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.