construction workers. One is an oversize printer that prints the whole floor plan full size on each floor in about two hours. You can only do it once when the building doesn’t have walls up so it may not be that practical, but it could be used for large billboards and art events on a large scale. The other three use the same platform mechanisms for propulsion, wheels, batteries, and add hydraulics to lift small medium or large sized items from ten to fifteen to thirty feet in the air. I think these will have more use. They translate instructions in a CAD drawing to do the construction work. So if they are fitted with a screw driver they screw drywall in. If they have a nail gun, they nail 2×4’s according to the instructions in the construction drawing. Each robot uses a global positioning device to get a 0,0,0 coordinate for the entire building and just run around nailing a screwing screws to their little heart’s content! There is a sensor so they don’t accidentally nail or screw into a person!!! Ow!!! I sadly have a few time wasters ongoing at present that are eating up my time and have kept me from getting more done with this. Sorry.
My sister in law Patty Peterson, went mountain climbing recently in Venezuala or Argentina, I can’t remember which, when they had the earthquake in Chile. My nephew John Leonard and his wife are with the Peace Corp in Tahiti. They had a typhoon recently. My mom Micky or Mildred Peterson is still ticking away. She will be 80 on August 14. My dad Willard, passed away nineteen years ago on the Wednesday after Palm Sunday so we had a little commemoration for him. He was 61 when he died and would have been 80 now. Take care of your tickers!!!!! He was waiting for a heart transplant in Arizona, but couldn’t hold on.
My brother Joe developed an App for the Ipod. It is some kind of a joke App giving advise to Nerds on what to do in a Nerdy fashion. Has he made his first billion yet. Ah, don’t think so. My brother Brad is a pastor now at St. Agnes Parish in Phoenix. I think I already told you that. It is the Parish he grew up in after my family moved to Phoenix in 1974. My sister Kerry won a scholarship at one of the colleges in Phoenix and is attending graduate school to work on mural painting. My brother Brian is a sound designer for the Arizona Theater Company in Tuscon and Phoenix. He works on plays for his day job and plays on work at night recording albums for local bands. He had a hit tune that made it for a while on the radio in Mexico a while back.
My uncle Dean and Aunt Judie come out from Johnston to stay in Phoenix for the winter. He likes golfing. He was a quarterback at Iowa State in the 50’s. He has a ton of patents. I have to go see him about what I am up to. Joe and I and my dad used to help him build his inventions when I was a little shaver.
I have been trying to put together a family tree for my sons. On the Swedish side of things, Joe and my aunt Caroline put together something that goes back to 1611. I guess they found a cemetary in Sweden with a lot of old relatives there. On the Welsh side I had a great aunt that put together a family tree for the Davis family back to 1740. I am just trying to get the current family stats together. I have 34 cousins and they all have a ton of kids that I have been remiss in keeping up with.
We need a website!!! Got any suggestions Dave? I told the Calarts Board to have a reunion website. That was a big hit. Oh, it is the 75th Anniversary of the founding of UCLA and it is my graduate class’s 25th Anniversary this year at the UCLA Anderson School. They have their reunion a week after the Calarts reunion. I am reading the Princeton Reunion Guidebook that I found on the Internet for advise. God Bless the Internet!!!
All for now.
Yours truly,
Jim Peterson