Happy 2015! To celebrate the new year, we’re posting our very last retro–photo update from 2010. This collection covers Halloween and Thanksgiving, plus a bit extra in the form of a few snapshots from Julia’s first grade Christmas party. There are still some videos to work on, but this should be it for pictures, I hope.
That halloween, we took the kids to Uesugi Farms in Morgan Hill to pick out a pumpkin, which was miles beyond the level of effort we normally put in. There were hayrides, ponies, carousels, multiple trains, and thousands and thousands of pumpkins. It’s a little hard to tell from the photos, but there had been a tremendous amount of rain in the days leading up to our visit, so much of the farm, including the parking lot, was basically mud. This made it a little challenging to get everyone back into the van without wrecking the upholstery, but we managed to make it without completely overwhelming my compulsive tendencies (there may have been sulking involved, however).
The kids were both Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles that year. For reasons I don’t recall, they developed a brief fascination with them around that time without ever having seen any of the films or television shows or having read the original source material. They did have a picture book or two that featured the characters, but that’s just about the extent of their exposure, apart from the influence of friends. Although I didn’t realize it at the time, this probably near the beginning of the end of our ability to exert complete control over what both of them were exposed to.
Moving right along, here’s another set of pictures, this one from fall 2010. Though a bit smaller than the last batch, this set covers broad ground.
For Joe, it includes his first day of real school in Junior K and his first soccer team, which some might argue wasn’t actually a team, per se, because they didn’t play games against other teams, but the kids had tons of fun regardless.
It also covers Julia’s second season of soccer, which reunited her with Molly Gosling, whom she knew literally from infancy, since Julie and Molly’s mother were in the same Las Madres group; the first grade field trip to Pizza My Heart, which seems to have had dubious educational value, but would probably rank at the top of her list of favorite field trips to date; and her trip to a Sharks game with her teacher, Mrs. Peters, which she won in a drawing at the Booksin Walkathon. She still remembers that trip as well, and when it comes up, she rarely fails to remind me that the Sharks beat the Blackhawks that evening.
Note that the pictures in this set come from a variety of sources: some were taken with my old phone; some are scans of prints; and some were taken by other parents and sent out in compressed form via email. As a result, the quality is a bit uneven.
I realize that our readership (by which I mean: grandparents) is probably vastly more interested in photos and a blow–by–blow (in some cases, literally) description of what transpired over the holidays here in San José this year, but there’s an really good reason they’re not ready: they’re not over yet. In fact, I have the week between Christmas and New Year’s more or less off this year, so there should be plenty of opportunities to shoot more pictures and video and, if previous years’ patterns hold, get them posted sometime in August.
In the meantime, we’ve had a giant pile of pictures from spring and summer 2010 sitting around, un–sorted, un–reviewed, and un–published for the last four years. This is my attempt to rectify that oversight. Note that while this may seem like a ton of photos to drop on you all at once, rest assured that these constitute less than half of the original set: believe it or not, this is a carefully curated selection.
There was a lot going on that year, including Joe’s fourth birthday and his first ride on the Junior K bus, but in going through the pictures, one particular memory jumped out at me: the ceremonial walk around the field at at San José Giants game for the kids in the Fearless Baseball program at Primary Plus. The march itself was unremarkable—just a bunch of kids in baseball uniforms wandering around a minor league ballfield, albeit with some classic Mason–and–Joe horseplay—but, following on the heels of her legendary meltdown at PAL soccer night at the San José Earthquakes, it did feature Julia expressing what can only be described as unbridled terror at being confronted by a large crowd (and probably mascots), even with Julie there to hold her hand. As we face down various manifestations of her forceful personality going into adolescence, it’s helpful to remember that it wasn’t so long ago that she was just a scared little girl who wanted her mommy.
It’s been a busy month or so since our last post. The kids wrapped up their soccer seasons; Julia started doing Girl Scouts again in earnest; William discovered the joys of emptying cabinets and drawers; Joe was accepted into advanced band and then kicked out; and, of course, Halloween came and went. We’ll get to much of that in due course, but first there is the matter of William’s first birthday to attend to.
We’ve uploaded a boatload of pictures covering his birthday celebration, which ended up happening the day after his birthday due to his tendency to fall asleep at 6:30 in the evening. He had a delicious dinner of grown–up food—he’s largely grown out of baby food at this point—topped off by chocolate cake, which he attacked voraciously. He then had a great time opening presents, and his older siblings had an equally great time helping him.
Since he started walking, William has been romping around the house enthusiastically, much to the cats’ dismay. He’s a bit more adventurous than Julia and Joe were, and he likes to climb into and onto things, as you can see in some of the pictures. In fact, as I was writing this, he climbed up onto the Ottoman in our bedroom and promptly pitched over the side, bonking his head on the floor. Hopefully this is a phase that will pass quickly.
You’ll also note that William has decided that the best thing to do with his soft toddler blocks is to stick his arms through them and wear them like bracers. I honestly have no idea where that came from.
For Halloween, we returned to a favorite haunt to pick up our pumpkins: Giordano Farms here in San José. The last couple years, we’d gone to pop–up pumpkin “patches” set up in parking lots, where Julia and Joe could jump around in bounce houses and slide on inflatable slides. This year, for William’s first real Halloween, we decided (or, rather, I insisted, over the older kids’ objections) to do something that felt a little more real, so we went back to the place we used to take Julia and Joe when they were younger; you may remember this as the pumpkin patch with the model volcano / geyser that scared the pants off of Joe back in 2009.
Lingering fears aside, everyone had fun at the pumpkin patch, especially William, who just loves being outside: when we’re in the garage, he’ll climb into the stroller on his own and demand to be taken for a walk. You can clearly read the excitement and joy on his face in the pictures from the pumpkin patch and the afternoon Julie set up the Halloween decorations outside.
As I mentioned earlier, Joe auditioned for and was accepted into advanced band this fall. We were very proud of him, as he was one of only two third graders to make the cut, and he had only started playing the clarinet this summer. He’s worked very hard practicing at home, and really seems to have a measure of talent for it. Unfortunately, however, his temper and difficulties dealing with frustration got in his way once again, this time with real consequences. Last week, as the band was working on Christmas songs in preparation for their upcoming winter concert, Joe had a epic meltdown because he was having trouble keeping up with the tempo: he stalked off to sulk away from the other kids (and cry); he threw his clarinet in frustration; and he hit his sister when she—according to her—went over to make sure he was OK.
This was too much for Mr. Reed, the band director, to take, and he let Julie know via email that he couldn’t deal with that kind of disruption while he was trying to teach the band all–new material in the few weeks remaining before the concert. He let Joe down relatively easy, telling him he could be in “intermediate band,” a construct that doesn‘t really exist, and re–audition after the holidays. We’re sure he can pass the audition, as he’s technically proficient enough to play the songs, but we’re on the fence about whether he’ll be up to it emotionally. The one advantage of trying again in the spring is that there will be a little more time before the next performance, so there might be less pressure to pick up the new songs quickly. We’ll have to see how things go.
It’s been a busy couple weeks here in San José since our last post: the kids did their annual school walkathon; Julia has started doing Girl Scouts in earnest once again; Joe has been practicing his clarinet like crazy in the hope of being promoted to advanced band; both of the older kids and Julie came down with head lice; and I’m trying a new brand of shampoo, because the kind I’ve been using for the last thirty–odd years has been found to cause cancer.
It was Julia’s sixth and final walkathon, and rather than go all-out in an effort to finally hit the 25-mile award level, she decided to take it a little bit easy and enjoy her last time around the track with her friends. Of course, many of her friends were going all-out, but Julia cruised to the 15-mile level and called it a day.
Joe made it all the way to 20 miles (including the 5-mile bonus for playing soccer during the day), albeit with a little extra urging from yours truly. He was ready to stop after about 17 miles—his feet hurt, which was unsurprising considering his gym shoes were falling apart—but he changed back into his soccer cleats and kept going, at least as long as William and I kept him company. He got a snazzy stainless steel water bottle for his trouble; I feel like should have earned some kind of prize for carrying William around for at least half of that distance, but alas, my only reward was a very deep sleep Saturday night.
We’re unsure where the kids picked up lice, but we suspect it may have arrived in our little home on the head of William’s babysitter’s son. Regardless of how the little bugs got here, it was probably our turn: lice have been running rampant through the classrooms at Booksin for at least the last five years. Things have been bad enough that the kids have been urged to bring their own headphones to use in the computer labs. Somehow William and I have avoided the scourge thus far, though dealing with the treatment process (hours and hours of repetitive combing) has been no walk in the park. Julia was especially disappointed, because her infestation resulted in her missing her first-ever day of school.
With head lice hopefully behind us, Julia has joined a new Girl Scout troop and is diving headfirst into earning badges. This weekend, she worked on her basic cooking badge, which involved creating two delicious meals: for brunch this morning, she made chocolate chip pancakes with bacon and apple slices; and for dinner, she made a Nebraskan staple, runzas. Sometime in the next couple weeks, I’m on the hook to help her with the digital photography badge: we are supposed to spend a few hours reading and watching videos about photography online. Given my paucity of knowledge and skill, I’ll probably learn nearly as much as she does.
As alluded to by the title of this update, the kids’ school pictures came in this week, and we’ve updated their albums. Julia’s turned out very nicely, as did Joe’s, with the caveat that he had a pretty nasty case of dry, irritated skin around his nose and mouth on picture day: he had a cold that week, and had spent the previous several days fighting a running nose and licking his lips. In a very rare move for me, I’ve actually retouched his picture a bit, because the original was physically painful to look at.
We’ve also updated William’s vital statistics from his one-year checkup last month. He’s tracking around the 75th percentile for height and the 55th percentile for weight, so he’s a healthy, growing boy. We’re still waiting on a definitive first word, though.
In uploading this year’s portraits, I noticed that we never added last year’s class photos. I’m not sure what happened there, and will do some digging to see if they turn up.
It’s been a busy fall since we returned from our trip to Texas. The kids started school in mid–August—which seems awfully early to me—and Julia had her tenth birthday at the end of the month. As she has pointed out on many an occasion since then, she is no longer a “little girl”: she is in double digits. To celebrate, we have pictures.
Both of the older kids are gradually acclimating to their new classes. Julia seems to have clicked with her teacher, Mrs. Kammann, and has been doing a reasonably good job of getting her work done in class and at home: so far, there have been many fewer battles over homework this year than last year. Of course, some of that may be down to the fact that there seems to be less homework than there was last year, but a positive step is a positive step.
Joe got off to a bit of a rocky start the first couple weeks of school with his teacher, Mr. Alderette, and threw several of what we unaffectionately call baby fits; the name comes from one of his preschool teachers, which should give you a pretty good idea of what kind of behavior we’re talking about. One such incident was bad enough that the school actually called me at work to let me know what had happened: Joe got frustrated that he hadn’t finished a particular project when Mr. Alderette told the class that time was up, and Joe flatly refused to comply. Eventually, the office was called, and the assistant principal had to take Joe out of the classroom to give him a chance to calm down.
That was about a month ago, though, and Joe seems to have adjusted his behavior in the weeks since. We’ve been checking in with jim on a daily basis to see how he’s been doing, and it seems as though things are slowly getting better. He has always had a bit of a hard time dealing with situations in which things go poorly, whether it’s getting problems wrong in class or striking out in baseball, and we’re focused on helping him learn how to deal with those kinds of truly inconsequential failures.
In the meantime, Joe has been working extremely hard to come up to speed on the clarinet. We’re just a few weeks into his first year of band, and he has already progressed to the point that Julie has been encouraging him to try out for the advanced band as soon as tryouts begin. He derives a tremendous amount of pleasure from learning how to play the notes he needs to get through each of the songs, and he keeps pushing ahead every time he practices. He has made a tremendous amount of progress in a very short time, and it’s been delightful to see him working so doggedly to achieve his goals.
Finally, at some point in the last week—it’s hard to say exactly when, because the older kids have been at home for fall break, and things have been chaotic around the house—William took his first, halting steps on his own. He first did it for me yesterday, at Joe’s soccer game, and I managed to capture a few seconds on video, which I’ll edit and upload later. He still has a ways to go before we can really say that he’s walking, but this is an exciting development nonetheless. He remains pretty quick on all fours, so that somewhat reduces his incentive to get up and walk, but I’m sure he will be very happy to be able to chase his big brother and sister around more effectively.
We’ve fallen off the wagon a bit in terms of posting pictures—a busy work schedule combined with the usual plethora of kids’ activities has gotten in the way—but we have a decent-sized batch queued up and nearly ready to go.
Over the last fifteen years or so, we seem to have accidentally fallen into a tradition in which we get together with some of our old college friends every five years: in 2004, we went to Paul and Joanna Williams’s house near Killeen, Texas, and in 2009 we all gathered at Dave and Rebecca Hyatt’s house in The Woodlands. Considering that no fewer than ten children have been born to the various families since the 2004 get-together, invading someone’s home no longer seemed like a viable option for the 2014 shindig. Instead, we decided to rent a house on a beach somewhere, so that no family’s permanent residence was at risk of being utterly destroyed. Naturally, we have pictures.
The place we decided on was called Luck o’ the Irish—charmingly, all of these beach houses seem to have cute names—in Surfside Beach, Texas. We stayed there a full week and had a fantastic time. The house was big enough to accommodate all twenty-one of us comfortably, and there were plenty of spaces for the kids to do their own things while the adults played board games and caught up.
The beach itself was wonderful—really far nicer than we had any reason to expect a beach on the Gulf of Mexico to be given our past experiences. Apparently there was a bumper crop of seaweed in Galveston this year that left some area beaches a foul, smelly mess, but by the time of our visit, the seaweed in Surfside had pretty much dried up, leaving a broad, coarse band between the house and the ocean that was little more than a mild nuisance.
We did see a couple jellyfish drifting around one day, and there was a fierce current that would carry you halfway to Houston if you weren’t diligent, but the water was warm and the surf was vigorous enough to be fun for the kids without being overtly threatening. The kids spent hours and hours swimming in the water and playing in the sand and by extension, the parents did as well: after the first couple days, I had the worst sunburn I can remember having, and I don’t burn easily. I spent the rest of the trip bundled in a swim shirt whenever I went out to the water, with sunscreen slathered on even under the shirt.
When we weren’t down at the beach, the kids were completely content to play on iPads and show off games they’d discovered to one another—if I weren’t already bullish on tablets as a platform before this trip, I certainly would be now. Surprisingly, there wasn’t much in the way of inter-child or cross-family drama. The biggest obstacle we faced was trying to stop William from climbing up the stairs to the upper level of the house. Well, that and the fact that the tap water was more or less non-potable, so we kept making quick trips into town to buy bottled water. It wasn’t until the second-to-last day that we noticed the page in the back of the house’s informational binder that warned that Surfside’s water exceeded the federal government’s maximum safe levels of arsenic. According to the warning, it’s perfectly safe for short exposures, but if we’re all dead in six months, you know what happened.
Before we went to Surfside, we stopped off at my parents’ new-ish house in Georgetown, near Austin, which Julia and Joe were very excited to see for the first time. Having spent much of the summer obsessively watching HGTV, they couldn’t stop talking about the various features of the house, though they did come to the conclusion that it was a little on the small side for us (an easy answer to arrive at, considering that it only has two bedrooms). Nevertheless, they had a great time camping out in Grandma and Grandpa’s spare room and counting golf carts on the roads within the gated community of Sun City.
We were flying out of Austin on our way home, but we had a few hours to kill between the time we had to be out of the house in Surfside and our departure. We decided to take a brief detour into Houston to visit Rice and see some of our old haunts. Thanks to a bit of lucky timing, I even managed to snap a quick picture of Joe outside the room that Joe Shidle and I shared during our senior year, twenty years ago.
They’ve done quite a bit of work on campus over the last couple decades, and naturally, as people who have a strong emotional affinity for the way things were at the time we were there, not all of it is to our liking. Most of that can likely be chalked up to ordinary, everyday antipathy toward change, but I’m genuinely saddened by some elements of the reconfiguration of Baker College, where we and most of our close friends lived. In particular, the formerly gorgeous and understated facade of the building, including the main entrance to the commons, is effectively gone, blocked from view from the inner loop by a massive new residential wing. I’m sure it seems completely natural to students who only know the Baker of today—and it’s definitely a plus if the new wing makes it unnecessary (or at least less necessary) to kick some students off campus for a year the way Joe and I were—but it’s not the way Baker looks in my dreams.
We made it back home just in time to start getting ready for school and all that entails. The kids still talk about the beach house, though, and as I was going through the photos to accompany this post, Julia mentioned that seeing them makes her feel a little bit sad, because she misses the house and her friends. By that measure, at least, the trip seems to have been a success.
We’ve been back in California for a couple months since our trip to Nebraska, and we’ve finally recovered sufficiently from the unexpected detour to Denver to get another set of photos up on the site.
It’s been a pretty hectic couple months. The kids still had a few days off when we got back to California, so Julie took them down to the Monterey Bay Aquarium for a day while I was stuck at work. Then, the very next weekend, they started on their winter athletic activities: basketball for Joe and swimming for Julia.
Julia has made great strides in the pool, and she finally passed the complete swimming test, so she can get a green wristband and swim unaccompanied. The hard part for her was convincing herself that she could tread water for a full minute. There wasn’t really any question in my mind whether she could do it, but she had persuaded herself that it was extremely difficult, and was reluctant to try as a result. Now that she’s passed, she is happy as a clam swimming on her own after her lessons while we watch Joe’s basketball games. Being able to swim outside in February is a definite advantage to living in California.
The big news of the last couple months is that William has started eating solid food. Julie noticed that he was keeping a watchful eye on us at mealtimes, so we introduced rice cereal mixed with breast milk the third week of January; he did well enough with that relatively tame starter food that he got to try squash a couple weeks later. In addition to cereal and squash, he’s had avocado, bananas, and carrots so far. Julie has been making her own baby food from fresh fruits and vegetables and freezing portions in ice cube trays, and William has been gobbling up everything we’ve tried. He’ll be ready for popcorn and pizza before we know it.
Rounding out the early part of the year, Julia turned in her first science fair project, an effort to learn which detergents did the best job cleaning oil from various animal hides, and Joe finally got to hang his glow-in-the-dark outer space decorations in his bedroom. He actually had the planets all wrong at first, but we finally convinced him to put them into a rough semblance of order, though the distances between the planets’ orbits still aren’t quite right. His ceiling is quite a sight to behold at bedtime; I actually bought a remote shutter cord for my camera to capture a few photos with really long exposures.
Coming soon: a video or two, William and his bouncer, a visit from my parents, and perhaps a flashback to 2010.
The fact that we have a new-ish baby at home doesn’t change the reality that we are still way behind on the task of going through and posting pictures of our other kids, despite the fact that they are no long producing dirty diapers and drool at the extremely high levels achieved by their younger sibling. It is with this in mind that I am very excited to present a collection of photos from Thanksgiving 2009.
Looking back at these pictures, I am struck by the bountiful feast Julia’s kindergarten class had to celebrate the holiday. There have been years we have had a less impressive spread at home. If you look carefully at the classroom pictures, you’ll note that Julia’s name is next to the green apple; that was a very good day, indeed.
Also, thanks to the kindliness of our former next door neighbor Tom (or, as the kids called him, Mr. Tom), there’s a rare photo of the four of us that actually turned out pretty well.
The set is rounded out by one of our most popular features: a collection of outtakes from our attempt to get a family portrait for Christmas. Things were going so well that Joe opted out of participating in the shoot for an extended period of time. Fortunately, Julia’s Bitty Baby doll was on hand to take his place.
As I hinted in our last update, having a working camera at Christmas allowed us more latitude in terms of taking pictures than we were accustomed to. The end result was hundreds of pictures—most of them not especially good: having a camera is hardly the same thing as knowing how to use one, and our new camera is a fair bit more complicated than the one we had before—to sort through, evaluate, and try to make presentable. Finally, nearly a month later, we’ve uploaded our Christmas album.
The season kicked off with the winter band concert at Booksin. After a year or so of learning the trumpet, things are starting to click for Julia. It helps that we belatedly realized that she has a secret weapon in the form of her mother: not many of her bandmates are lucky enough to have someone who played the same instrument for years and years at home. Rather than having Julia head off to her room to practice on her own, which was never very effective, we’ve taken to having her work one-on-one with Julie for fifteen minutes in the evening, so she’s getting expert, real-time feedback on how she’s doing. She’s showing real improvement, and she seems to be enjoying playing more as a result. She did a great job at the concert, even if she’s a little tough to make out in the photos, hidden behind her friend Zoe’s music stand and a giant saxophonist. The shots in which she’s front and center were taken after the show, when the band director let each group of kids come to the front of the stage for a photo opportunity—he certainly knows his audience.
For the second consecutive year, Joe’s YMCA Adventure Guides circle did an evening trip to Downtown Ice. Joe won’t be competing in short track any time soon, but he had a good time. Unlike last year, we actually met up with the group: I worked from home that afternoon rather than try to fight traffic down from Palo Alto during rush hour. My biggest takeaway by far was that ice skating is really, really painful; my feet are cramping up just thinking about it.
We spent the holidays at Grandma Flack’s house in Nebraska, and we were lucky to be able to see all of Julie’s brothers on Christmas day in Norfolk and later, at David’s place in Malcolm. Julia and Joe eagerly anticipated seeing their cousins, and they didn’t disappoint; Greg was especially patient with them.
One of the other things the kids were looking forward to—perhaps more than anything else—was Grandma Flack’s electric typewriter. They spent some time banging out notes on it the last time we spent Christmas in Nebraska (two years ago for those of you keeping track at home), and it was still fresh in their minds this time around. This year, in addition to assembling personalized missives for each of the adults in the house, they wrote notes for Santa, which we left out on Christmas Eve along with the traditional milk and cookies. Naturally, Santa took a few moments out from his busy night to leave them handwritten replies.
In contrast to the typewriter, one of the kids’ other thrills this year was watching the Doctor Who Christmas special, streamed over the Internet to my iPad, since Grandma Flack’s cable company doesn’t offer BBC America. Interestingly, they didn’t make much of a distinction between these two technologies, separated as they are by a more than a half-century of progress. To them, they were just ordinary things that worked and could more or less be taken for granted; if anything, the fact that the typewriter produced tangible, solid artifices they could hold in their hands made it more interesting than the purely virtual reality of the iPad.1
Of course, It was William’s very first Christmas, though he seemed a bit nonplussed by all the festivities. He spent a significant portion of our stay napping with Aunt Julie, who worked assiduously to find positions for him that might relieve gas pains. Grandma Flack was able to turn up a crib, swing, bouncy seat, and a playmat that was nearly identical to the one we have here in San José, so William felt right at home, as evidenced by the fact, he felt comfortable enough to maintain his policy of not sleeping for more than two hours straight.
He even did reasonably well on the flights to and from Nebraska. We didn’t have a seat for him, so he spent the entirety of his time on the plane on our laps, but he didn’t fuss much at all in the grand scheme of things. We flew Southwest, which doesn’t have assigned seats, so he actually served as an effective good-luck charm on the way out to Nebraska: I held him on my lap throughout the boarding process, and no one elected to sit next to me.
Flying Southwest had one other benefit: unlike most other airlines, they still don’t charge for your first checked bag, and we were able to take advantage of that policy to help us get the kids’ gifts (of which there were many: every year, we vow not to let things get too out of hand, and every year, we fail) back to California without having to spend too much on shipping. This year, we got away with just sending one large box via FedEx; everything else came on the plane with us.
While we were in Nebraska, Julia also started work on her very first science fair project. She did an experiment judging the effectiveness of different types of detergent in removing oil from feathers, chamois, and rabbit fur (being in the Midwest, rather than California, ensured that we wouldn’t have any problem acquiring whatever animal products we needed to conduct the experiments). Julia didn’t have to present her work or be judged this time around, but she enjoyed putting together her poster—which was covered in stickers, naturally—and testing her hypothesis. Going down to Champaign for the state science fair in the seventh grade is one of my favorite childhood memories, so I’m looking forward to even more exciting projects down the road.
Seating aside, the actual travel portion of the trip was more eventful than usual this year. I had forgotten how much fun it is to get through airport security with a stroller and an infant. Luckily, Julia and Joseph are both old enough to get through the process more or less independently, but I pity the poor, unfortunate souls who ended up behind us in the security line, especially now that the slower, hold-your-hands-in-the-air naked-picture machines have largely replaced metal detectors in the airports we travel through.
Making things even more exciting was the fact that Mother Nature was being extremely uncooperative while we were trying to get from place to place. While we were actually in Nebraska, the weather was fairly pleasant: a couple of times, it even got up into the 50s and 60s, warm enough for the kids to go outside and play with some of their new toys. But the visit was bookended by some absolutely brutal weather. Our outbound flight was delayed by almost three hours due to precipitation elsewhere in the country, long enough that we had to call ahead to make special arrangements with the rental car company so that we would have a way to get to Norfolk upon our arrival.
On the day we headed back to California, the temperature dropped to around zero, and the wind chill was unspeakably low. Our flight to Denver was delayed by more than four hours, and we missed our connection to San José completely. Fortunately, Julie was able to make last-minute hotel arrangements while we waited, and we spent the night in a cozy little room close to the airport. The kids (other than William, who didn’t seem to have an opinion) thought it was a grand adventure, while I was mostly worried about missing a day of work.
As an aside, that progress could grind to a screeching halt if the big telecommunications companies get their way on net neutrality. I’m probably biased, seeing as I make my living in the tech industry, but the open Internet has done more to drive innovation over the last twenty years than just about any technology, and companies like AT&T and Verizon are trying to kill it out of avarice. We probably shouldn’t let them. ↩
Occasional Dispatches from San Jose 
