Monthly Archives: July 2013

Soccer Year One

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It’s been an eventful week for us here in San José. It started out with Joe moving into his own room—the subject of the previous post—and he has adjusted more quickly than we hoped: as far as we know, there haven’t been any surreptitious midnight trips between rooms, and each morning, both kids have been right where we left them.

Julia did get to spend one night in Joe’s bed, with permission, while Joe camped out in the compartment below. At this point, both kids have chosen passwords that the other must recite in order to gain entrance into their rooms, but both passwords are variations on “Order 66” or “Execute order 66”, so their value as a security measure is somewhat dubious.

On Wednesday, we trekked down to Santa Cruz for an afternoon at the beach with Liz Kinsella, Jeremy Gottlieb and their respective spouses and children. We hadn’t seen Liz for at least a couple years, and we hadn’t met up with Jeremy and Kate since they moved out to California about four years ago, so it was a treat to get together with them and catch up. Liz was staying with her family, including her parents, at her grandparents’ old vacation home facing the beach, so we were able to walk out the front door and march straight down to the ocean. The kids had a great time playing in the surf, and it was remarkable to see how big they looked compared to the others, who ranged in age from 18 months (John Kinsella) to 6 years (Hal Kinsella). At the end of the day, both wondered aloud when we could go to the beach again, and it’s hard to dispute that they made a good point: as close as we are, it’s a shame we don’t go more often.

Then, on Thursday, I ended my extended summer vacation by accepting a position at vLine, a company launched by one of the founders of my previous employer. vLine is doing some interesting things in the videoconferencing space, which is obviously very different from the file synchronization and cloud storage stuff I’d been working on since 2006, but the biggest change is moving from a situation in which I was the longest tenured and arguably the most knowledgeable employee to one in which I know less about how things work than anyone else on the team. I feel as though I have some serious catching up to do.

The kids took the news pretty well, though Julia is old enough that she was intensely curious about why I left SugarSync. We simply explained that sometimes a job stops being fun, and when that happens, it’s time for a change. We didn’t get into the fact that sometimes you have less choice in the matter than you might like. On the whole, I think the kids were most upset about losing access to the free ice cream at SugarSync. To satisfy their curiosity, we drove up to Palo Alto this evening so they could see my new office, and we capped off the night with a late dinner at the Palo Alto Creamery.

The dinner out—including milkshakes to ease the pain of being barred from the SugarSync kitchen—was well-earned, as we spent the entire afternoon washing my car and assembling the basketball hoop Julie got me for Christmas. The kids did almost all the work on the car while I struggled with putting together the eleven foot tall hoop, and though I wouldn’t say it’s the cleanest it’s ever been, it’s definitely cleaner than it was. It was fascinating to watch them work together on a reasonably big project; they even came close to actual cooperation at a couple points. All we need now is 319 pounds of sand to anchor the base of the basketball hoop and we’ll be done.

All that excitement hasn’t stopped us from putting together another batch of pictures, and we’ve posted an album of photos from Julia’s very first year of soccer. One of the highlights of the season was a trip to a San Jose Earthquakes game with other kids from the league. The teams paraded around the perimeter of the field before the start of the game and then the kids on Julia’s team got to play a bit of soccer on the field itself at halftime. As you’ll see from the pictures, Julia had a little trouble with the pre-game march: she evidently wasn’t too comfortable with the large crowd at the game, even when “large” is defined loosely enough to cover the attendees at a Friday evening Major League Soccer match. She perked up by halftime, though, and you can make her out in most of the somewhat grainy shots I was able to get from the sideline.

Joe’s Room

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Sunday was a pretty momentous day for us here on Harmil Way, even when you take into account our diminished standards. After a year or so of preparation, Joe finally moved into his own room with an actual full-size bed. Naturally, there are pictures.

At Joe’s request, the room is decorated with a space motif, complete with space linens, space bedspread, space lamp, space pillow (which Joe calls “1-2-3, Yay!”) and glow-in-the-dark space wall decals that we haven’t applied yet. The space theme also dictated the color of the walls: blue and orange. According to Joe, this color scheme is required to capture the essence of traveling through space. Both colors ended up being a bit stronger on the walls than they appeared in the store; I take solace in the fact that, with luck, I will not be responsible for painting over them.

Our cleanup efforts were not limited to painting. Julie rented a Rug Doctor and gave the carpet a thorough cleaning: in all the years the room had been used as a spare bedroom and, later, an office, the only member of the family who paid much attention to the carpet was Maggie, and her standards of care were shockingly low. After a few cleansing passes with Nature’s Miracle and the steam cleaner, the carpet is in much better shape. Long term, it’s still in need of replacement, but it’s no longer completely appalling.

We did encounter one significant wrinkle during the rehabilitation of the room, however. As we were washing the walls in preparation for painting them, I went to work scrubbing the baseboards as well, thinking that we’d touch them up. Things were going along swimmingly until my thumb actually went through the wood. It appears that Joe’s room, at least, is infested with termites; further inspection revealed more baseboard damage, as well as an actual termite who poked his head out of the damaged wood. He’s dead now.

Obviously, we will need to do something to address this issue. We’re not yet sure of the scope of the problem, so we don’t know if it can be treated locally in and under Joe’s room, or whether we’ll need to have the whole house tented. Complicating matters is the fact that Julie’s online research on the effects of termite mitigation on pregnant women and fetuses revealed that some studies have found a increase in brain tumors among children who experienced prenatal exposure to the kinds of pesticides used to kill termites. With that in mind, we’ll likely leave things alone for the next couple months and figure out what to do after the baby is born. Hopefully the house isn’t reduced to sawdust by the end of September.

Kindergarten for Julia

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It’s hard to believe now, but back in August of 2009, Julia was just starting kindergarten and Joe had only recently transitioned into preschool from the infant center at Action Day. Here we have a small set of photos covering that general timeframe, including Julia’s first day of school and her fifth birthday.

Note that the unique cake design was one of Julia’s own: she drew it up in crayon on a sheet of paper, and we handed it off to the skilled artists at Aki’s Bakery to implement. If you put a gun to my head now, I couldn’t explain why the design featured a little man in jail. I am quite sure there was a thematic thread connecting the prisoner, house and tiger, but that link has been lost to history.

Mom’s 65th Birthday / Training

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Turning our attention back to the halcyon days of 2009, here’s a set of photos highlighting my mom’s 65th birthday. For the occasion, my dad arranged for the two of them to travel to San José, and for Bill and Leah to fly in from Colorado Springs. For some reason, Joe spent part of the visit dressed up in one of Julia’s old Disney Princess outfits; we’ll need to keep those pictures handy in case he steps out of line as a teenager.

In other exciting news, Julia hit a big milestone yesterday: she went with Julie to Nordstrom to be sized for her very first training bra. Needless to say, she was extremely excited to take this step, and throughout the afternoon, she happily switched among the three bras she brought home. For the first hour or so, she complained a bit that it was uncomfortable, but by the end of the day, she hardly noticed it was there. For obvious reasons, we’re not posting pictures.

On the topic of training, we finally took the training wheels off of Joe’s bike a couple weeks ago. All things considered, he’s doing pretty well. He was up and balancing on his own a few tries after the wheels came off (though he certainly had plenty of practice with them on). We’re still trying to work out the kinks around turning—so far, we’ve only gone around the block counter-clockwise—but he will definitely be speeding around the neighborhood by himself by the end of the summer.

Father’s Day and Julia at Camp Campbell

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Taking a break from ancient history for a bit, we’ve uploaded a new set of pictures from the last few weeks. The photos cover our Father’s Day dinner at Paxti’s in Campbell and Julia’s summer camp week at YMCA Camp Campbell. Somehow, we managed to avoid having any pictures of Joe in this batch.

This was Julia’s second visit to Camp Campbell: last year, she went for a three-day mini-camp, and this year she signed up for a full, week-long session. Like last year, she went with her good friends Phoebe and Zoe Dueltgen and they stayed in the comparatively luxurious Treetop cabins, which have heated floors, windows and lights for each bunk, and attached indoor bathrooms. Apparently the more rustic cabins that Joe and I have stayed in during our Adventure Guides trips are reserved for the older kids, who stand a better chance of fighting off bears as they stumble to the standalone bathroom facilities in the dark.

One of the highlights of the week for Julia was the night she and her cabin-mates slept out under the stars. The cabin counselors, Shelby and Kate, rounded up the girls and their sleeping bags and marched them out into the woods to spend the night outdoors. It’s not exactly clear how far they went—it can’t have been that far, right?—but evidently it was far enough that the counselors couldn’t easily walk Julia back to the cabins when she announced that she needed to use the bathroom. Thus, along with her first time sleeping under the stars, Julia was able to notch another personal first: peeing under the stars.

If you look carefully at the camp pictures, you’ll note that Julia seems to be wearing the same pair of polka-dot pants on at least three different days, while other kids are wearing shorts. It should also be noted that Julia’s week at camp coincided with a long stretch of some of the hottest, least California-like weather we’ve experienced since we moved out here in 1999. As far as we can tell, the counselors seem to have advised the kids that long pants were a good idea in order to avoid tick bites and other mishaps that can occur in a forested setting. Julia seems to have taken this guidance to heart: hence the repeated appearances of the pants over the course of the week. Fortunately, she’s not one to be unduly traumatized by temperature extremes. I only wish that she listened that well to us.

Mixed in with the Father’s Day and camp photos are a few quick and dirty snapshots I took at the lone open Vista Point along Interstate 280 between our house and San Mateo. I used to drive past this spot every day during my 45-mile commute to the office, and has never stopped. As unpleasant as spending hours every day in the car was, one thing the drive had going for it was the gorgeous scenery. In this picture, you can see Upper Crystal Springs Reservoir, which sits directly atop the San Andreas Fault.