Category Archives: Baseball

Birthday Dinner / Home Opener

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It was my birthday this month, and how did I choose to treat myself? At the risk of annoying my family, I got out my film camera to take pictures. And, taking things a step further, I visited eBay—an increasingly hazardous proposition for me of late—and bought a new lens, a Canon EF 70-300mm f/4-5.6 zoom, because I got it into my head that I wanted to take some pictures at one of William’s baseball games.

The first half of the set was taken at my birthday dinner at Palermo, a local Italian restaurant that isn’t especially fancy, but offers some basic dishes prepared well and presented in a pleasant, family-friendly environment; as we were sitting down for dinner, some of William’s friends from school were leaving.

The lighting in the restaurant was a little challenging. I was using a 50mm prime lens that is reasonably fast, but it was still difficult to get sharp pictures from some angles. I left in some fairly fuzzy shots—presumably blurry due to camera shake—just so I would have some of William and Julia. Luckily, the pictures of Joe, who was in town for spring break—more on that in a post to come—turned out a bit more sharp.

The second half of the set was taken at William’s opening home game of the baseball season. This is his first year at the Majors level, so everything is moving a little faster than he’s used to from his experiences the last two years. But he’s working hard to catch up. He managed to walk and score a run in the game, and his team, the Pirates, came away with the win. He’d been thinking about asking for a transfer down to Minors for another year, but after the game, he was settled on staying where he is. I firmly believe the hits will come: when I throw wiffle balls to him in the yard, he crushes them; Julie has been taking him to the batting cages regularly to get used to the speed of the in-game pitches. Where we need to focus is on making plays in the outfield, which he hasn’t had many opportunities to do in game situations.

The light wasn’t a problem at the game, but at 300mm, the new-to-me lens is a little shorter than the 100-400mm lens I use with my digital camera. As a result, I wasn’t able to get as close to the action as I’m accustomed to. I’ll have to get used to it, though, because I have no current plans to buy more lenses for my retro film setup.

On the other hand, I do have a couple more rolls of film, and I have been eyeing a 35mm prime to use for just walking around. It would probably be healthy for me to suspend my eBay account before I do something I regret.

Gallery: Birthday Dinner / Home Opener

League Champions

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A few months back, William wrapped up his first season in the Minors division of the local Little League in thrilling fashion: his team went on a tear at the end of the campaign, winning three out of four games in the end-of-season tournament to claim the championship. We have a giant pile of pictures to commemorate the occasion.

The championship was decided via a double-elimination tournament featuring the four teams in the AA division. William’s team had decent success during the regular season, finishing with a record of 8 wins and 5 losses. However, a number of those wins came against teams from another league: against the teams who would be competing in the tournament, they were a more pedestrian 5-5.

The team started the tournament strong, winning their first two games. This gave them chance to win it all in their third game, as the other team left standing had already suffered a loss. This team, the TinCaps, had been their nemesis all year: they had played them on three separate occasions and lost every time, by an average of more than five runs. This time, the matchup was close throughout; William’s team had a lead in the late innings, only to see it, and the game, slip through their fingers. Some calls didn’t go their way toward the end of the contest, which only added to everyone’s frustration.

This set them up for a do-or-die matchup three days later. The deciding game was a back-and-forth affair, with the TinCaps jumping out to an early lead, only for William’s team to charge ahead in the middle innings. Heading into the bottom of the sixth, however, the TinCaps were leading by a score of 8-7. The tension didn’t last long, though: the first two batters walked and advanced to second and third on wild pitches. They were brought home by a long single to right field, winning the game and the championship in dramatic fashion. The entire team erupted in delirious joy.

A on-field celebration followed, including a presentation of championship rings—William especially loved that part—and the kids ran the bases one last time in jubilation.

A couple weeks later, the team took the stage at the annual St. Christopher parish festival—most of the kids on the team go to school at St. Chris—to be fêted by the crowd.

William was thrilled with the way the season ended, of course, and he had a fantastic year overall. He took great strides in the field, and made several very nifty plays at third base. By the end of the season, he was starting to get more comfortable at the plate, though he was still somewhat apprehensive about getting hit by a pitch. As I write this, we’ve just received an email letting us know that Early Bird registration for next season has opened up, and William can’t wait for it to begin.

Gallery: League Champions

Opening Day 2023

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As we approach the end of the school year and the conclusion of William’s Little League season, it seemed like a good idea to post the pictures from opening day that I’ve been sitting on for the last few weeks.

This is William’s first year in the Minors division of the local Little League. Minors differs from the Farm division he played in for the last couple years in one critical way: in the Minors division, the kids pitch instead of the coaches. This has made batting a little nerve-wracking for William, who just hit his stride staying in the batter’s box and swinging away last year, confident that his coaches weren’t going to hit him.

Because I’m writing this at the tail end of the season, I can say that he has made great strides over the last few months. He’s much more confident catching and throwing the ball, and he’s developed a better grasp of the rules of the game. He’s still a little skittish about getting hit, but he’s got a great swing, and will be fine once he gets comfortable at the plate.

The team opened the season playing on the field normally reserved for the Majors division—that’s why it looks a little more luxurious than you might expect of a baseball field for nine year olds. This was the culmination of a comedy of errors that left the Minors field unplayable for the first half of the season, and left the league without an operational snack shack for the entire year. I don’t know the details of what happened, but from what we’ve heard, certain members of the league staff butted heads with the city parks officials who are responsible for access to the fields and facilities, and things went downhill from there. Hopefully things will be sorted out be next season: I miss being able to enjoy a soft pretzel or burger at the park during weekend games, and the kids really miss getting post-game snacks from the snack shack as a reward for their efforts.

Gallery: Opening Day 2023

Baseball and Band

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We have some very significant life events coming up in the next couple weeks for which I’m sure we’ll have a great many photos. In the meantime, we have this album, which presents a collection of pictures from April and May of 2014.

Eight years is a long time. But, looking back from here in the spring of 2022, the distance between then and now feels even greater. Julia and Joe were still in elementary school; William spent most of his time rolling around on the floor; and the world as a whole felt like a safer and saner place than it does today.

The gallery is interesting because it features Joe at about the same place William is today: in the home stretch of the second grade, and finishing up the season at the Farm level in Little League. It’s fascinating to look at these pictures of Joe and compare them to more recent shots of William: even though there’s a clear family resemblance, different aspects of their personalities shine though clearly.

(That said, it’s worth noting that, due to the vagaries of the school district’s academic calendar, Joe is actually close to a year younger in these photos than William is now).

Joe waits for the pitch

William waits for the pitch

Returning to the present, we’re approaching the end of the school year at alarming speed. Julia is effectively done: she finished up her last class this past Friday, and has nothing left but graduation practices. It’s been a difficult and challenging year for her on many fronts, and there are still challenges to come—including major oral surgery in just a couple weeks. Right now, though, she’s looking back with a sense of bittersweet melancholy that is all too familiar to me.

As I write, Joe is on the way home from a band trip to Southern California. The group left by bus Thursday afternoon and on Friday attended a band competition with other bands from around the state. Then, as a reward, they spent Saturday at Disneyland and are returning home today.

Disneyland probably wouldn’t have been Joe’s first choice of places to visit, as he hasn’t historically been that interested in amusement park rides, but it was a bit of a relief that he was able to make this trip: COVID-19 canceled two other school trips that he had been looking forward to over the last couple years.

Julie chaperoned this trip, so I’ve been left alone with Julia and William for the last few days. Miraculously, all of us have survived so far, and William and I even got COVID vaccine boosters on Saturday: my second and his first.

Speaking of COVID, transmission levels in the Bay Area are disturbingly high at the moment, and, in the second half of this month and the first week or two of the next, we’re looking at some the highest-risk activities we’ve faced during the entire pandemic. There’s the band trip, of course, and this past week, after not having heard anything for a couple months, we received a notification from Booksin that at least three people in William’s classroom have tested positive. Last week, Julia had her senior trip to a campground in the redwoods, which also involved a long bus ride. And, coming up, we have the senior awards banquet, which is an indoor dining event; and graduation itself, which is being held indoors with no restrictions on the number of guests each senior is allowed to bring.

All of us have made it through the pandemic thus far without getting sick; if we get past the next couple weeks without anyone catching it, it will be a minor miracle.

Gallery: Baseball and Band

Solid Food and Grandparents in Spring

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This album takes us all the way back to the spring of 2014, when William was a squawky infant; Joe was a carefree second grader; and Julia, our big kid, was all of nine years old.

The photos here cover a lot of ground, including a visit from Grandma and Grandpa Wong, baseball and basketball games for Joe, an overnight trip to the California Academy of Sciences, Julia oozing personality, and a few work-related pictures to top things off.

William was in a developmental phase in which he was getting used to eating solid food and rolling over, but he wasn’t yet crawling or saying even simple words. Those limitations didn’t stop his effervescent personality from shining through, though: even at this age, he was a joyful kid who loved interacting with other people, and that’s plainly evident in these images.

Joe had a busy March: basketball season was wrapping up, and his lone season of Little League at the Farm level was just getting started. A highlight of the month was an overnight stay at the California Academy of Sciences with his Adventure Guides circle, the Grizzlies. We had the run of the museum for the evening and slept in the darkened aquarium section, with the quiet murmur of the water pumps to lull us to sleep.

The gallery also contains a smattering of work-related photos. In March 2014, Airtime had just completed the acquisition of vLine, the startup I’d joined the previous July. To foster a greater sense of cohesion between the original Airtime team, which was based in New York City, and the vLine folks from California, the company set up an all-hands offsite in Miami. We stayed in a very nice hotel and worked through strategy discussions and team-building activities. I was especially taken by the outdoor bathtub on my patio, though I never got a chance to use it.

There are also a few pictures of our first post-acquisition office, which we rented for a few months while our more permanent home was being renovated. It was basically a long walk-in closet with doors on both ends and no exterior windows. We only spent a few months there but it was a startup experience to remember.

Gallery: Solid Food and Grandparents in Spring

Easter 2014

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This week, we’re going nearly eight years into the past to bring you a set of previously un-published photos from Easter 2014. As old as these images are—and bearing in mind that William was barely six months old at the time—their personalities shine through to an impressive degree. In particular, William’s expression of sheer joy at the experience of playing with empty plastic Easter eggs is a favorite of mine.

In more timely news, Joe and Julia are both preparing for the next school year, even though this one is only halfway complete. Joe has signed up for no fewer than five AP classes in his junior year, while Julia is still waiting to hear back from some of the colleges she applied to. She remains very happy that she was accepted by Santa Clara University, as the idea of staying close to home—and Felix—is strongly appealing to her, but it’s always nice to have choices.

For his part, William is very excited to have a very small speaking role in his school’s production of Peter Pan Jr.. He had actually planned to try out for a bigger part, but he somehow didn’t hear when the second graders were called in to audition. He was upset at the time—tears were shed—but he’s happy to have a role in the play.

Baseball season has started up again, and William was glad to learn that he’s on the same team as a bunch of kids he knows from school. It will be hard to top the experience he had last spring, but he’s having a great time so far. My only gripe is that we had a practice at 9:00 this morning, the first day of a long weekend. William didn’t have any trouble getting up for it, but I certainly did. I may have taken a nap when we got home.

Gallery: Easter 2014

Baseball, Camping, and Spring

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This week, we have a selection of pictures from way back in the spring of 2014, when William was less than a year old, and Joe was just about four months younger than William is now.

The gallery includes a few photos from Joe’s campout at YMCA Camp Jones Gulch, one of a few locations we visited for cabin camping during Joe’s time in Adventure Guides through the Y. When William entered kindergarten, I looked into signing up with him—I thought it would be a hoot if he could join the same circle, the Grizzlies, that Joe had been a part of, but I was a little disappointed to find that the YMCA no longers offers the Adventure Guides program in our area. I’m more than a little curious about what happened to the paraphernalia associated with our group: we had a carved table standard in the shape of a bear; a big drum; and a larger standard we used in parades, festooned with ribbons the kids won in competitions. Hopefully it’s not in a landfill.

The set also features some pictures of Joe’s first (and only) season at the Farm level in Little League. They realigned the age brackets after the season so that he was moved up to Minors the next year, which was a bit of a shame, as he could have used a bit more seasoning in Farm, where coaches pitch, before moving up to a kid-pitch league. Coincidentally, this was the same level at which William played this year. Time flies.

My brother Bill came to visit in this timeframe; it may have been the first time he met his namesake nephew. William made a positive first impression, as is his wont. Even at his six months, his personality shone like a beacon.

Gallery: Baseball, Camping, and Sprng

Extra Summer Fun, 2013 Edition

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While cleaning up the pictures from the last set we posted, I noticed that there were a very few photos from spring and summer 2013 that never made it into an actual album. Some of them seemed like keepers—including Julia’s brave attempt at pitching in a softball game and Joe’s initial, valiant struggles with riding his bike without training wheels—so it seemed a shame to let them languish unseen on our computer. Hence, a very small album: Extra Summer Fun. Most of the shots of Joe’s cycling adventures are in the form of video clips, so they’ll have to wait for another time.

The older kids have wrapped up their first marking period at school and have settled into a reasonable rhythm, a few hiccups notwithstanding. Julia has signed up for, among other things: a role in the fall play, The Somewhat True Tale of Robin Hood; the Girls Who Code club; and a spot on the school’s ComedySportz team, which is a thing I didn’t know existed. She’s also really enjoying her journalism class thus far, particularly the photographic side of the subject. She’s headed to the National High School Journalism Convention in Chicago at the beginning of next month, and she’s predictably very excited about the trip. Unfortunately, Grandma and Grandpa Wong will have migrated down to Texas by the time she gets there, but she’s still happy to be visiting a city with which she has a passing familiarity.

Joe has been less interested in extracurriculars so far, but he does seem to be free of much of the drama that he was wrapped up in last year; sometimes a change of scenery is just what the doctor ordered. Maybe next year we can talk him into being more of a joiner.

We are continuing to move forward at a glacial pace with our plans to remodel the house. It’s par for the course for the Bay Area, but the numbers being thrown around are staggering. Of course, it doesn’t help that, true to form, our timing is terrible. But nevertheless, we persist.

We’ve decided to go ahead and work through the formal planning permit process so that we can squeeze in a few extra square feet of living space beyond what would normally be allowed by the planning department. Hopefully we can get by with a simple administrative review, rather than a public hearing: I’m not particularly excited about the prospect of giving our neighbors, kind as they are, oversight over what we do with the house, especially given that we are only looking for a slight deviation from the normal requirements: about 80 square feet, all in the back of the house, invisible from the street.

We’ve re-engaged our architect and are in active discussions with a few different builders, so we should have more tangible progress soon.

Gallery: Extra Summer Fun

Early 2013

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We don’t have many new photos to present at the moment, though there are a great many pictures from the summer we have yet to process, so we’ve thrown together a small collection of photos from early 2013, way back before William was born, and not too long after we had learned that he was on his way.

In the meantime, the school year is well under way—we’re entering its third week, and William’s first full day is tomorrow—and the summer’s festivities are gradually coming to an end. The Parks for Life program Julie has been doing with the kids wraps up on Friday, and the older kids’ swimming lessons are finished on Thursday.

So far, Julia has adjusted beautifully to the more complicated world of high school. She’s enjoying her classes, has found a nice group of friends, and even has a part in the school play. She’s been great about working on Khan Academy with me to get ahead of the game in math, and she’s had a positive attitude about working with us to adjust to the greater challenges presented by high school coursework.

Joe, likewise, is staying on top of things. He hasn’t had much homework to speak of yet, but Mr. Guevara, his history teacher and one of the principals behind the founding of UPA, said at Back to School night that we should expect that to change shortly. The biggest challenge he’s facing at the moment is the fact that his clarinet isn’t working right, which has him stressed out and Julie making multiple trips to the music store to get things sorted.

Finally, William is loving TK with Ms. Pak. According to Julie, his only complaints have been that he doesn’t get to stay long enough, and that there’s not enough time to play outside during lunch recess. Both of those complaints will be addressed this week, when the class switches from half days to full days, giving him a longer lunch break and about two and a half extra hours at school each day.

He’s also started working with the new Khan Academy Kids app, which has him very excited because he gets to do “homework” like his older siblings. We’ll see how he feels in a few years when we’re making him do math exercises over the summer.

Even with limited time in class, he’s already producing masterpieces like this:

IMG 1696

One can only imagine what he’ll do with another ten hours every week.

Gallery: Early 2013

Early 2012

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We are headed into Girl Scout cookie season here in San José, which means that our weekends are going to be very fully booked very soon. With that in mind, I took some time this afternoon to go through our deep pile of un-reviewed photos to bring you an astonishing collection of pictures from… early 2012.

That’s right: these Obama-era pictures are pre-middle-school, pre-Brexit, and pre-William, going all the way back to kindergarten for Joe and second grade for Julia. Turns out, the older kids were pretty cute back in the day, and they hadn’t even learned to roll their eyes yet.

Speaking of eye-rolling middle schoolers, Joe has more or less settled in at Willow Glen Middle after a few early bumps in the road. Like Julia before him, he’s taking intermediate band with Ms. Lee and getting a kick out of her vibrant and somewhat unorthodox persona as a teacher. He tried out for jazz band over the summer and didn’t make it—officially, he was told that they didn’t need any more clarinetists—and that got him a little down for a while, but he has a springtime trip to Disneyland to look forward to, where the band will be participating in a contest. I don’t think Joe is as excited about it as Julia was—he’s not really into roller coasters and thrill rides—but being on the road for a few days with his friends and classmates should be an interesting life experience for him, as long as he doesn’t get left behind in a rest stop bathroom.

Speaking of Julia, she finally really seems to have a handle on middle school life, just in time for her to start high school next year. She’s even gone so far as to join two clubs: geography club, and a dungeons and dragons group. I thought about digging up some of my old AD&D character sheets from high school and college, but decided against it; I figure that hearing all about how I used to play the same game thirty years ago is the last thing she wants.

William is cruising through his last few months of preschool before he starts transitional kindergarten next year. Unfortunately, he’s taken to copying his older brother and decrying school as “boring”, but I think he secretly loves it. He will also be starting his first year of t-ball in a few weeks, so we’ll be back to spending Saturdays at the park after a year-long break.

Gallery: Early 2012.