Hello Hello! 

I am the (in)famous M you’ve been reading about on occasion.  This is my first guest blog post and in it I get to tell you a bit about the reason we moved to San Antonio.

I was extremely fortunate to accept a position as a Test Engineer with Cooper Tires at their Tire and Vehicle Test Center this past Fall.  The facility is about 50 miles South of our home, so I have to deal with a bit of a commute.  It's totally worth it to live in the city though, as anyone who's followed this blog should be able to deduce.  The fact that I'm commuting to a fantastic job certainly helps too.

I got an opportunity to show Eryn and her Mom and Grandma around when they were here for a visit, so what follows are some of the highlights from that day.

To lead off the tour, here’s my office!  I spend about half my time in here, so I'm slowly making it more and more my own.  You can just barely catch a glimpse of my obviously grown-up collection of model cars in the picture below.

 Welcome to my lair.

Naturally, there’s a lot of tires...

 

We test a wide range of tires on a wide range of vehicles.

We have pretty awesome off-road testing capabilities.

 

30 Degree Hill Climb.  We normally run this wet.  There are 3 different surfaces; brushed concrete, smooth concrete, and embedded rock.

 

Rock Crawl

 

The Rock Garden.  Entered from the left, the driver goes through water before climbing and out.

I know the pictures are what everyone cares about, but I’m sure someone read above and wondered what exactly a Test Engineer does.  Well, that changes from day to day, but my responsibilities generally include calibration, test support, some test driving, event support, and basically making sure our testing runs smoothly.  If an issue pops up, I try to figure out why and fix it as quickly as possible to avoid downtime.  I continuously look for improvements we could make to current test methods while also doing research on new tests to be developed as well.  I have loved every minute of it so far and am extremely fortunate to get to spend my weekdays around cars with a great team of people.

That about covers it for a very basic introduction to my job.  I look forward to providing more updates about cool happenings there in the future.  Look out for another post from me, as I will be occasionally hijacking E's blog when it strikes my fancy.

------FITNESS FRIDAY UPDATE------
E: Ok, so it turns out, not too many people wanted to join me on my Fitness Friday endeavor. I haven't given up and in fact, I am about to ramp it up! Starting in February, M&I will be killing it with 5 days a week workouts that consist of agility, speed & quickness, and weight training gearing up for tryouts and Worlds in London. #fitnessfriday