Category Archives: Julia

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

Gold Country and Father’s Day

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Our most recent photo gallery, which isn’t actually recent at all, is another throwback to 2014. This set covers a short trip to Gold Country in the Sierra foothills at the beginning of the summer of that year, just after the kids got out of school.

Julia had completed a unit on the gold rush during the school year, so she was excited to share various historical tidbits about the region. And, thanks to the power of marketing, Joe had been asking to go see Mercer Caverns ever since we visited the Mystery Spot: he kept seeing orange Mercer Caverns bumper stickers around town that bore an uncanny resemblance to the ubiquitous yellow Mystery Spot decals, and logically concluded that Mercer Caverns should be next on (or at least high on) our list of sites to see.

We spread the trip out over a couple of days, starting in Murphys, where the big kids panned for gold while William was content to just splash in the water. Sadly, they didn’t find any, and we then headed into Mercer Caverns themselves. I was carrying William on my back in a hiking baby carrier, which made things interesting: his head stuck out several inches above my own, so I had to be conscientious to avoid braining him on a low-hanging stalactite.

All five of us made it out alive and intact, and we headed next to Calaveras Big Trees State Park, which features the first giant sequoias documented by European explorers. This includes the stump of the Discovery Tree, which was once the largest tree in the grove, but was felled just a year after it was first documented. The stump was then used as a dance floor, and bowling alleys were constructed on the fallen trunk, much to the irritation of John Muir; in response, he is said to have written an essay titled And the Vandals Danced upon the Stump.

We snapped a picture of Julia and Joe standing in front of the Pioneer Cabin Tree, which featured a tunnel carved out in the 1880s to allow it to compete as a tourist attaction with similar trees in Yosemite and elsewhere. Sadly, in preparing this post, I learned that this tree fell during a rainstorm in January 2017, less than three years after our visit.

The next day, we visited Moaning Caverns, which was, if anything, a more impressive spectacle than Mercer Caverns. Once again, I had to be mindful of the risk of decapitating William, but for the second day in a row, he survived.

After we finished spelunking, we stopped at Railtown 1897 State Historic Park and Columbia State Historic Park. The former included the train from the movie Back to the Future III, which may have interested me more than the kids. We toured the area by rail, which was a welcome respite after all the walking we’d done over the last few days, did a little more panning for gold—still coming up empty—and enjoyed some cool drinks in a tavern before we packed up and headed home.

The gallery closes with some pictures from the construction of one of my favorite Father’s Day gifts ever. Julie had the kids make signs calling out something I did for them (William had help) and composited them into a small poster that sits on my dresser to this day.

Gallery: Gold Country and Father’s Day

Late Spring 2014—William Eats

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It’s almost Thanksgiving, so it seemed like the perfect time to post some pictures from, well, eight and a half years ago! This album features snapshots from May and June of 2014, when William was not quite one and Julia and Joseph were still in elementary school.

It includes some pictures from a fun YMCA Adventure Guides outing in which the boys launched homemade rockets; there’s even a video of Joe launching and chasing after the rocket he designed. It also features some photos of Julia napping with Felix; little did we know at the time that this would become a pervasive, recurring theme in our lives.

But the majority of the pictures focus on William’s trials and tribulations trying to maneuver finger food—in this case, Gerber Puffs—into his mouth. As you can see from the photos, he’s making a valiant, two-fisted effort at it, but his tiny fingers aren’t fully on board with the plan. He does eventually succeed, but it’s not immediately clear that the caloric value of the puffs he ate made up for the energy he expended consuming them.

The whole series reminds me of a much older sequence of pictures showing Julia attempting the same feat with Cheerios. Unfortunately, that photo album has vanished from the Internet for the time being, but here’s one sample:

Julia eating Cheerios

And here’s the more recent equivalent:

William eating puffs

The gallery closes with some pictures of William at dinner in a stunningly stylish outfit that’s even older than these photos. Somewhere out there, there are surely pictures of me in the same getup, but unfortunately, I don’t have any to share at this time.

Gallery: Late Spring 2014—William Eats

Disneyland and Fall Break

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It’s been a long couple years, during which we haven’t really had an opportunity to travel just for fun. We’ve had some plans, but Covid and other realities kept getting in the way. It was in this context that Julie hit upon a great idea: a short family road trip to Disneyland over William’s fall break. Here we present the photographic evidence of the fact that we made—and survived—the trek, with a few soccer and pre-Halloween photos thrown in for good measure.

William had the entire week off, which gave us a measure of schedule flexibility. On the other hand, Julia and Joe did not, which meant that if we wanted to take them along, we’d have to leave on a Friday evening so they wouldn’t miss school. With that in mind, we opted to depart on the Friday at the beginning of fall break; Julia chose to come with us, as Disneyland is one of her favorite places in the world, while Joe opted to stay home by himself: the same can absolutely not be said for him.

We got out of town at a pretty reasonable hour, which reduced our exposure to traffic: the last time we drove south, in 2020, it took us nearly two hours just to get to Interstate 5, whereas for this trip, it hardly seemed to take any time at all. We stopped for a quick dinner at Harris Ranch and drove more or less straight through to Anaheim, arriving sometime around midnight.

We spent all day Saturday and most of the day Sunday at the park, giving William a chance to ride all the rides he missed out on the last time we visited, when he was just two-and-a-half years old. He especially liked the Spider-Man ride, in which riders electronically shoot webs at bad guys while the ride keeps score. Perhaps unsurprisingly, William was much better at this than me, as was Julie; I consistently had the worst score in the family on this ride.

He even rode the park’s biggest roller coaster, Incredicoaster, and didn’t completely hate it, though he declined to give it a second go. It’s too early to say that he’s a roller coaster addict like his mother and sister, but it’s also too early to rule it out. He especially enjoyed the water rides: we rode Splash Mountain first thing the second day because the lines were short, and we quickly discovered why there wasn’t a wait: it was more than a bit chilly walking around the park in soaking wet jeans in the cool morning air.

Like many kids his age, William is keenly interested in all things Star Wars, and the ride we spent the most time on was the new-ish Smuggler’s Run, in which you get to fly around in the Millennium Falcon as a team, collaboratively dodging obstacles, shooting at enemies, and trying to keep the ship flying with timely repairs. I remember reading about the ride when it first opened a few years ago, and it was hoot to finally see it in person. Who doesn’t want to fly the Millennium Falcon?

Another Star-Wars-adjacent highlight was the opportunity for William to build his own lightsaber, which he had been looking forward to ever since Julie came back from chaperoning a band trip to Disneyland last spring with one she’d built. He undertook the task with great gusto, and the end result was both uniquely his own and exactly what he wanted.

For her part, Julia was in good spirits for most of the trip. She wandered the park on her own most of the time, meeting up with us for meals and a few family rides. She seemed to really value the opportunity to explore independently and make her own choices.

The only real wrinkle came around lunchtime on Sunday when, in a truly unfortunate accident, Julie’s wallet and phone ended up in the water bordering the waiting area for the Pirates of the Caribbean ride. It was clearly visible in the channel through which the ride travels, but just out of reach. We finished our ride—there didn’t seem much point in not going through with it, as we’d waited in line for nearly an hour and the phone didn’t seem to be going anywhere—and Julie explained what had happened to the attendants when we disembarked. After investigating for a few minutes, they told us that they knew exactly where the phone was, but didn’t have any way to reach it while the ride was running. Our only choice was to wait a few hours and hope that the phone and wallet would be dragged by the current into the boarding area, where they would be able to retrieve it. Failing that, they assured us that they would be able to pick it up and mail it to us after the park closed, when they drained the channel for cleaning.

This was bad enough: in this day and age, being without one’s phone seems almost unfathomable. But complicating matters was the fact that Julie had a trip to Nebraska scheduled for the following Friday, just five days later: if they couldn’t get her wallet back to her before then, she’d be forced to travel without her phone and her driver’s license.

In all honesty, I thought the phone was pretty much a goner. Companies like Apple have made great strides in terms of waterproofing in the last few years, but Julie’s phone was more than three years old, and the gaskets and seals that keep water out degrade over time. And we were talking about it spending hours underwater; as we moved on to our next ride, I was already trying to figure out how we could get her a new phone before her trip.

We planned to check back in at Pirates of the Caribbean toward the end of the day, but as we tried to enjoy a few more rides in the meantime, we could tell that the uncertainty was weighing on William. To allay his concerns, we headed back after just a couple hours to see if the phone had turned up.

And, lo and behold, it had, with Julie’s phone and the contents of her wallet soaked but intact. Just as the Disney folks had predicted, it had made its way downstream to the platform where they could snag it. Even better, the phone still worked. It wouldn’t take a charge until the charging port thoroughly dried out, but otherwise it was none the worse for wear.

Julia had classes the next day, so we didn’t stay too much longer, though we did stop at Portillo’s for a quick dinner before we got on the road for the long drive north. Despite the hiccups, it was a delightful trip, and it was a joy to share the experience with William now that he’s old enough to really enjoy it.

It also felt like something of a bookend to our thirty-month pandemic experience. Way back in February 2020, we road tripped down to San Diego and Legoland for the kids’ winter break. I’d heard from from some co-workers who returned to the U.S. from China at the beginning of the year that things were worse than we in the West knew, but we had no idea what was in store. While we’re not completely out of the woods yet—as I write, Covid cases are starting to tick up here in the Bay Area—this year’s trip, though short, was an opportunity to reflect on where we are and everything that we’ve lived through since then.

Gallery: Disneyland and Fall Break

Julia’s Senior Portraits

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Julia’s senior year was intense: she was faced with re-adjusting to in-person classes, applying to colleges, assorted friend-related drama, and the prospect of significant surgery at the end of the year. Amidst all that chaos, there were a few interludes of relative calm. One came toward the end of April, when she sat with a professional photographer to put together a collection of senior portraits.

The very concept of senior portraits as something distinct from garden-variety school pictures was somewhat novel to me, as they weren’t really a thing at my school, as far as I know. This set turned out very well, however, and helped me to understand the appeal.

Gallery: Julia’s Senior Portraits

Mother’s Day 2014

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As we approach the end of summer—Joe and William are both already back in school, and Julia is just a couple weeks away from starting college—we have a quick trip down memory lane: a selection of photos from Mother’s Day, 2014.

We celebrated the holiday with our pre-pandemic tradition of visiting the Santa Cruz beach boardwalk. Some years, it’s been too cold or windy, and we’ve had to delay our visit until later in the year, but the weather was perfect for this trip. By the time we got there, it was warm enough for the kids to frolic on the beach and in the surf, and we even had a visit from a passing dolphin.

When we’d had enough of the sand and water, we headed up to the boardwalk to partake of its gifts, primarily unhealthy food and carnival rides. Pay particular attention to the look of abject terror on Joe’s face on the Rock & Roll ride.

Even William, then less than a year old, had a great time. There were plenty of new and novel sights, sounds, and smells for him to experience, and he has always been happy to spend a day out with the family.

Gallery: Mother’s Day 2014

Julia Graduates from High School

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It seemed almost unthinkable when I started writing these posts years and years ago, but it’s true: Julia graduated from high school last month and will be attending Santa Clara University this fall. It was a long and occasionally bumpy ride—returning from school after distance learning last year was nothing short of traumatic—but through grit, hard work, and determination (and occasional cussedness), she made it through high school and senior year.

The week leading up to graduation was hectic in the extreme. Julia spent every morning at school practicing for graduation—UPA takes the ceremony very seriously. Wednesday evening was the Senior Awards Banquet, in which seniors were recognized for their accomplishments during their UPA. During the dinner, Julia took home five different awards, including:

  • Quill and Scroll, a high school journalism honor society
  • National Honor Society, for academic achievement
  • the Golden State Seal of Merit, for good grades across a broad range of subjects,
  • the State Seal of Biliteracy, for achieving proficiency in a foreign language, and
  • the Six Year Award, for students who spent the full six years at UPA

Each award came with a cord or medal that the graduate could wear with their gown at graduation; you can see Julia’s in the photos.

But for me, the clear highlight of the night was when Julia received one of four PTSO scholarships for an essay she wrote discussing some of the challenges she faced as a student whose brain does’t respond the same way to stimuli as most of her peers. As the sitting PTSO president, Julie recused herself from judging Julia’s essay, but she had the privilege of announcing her win, along with the other four winners. Although I have a few pictures, I wish I had thought to record video of the presentation; Julie was so caught up in the moment, she could scarcely get her words out.

We were very lucky in that Julie’s brother Andrew and my parents were all able to make the trip to San José for the graduation ceremony. In my parents’ case, it was a very near thing: thanks to staffing and COVID issues at the airlines, their original flight was canceled the night before they were scheduled to depart, and they were forced to scramble to reschedule. Fortunately, there were able to find something that arrived only a few hours later than they’d planned, though they did end up flying into San Francisco rather than San José.

The graduation ceremony itself was at the somewhat unfortunate time of 6:00 pm on Friday, but it moved quickly; if anything, it felt slightly shorter than the eighth grade promotion ceremony four years ago. Speeches and musical performances by students, teachers, and administrators were intermixed with video clips of the graduating class announcing what they would be doing after UPA. You can watch Julia’s clip here.

The ceremony was preceded by a performance by the small band ensemble that Joe was a part of, following their earlier appearance at the last band concert of the year a few weeks earlier. It was a fortuitous opportunity for Joe to play a small part in Julia’s big day.

After the ceremony, the full band was scheduled to perform for the graduates and their guests while they mingled outside the auditorium, and perform they did, but they were somewhat upstaged by a very loud Mariachi band that someone had hired to play in the adjacent parking lot. The UPA band seemed to take it mostly in stride, though they were undoubtedly a bit miffed, but I suspect the school administrators were not at all pleased by the disruption.

After Julia finished saying her goodbyes to everyone at school, we headed home and took some pictures in the living room, as Julia was still energized by the experience and happy to be the center of attention.

The rest of the weekend was restful compared to the busy week we had just surived. My dad helped me hook up our gas grill and pizza oven to the gas line on the patio—happily, we did not blow ourselves up—and we even managed to find a few minutes to celebrate Joe’s sixteenth birthday which, in a stroke of cosmic unfairness, happened to fall on Julia’s graduation day.

Continuing the streak of travel-related adversity, my parents’ flight home on Monday was canceled, leaving them to find an alternate route that ended up taking the through Dallas, but still got them back to Elk Grove Village that day. Even Andrew suffered a bit of unfortunate scheduling drama, which resulted in him arriving in Dayton a day later than he’d originally planned.

Once everyone had gone, we were left with just a few short days to recover from all the excitement before the next big milestone: Julia’s long-awaited major oral surgery. But that’s a story for another time.

Gallery: Julia Graduates from High School

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

Julia’s Senior Prom

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Here, we have a small selection of photos from a very big night: Julia’s senior prom. It’s a little hard for me to wrap my head around the idea that Julia is old enough to go to a school dance, let alone prom, but here we are. Earlier this week, I posted this photo of Julia looking glamorous in a fancy dress on Facebook and, truth be told, part of me finds it easier to think of her like that rather than as a young woman getting ready to head off to college.

I didn’t attend my senior prom—as I recall, I chose to spend the evening eating microwave pizza and playing computer games instead, since I didn’t have a date—so I didn’t have much to offer with respect to preparing for the big day. Julia and Julie worked through that process over the last couple months, and I did my best to stay out of the way.

Julia first spotted her dress on a trip to the mall with her friends back in March, and she and Julie returned later so she could try it on, along with a few other candidates. Over the next few weeks, they worked through having the dress altered—it just needed a few minor tweaks—picking out shoes, buying a purse, and finding a necklace to go with the ensemble. The day of the prom, Julia spent the afternoon having her nails, hair, and makeup done so she would look her absolute best that evening.

We have some pictures covering various aspects of the run-up to prom, including some professionally shot senior portraits Julia sat for last week, but we’re saving those for another update: this album focuses on the day of the dance itself.

The evening of prom, Julia invited some of her friends over to our place so they could drive over to the dance together. We picked up a few trays of food so that people could nibble a bit as they got ready for the dance, planning for between three and five friends and their parents. Unfortunately, only two girls (and one dad) could make it in the end, so we ended up with a tremendous surfeit of leftovers. Julie was able to give away some of them through the neighborhood Buy Nothing group; two days later, we’re still working on the rest.

Before they left, Julia and Sierra, one of her friends, added a bit of extra elegance to their outfits with vintage mink stoles belonging to Aunt Julie and Grandma Flack, who generously shipped them to California. The girls then headed off to the dance, with Julie serving as chauffeur. They returned, safe and sound, around midnight, having had a great time.

A brief side note from Joe:

(hi this is joe i am adding this to the document please keep this in)

Gallery: Julia’s Senior Prom