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.
Gallery: Christmas 2013
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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. ↩
Christmas 2013
We took a ton of pictures during our trip to Nebraska for the holidays—more than 400 of them—so it’s taking some time to sort through them all, especially since I’m anal-retentive about making sure each and every photograph is tagged with the location it was taken and the names of the people it contains. Come to think of it, this compulsion might be why we’re still posting pictures from 2009.
With that in mind, we’re breaking with tradition and posting our Christmas video before the associated pictures. As usual, you can view the web version of the movie using the link above, or you can download the much larger high-definition version.
William at Home
We’ve uploaded another set of pictures of covering William’s first month or so at home. We were very fortunate to have Grandma Flack and Grandma and Grandpa Wong with us during these intense first few weeks: they were a tremendous help as we re-adjusted to having a newborn around, and they made it much easier for Julia and Joseph to get used to having a younger sibling siphoning most of our attention away from them.
So far, the older kids are coping pretty well with William’s presence. Julia loves helping out with him, and has been very gracious about sharing her room during late-night diaper changes and the occasional afternoon nap. Joe seems to be a bit more affected, but is holding up well overall. He’s regressed a bit in some ways—for example, we’ve caught him sucking his thumb a few times, a habit he had finally kicked over the summer—and he’s sometimes just a bit awkward and overzealous in his interactions with the baby, but there aren’t any signs of real jealousy.
So far, William has been a pretty well-behaved baby. He gets a bit cranky in the afternoon and evening, largely because he’s tired: for whatever reason, he has a hard time taking a nap except in the morning, right after I take Julia and Joe to school, so by the time evening rolls around, he’s usually pretty unhappy. On the plus side, once he gets to sleep at night, he’s usually good for two or three solid hours at a time, and he doesn’t require a great deal of convincing to go back to bed after nursing. He particularly likes to rest in his swing; in fact, last night he slept there for six hours straight from 7:30 until 2:30 in the morning. Unfortunately, Julie and I weren’t able to go to bed because we didn’t want to leave him alone in the kitchen, but hopefully it was a sign of more restful nights to come.
Gallery: William at Home
School Pictures 2013
End of (Summer) Days
Summer has wound down here in San José. The kids are back in school—classes started on August 14—and soccer should be starting up any day now. To celebrate, we’ve posted a set of photos covering the last few weeks of summer and the first day of school.
In the set, you’ll find some pictures of the kids at a couple different summer reading program events run by the San José Public Library. They decided to mix things up this year by requiring kids to participate in on-site activities to win prizes. As a result, the end of July was a flurry of visits to different library branches to fulfill the program requirements. One was more or less a giant Lego party which, naturally, thrilled Joe immensely; another was a performance by Dan Chan Magic Man. Julia managed to get herself chosen as a volunteer during the latter and, somewhat predictably, was a ham on onstage. She’s a fascinating bundle of contradictions: one day she’s spontaneously clowning around for an audience of strangers, and the next she’s refusing to give her well-rehearsed book report in front of a classroom full of friends.
As usual, we learned of the kids’ classroom assignments a couple days before the start of the school year. Julia is in Mrs. Whittell’s class, which is in the newer wing of the school, near the library. She switches over to Mrs. Compton-Kolda’s class next door for science and non-fiction reading; I’m not sure what the actual rationale for this approach is, but if nothing else, it’s an early preview of middle school for the kids. She’s quite excited to have a Trapper Keeper this year; I was surprised to learn that they still made them.
Joe gets two teachers this year: Mrs. Olson is teaching his class Monday through Thursday, and Mrs. Vandeneynde is covering Fridays. Luckily for both teachers, the school has wisely elected to continue avoiding putting Joe and his buddy Mason in the same classroom. That said, he still has a number of friends from kindergarten and first grade in his class this year.
As of this writing, we’re just about a month out from Julie’s expected due date, and we’re continuing to make slow progress on preparing for the baby’s arrival. Julie’s office gave her a new car seat and stroller, and we’re working on unloading the old stroller on Craigslist to make room in our packed garage. My jobs this weekend are to install the car seat in the van and see if I can figure out how to reattach the drop side on Joe’s old crib. We’re also planning to rearrange the furniture in Julia’s room a bit to accommodate the crib and a changing table, but Julia hasn’t signed off on that plan yet. I’m sure that will be an interesting conversation.
It’s a good thing that we still have a month to get ready, because Julie has been feeling pretty under the weather lately. She picked up a cold from Joe a couple of weeks ago—he has an unfortunate habit of drinking out of her water glass throughout the day—and the nagging cough that resulted developed into bronchitis. That’s being treated with an inhaler and antibiotics, but late Tuesday night, just after taking the antibiotics for the first time, she started feeling a sharp pain in her side and back. Fearing that she or the baby might be having an adverse reaction to the medication, she dashed off to the emergency room. The verdict: kidney stones.
She came home with a prescription for some nice, strong painkillers that made it dangerous for her to drive, so I took off from work early on Wednesday to pick up the kids from school. Then, on Friday, she suffered another attack, and this time the pain medication didn’t help. A trip to the urgent care clinic followed, where she was given an injection that again left her unable to drive. I left work early once more to pick her up from the doctor’s office—I actually had to sign discharge papers promising not to let her operate heavy equipment—and Tammy Riggioni, the mother of one of Joe’s friends, picked them up at school.
Fortunately, this was Julie’s last full week at work, so we’re hopeful she’ll have an opportunity to rest and recuperate in the coming weeks.
On a more positive note, Joe has suddenly decided to take giving up his longstanding thumb-sucking habit more seriously. If he makes it through the weekend, it’ll have been a week, and Julie and I are now faced with the frightening prospect of making good on the various incentives we offered to get him to stop. In fact, he’s so confident that he’s going to make it that he’s begun trying to renegotiate the reward for making it through a month: whereas before he wanted Minecraft, he now decided that he really wants New Super Marios Bros. 2 (the “New” is apparently part of the name) and a Nintendo 3DS to play it on. Suffice it to say that discussions are ongoing.
Soccer Year One
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.
Kindergarten for Julia
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
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
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.
Lonesome Baker Men 2009
Continuing our jaunt through the distant past, we’ve posted a new set of photos. These pictures, which are almost exactly four years old today, date back to our 2009 trip to Texas to visit friends from Rice at Dave and Rebecca Hyatt’s house in The Woodlands. Joe and Erica Shidle flew in from Chicago with Laura and Kay; Mason and Kathy Hart trekked across town from their place in Houston with their son Dylan; and Paul Williams drove in from Belton, Texas with Zane and Diana—sadly, his wife Joanna couldn’t make it. That, or she wisely chose to stay far away from the potentially explosive gathering.
Four years out, a couple things about the trip stand out in my memory. First, Houston was every bit as hot as I remembered it, and perhaps even more so. Second, Dave and Rebecca have a great pool, complete with a robot that cleans it automatically overnight, and they were fantastic about opening their home to fourteen people—seven adults and seven children—most of whom stayed overnight for several days. Somewhat miraculously, the structure was still largely intact when we departed.
As you can see from the photos, we took the opportunity to visit our old stomping grounds at Rice while we were in town. The campus has grown dramatically since we all graduated, but all the same, there were many aspects that seemed nearly untouched by the intervening years. Sadly, Baker College, where we all (except Rebecca) lived was undergoing remodeling and expansion at the time, so we weren’t able to go inside. I’m told that the facade is nearly unrecognizable since the completion of construction in 2010.
Prior to this trip, the last time everyone got together was in 2004, so if we want to stick to an every-five-years cadence, we’ll have to plan something for next summer. Assuming we pull it off, you can look for the pictures sometime in 2017. Of course, at least three more kids will have been added to the mix by that time, so the choice of venue may be a significant sticking point.
In case you were wondering, the titles of this post and the associated album are a reference to an unfortunate photo and caption that appeared in the Rice Thresher during my senior year. For the record, three of the five guys pictured had girlfriends at the time of publication.
Occasional Dispatches from San Jose 
