Monthly Archives: December 2022

Back to School, Julia’s Birthday, and Taylor Swift

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After what seems like an eternity, we are finally caught up with pictures through 2014, leaving us to bring you a new batch of pictures from… 2015! Our next post will, if all goes according to plan, cover more recent ground, but this one focuses on one busy month—August 2015—that included the start of a new school year, Julia’s birthday, and Taylor Swift’s visit to the Bay Area.

The new school year was a big one, as it was Julia’s first (and only) year at Willow Glen Middle School. She was nervous enough that she had a friend from fifth grade over that morning so they could experience the whole first-day-of-school process together. Later, Julia would walk to school with friends from the neighborhood, but on this particular day, she wanted all the support she could get.

Mid-month, Julie and Julia took the light rail to Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara to see Taylor Swift in concert as part of her 1989 World Tour. Julia had been looking forward to the show for months, and her excitement was captured in photos and selfies taken en route to the concert, while Joe, William, and I stayed at home.

The show absolutely lived up to Julia’s expectations and remains a touchpoint for her memories of middle school to this day. In fact, her big present at Christmas this year was a set of tickets to the Santa Clara leg of Swift’s 2023 tour.

At the end of the month, Grandma Flack flew out to help us celebrate Julia’s eleventh birthday. We had dinner at Benihana and opened presents at home. Julia graciously allowed William to sit with her as she blew out the candles on her cake. During her visit, Grandma Flack stayed in Julia’s room, while Julia camped out on a mattress in Joe’s bedroom. Looking back on it now, it’s a little hard to fathom that arrangement working out, but everyone was much more amenable to that sort of thing at the time.

Mixed in with what is otherwise a fairly Julia-centric set, there’s a cute picture of William with his collection of rubber duckies. I wanted to call this out because he enthusiastically enjoys his duckies even now. Miss Susan, one of our long-time neighbors, regularly hands out ducks at Halloween, which puts her house right at the top of our list to visit when we go trick-or-treating.

Gallery: Back to School, Julia’s Birthday, and Taylor Swift

Summer 2014

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We’re all at home for the week between Christmas and New Year’s—this wasn’t originally the plan, but the reason we’re all here is a story for another day—so it seemed like as good a time as any to post another batch of pictures, this one from the second half of the summer of 2014.

A lot was happening that summer. As he approached his first birthday, William was becoming a very interactive member of the family, and though he wasn’t talking yet, he was quite happy to listen to himself squawk and squeal. You can hear examples of his delighted exclamations in some of the video clips contained in the gallery. A number of these arose from Joe’s experimentation in the world of documentary filmmaking; his work is featured prominently here.

Julia had a busy couple months, as well. She and some other girls from school did a week-long “friends camp”, in which they spent one day at each of the girls’ homes. This let the girls’ parents exchange four days of relative freedom for one day of utter madness. Later, she spent a week at Camp Campbell, as was her custom until she increased the length of her stay to two weeks in later years.

After we dropped Julia off at camp, we stopped at the park surrounding the Felton Covered Bridge on our way home to break up the long drive. The bridge itself was once the main entry point to Felton and is the tallest covered bridge in the United States. A few years later, in 2020, the entire community of Felton was evacuated due to the CZU Lightning Complex fires. The bridge and park were not damaged, but nearly 1,500 buildings were destroyed, and both Camp Campbell and Roaring Camp Railroads, which we’ve visited a number of times, were in real danger.

Gallery: Summer 2014