Category Archives: Video

Fifth Grade Promotion / Farewell to Booksin

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On August 17, 2009, Julia started at Booksin Elementary School; that occasion is captured in the photo below. Last week, almost sixteen years later, William closed out our family’s time there with his fifth grade promotion. We’ve recorded the moment, as we are wont to do, with photos and even a few videos.

We had a student at Booksin for fifteen of those sixteen years, missing only the year between Joe’s move to middle school and William’s entry into TK. That makes for fifteen Back to School Nights, fifteen Open Houses, and fifteen Walkathons (more or less: Covid and wildfire smoke played havoc with Walkathon in a couple years). But no more: William is headed to middle school next year.

The week leading up to promotion was hectic. The fifth graders had activities almost every day, and Julie was one of the co-chairs of the promotion committee, so her days were extremely full, as well.

One of the highlights of the week was a class trip to Golfland for around of miniature golf on Tuesday. Wednesday featured a fifth graders vs. teachers kickball game, which was won by the teachers, though William insists foul play was involved. On Thursday, the last full day of class, the students gathered for the fifth grade breakfast, during which they received their yearbooks and sang along with a slideshow of photos (assembled by Julie earlier in the week). To commemorate our final pickup after school on Thursday, Julie treated William to a special surprise: she arrived at his classroom in an inflatable dinosaur costume. He was embarrassed, of course, but notably less so than Joe was when Julie wore the same costume to meet him at the airport when he returned from Belfast. Everyone else loved it: kids were lining up to say hello to the friendly orange dinosaur.

The promotion ceremony was scheduled to start at 9:00 on Friday, but the proceedings were delayed a bit by problems with some of the decorations, much to Julie’s frustration. It didn’t help that it was forecast to be the hottest day of the year so far: a heat advisory was in effect, and the high was supposed to be in the upper 90s. No one wanted to be out there when it started to warm up.

The proceedings finally kicked off around 9:15, and things went smoothly from there. William was wearing his well-loved navy suit, which is definitely too small for him at this point, so he looked dapper as he collected his promotion certificate. At the end of the ceremony, the newly minted middle schoolers stood and faced their families and sang a song they learned at science camp: Shooting Star, which is a long-standing fixture at Camp Campbell. As camp songs go, it packs an emotional punch.

After that, there was nothing left to do but for the kids to return their chairs to the classrooms, sign out for the last time, and say goodbye to their teachers and friends. It took us a while to get away from the school—Will and Julie both had a lot of people to bid adieu—but we eventually escaped and met up a short time later for brunch with some of his friends and their families.

It’s going to feel very strange this fall when the school year comes around and we won’t be preparing to send someone off to Booksin. William will be biking or walking to school with his friends, so our days of daily drop-offs are behind us, at least for now. And we won’t be looking forward to spending a hot day in October watching kids walk endless laps around the school yard. Middle school will be an entirely new adventure—one William is very much excited about—but there’s still a sense of loss from knowing that the Booksin phase of our lives is at an end.

Gallery: Fifth Grade Promotion / Farewell to Booksin

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

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

William is Five

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Much has happened in the month since we last posted, but by far the most significant happening was William’s long-awaited fifth birthday. We haven’t processed the pictures from the grand occasion yet—there are some in the works—but he is already asking when his next birthday will be, so it seems safe to conclude that he had a good time.

As you know if you’ve been following our birthday updates over the years, one of our longstanding traditions has been that the birthday boy or girl gets to have dinner (with the family, of course, though I think the older kids would prefer otherwise) at a restaurant of his or her choosing. In recent years, this ritual has proven to be be a bit costly, as both Julia and Joe have settled on Benihana as their favorite place to celebrate. William, thankfully, took it easy on our schedule and our budget by going a different direction entirely: Burger King. We went on Saturday night instead of his actual birthday to eliminate the time constraints of a school night, and we were joined there by Kai, one of William’s oldest friends, and his family.

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Although William received a great many things for his birthday—as often seems to be the case on these occasions, you don’t realize quite how many gifts you’ve acquired until you actually gather them in one place to wrap them—perhaps the most exciting to me was one we bought secondhand: a bicycle. It’s Avengers-themed, which seems only appropriate given William’s love of superheroes, and it was an immediate hit when we showed it to him on Sunday. With luck, we’ll be able to wean him off the training wheels in the next year or so.

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In other William news, we received his first school picture from Booksin, and although it’s perhaps not the best picture he’s ever taken, it does capture his personality reasonably well. It can be viewed in full size and in context with his preschool portraits on his school pictures page.

Transitional Kindergarten

Finally, though we don’t have a full set of pictures to present today, we do have something slightly different. It happens to be our eighteenth anniversary, and I’ve uploaded the video my Uncle Jack recorded at our wedding and reception. The fortuitous timing is actually a bit of a coincidence: I’ve been working on getting this footage into the computer and online for the last couple months, but the date provided a bit of extra motivation to knock it out this weekend.

The quality of the video isn’t great—it was originally VHS, after all—but I’m glad it worked at all, given the age of the media. The result is probably about as good as you can expect, absent a willingness to spend couple hundred dollars on a time base corrector on top of the money we already spent on a VCR (ours stopped working years ago) and a video capture device. Now that we have a digital copy, we no longer have to worry about the tapes crumbling into dust; and should the impulse ever strike us to relive our interminable first dance, we can do so effortlessly.

Christmas 2015

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A few weeks ago, we returned home from our bi-annual Christmas trip to Nebraska. Although we took a vast number of photos, in typical fashion, we haven’t gone through them yet. For now, all we have to share is a brief video.

At some point since our last holiday trip to Norfolk, it seems that the airlines have restructured their routes so that the relatively convenient flight we used to take, which delivered us from San José to Omaha via Denver, no longer exists. Instead, we were presented with an array of unappealing options with stops in relatively out-of-the-way places like Minneapolis, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas. Ultimately, we chose a route that originated in San Francisco and stopped in Dallas. Total travel time was longer than we were accustomed to, but the kids got a kick out of seeing two new airports.

Actually, saying that they got a kick out of it might be overstating their excitement a bit. Ten minutes into the hourlong drive to SFO (and just after we passed the San José airport), Joe asked whether we were almost there. That said, both of the older kids were suitably impressed by the relatively grand scale of the terminal in San Francisco.

Dallas was fun for everyone because we got to take the train between our arrival and departure terminals, which were spread out over the approximately 1,600 square miles of the airport. William was especially excited to be able to ride the “toot–toot,” and he didn’t seem fazed by the fact that it didn’t particularly resemble Thomas the Tank Engine.

Side note: on the way home, which also took us through Dallas, it was immediately clear which state we were in when, as soon as we deplaned, we were faced with a sign that read, “Shopping is bigger in Texas,” and a information desk staffed by a white–haired gentleman in a cowboy hat.

We arrived in Omaha mid–evening and, after picking up our rented minivan, headed directly to Norfolk. We made it to Julie’s mother’s house at a relatively reasonable hour once the time change was factored in, and got the kids tucked into bed without too much fuss.

The weather was dry and the ground was clear when we arrived, and the kids had plenty of time to scope out the creek and open space behind Grandma’s house, though they were a bit disappointed that there wasn’t any snow. On Christmas Eve, however, snow started to fall, much to everyone’s excitement. The blanket of white stuff did little to deter the older kids from further exploration: Joe discovered a small retention pond a few houses down, which he insisted was a lake, and Julia somehow managed to fall into the creek three times in one day.

After Christmas, Julia and Joe were extremely eager to try their hands at sledding. To kids growing up in California with parents who, unlike the vast majority of their peers, don’t know how to snowboard or ski, the whole concept is highly novel. On what turned out to be an especially blustery afternoon, we took all three kids out to Skyview Park for a few trips down the hill, as seen in the video. We lasted longer than I expected—I thought I was going to lose a finger trying to hold the camera without my gloves—and everyone had fun, including William, who seemed to enjoy the idea of throwing snow at me as much as anything else. Apparently, all the time we spent reading Snow by P.D. Eastman and Roy McKie paid off.

In fact, Joe enjoyed it so much that he begged and pleaded for us to go again the next afternoon. Julia and William demurred, but I took Joe back to the park for a second go. This time, I elected to stay in the warm van while he played in the snow, but he did just fine on his own. True, he was in tears by the time he finished and returned to the car, crying that he was cold and wanted to go home to California, but I don’t think that in any way diminishes the fact that he enjoyed himself right up to the point where he decided he was going to freeze to death.

Christmas itself was the usual blur of presents and food. As usual, the kids were excited about their gifts: Joe received a Lego TARDIS set, which he insisted on starting right away, and Julia dove right into reading The Martian, which originally interested her because she’d heard it contained a lot of swearing—which it does—and plowed right through it in the space of a few days. As a reward, we let both kids see the considerably less profane film version this past weekend.

William was, by and large, happy and excited to be there. He’s definitely starting to get the knack of the present thing, though, and is more than happy to help unwrap others’ gifts as well as his own. He was easygoing and well–behaved more or less the entire trip, including all four flights.

Going in, we knew we were in for a bit of trouble on the way home, as our flight was scheduled to arrive around 10:30 in the evening after a late afternoon departure. It was windy and snowy the morning we left, and the forecast called for significant snow in Omaha, so we left Norfolk before noon, hoping to avoid any delays that might cause us to miss our flight.

As it turns out, we needn’t have worried about the drive, as our flight to Dallas was delayed significantly. It could have been worse, though: we still made it out in time to catch our connection in Dallas, whereas some families were told that their flights had been canceled and that they would not be able to travel for days.

Things went from bad to worse in Dallas, however. The area, including the airport, was still recovering from a series of severe storms that had swept through over the preceding days, and our flight was delayed several times, largely (and frustratingly) without explanation. We finally arrived back in San Francisco after midnight local time, which made it past 2:00 for the kids. Julia and William napped on the plane, but Joe somehow managed to stay awake the entire time, finally passing out on the ten-minute shuttle bus ride to long term parking with Julie to pick up our car.

In the meantime, Julia and I waited with William at the curb outside the baggage claim, watching people flout the no-stopping rules and listening to an irate man who seemed to have lost a bag, forgotten to arrange for ground transportation, or otherwise failed to anticipate one of the many ways a trip can go wrong, repeatedly scream the f-word at the top of his lungs. Having just read The Martian, at least she was prepared.

Video: Christmas 2015.

Christmas 2013

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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.

Summer 2012 – Video

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In the wake of last week’s batch of pictures from the summer, we’ve put together a short video covering the same timeframe.

Julie also reminded me of an anecdote I forgot to mention last time. In the registration paperwork for Julia’s week at Camp Campbell, there was a section in which Julia could express her preferences and tastes on a number of subjects. One question asked what kind of counselor she would like. Characteristically, Julia wrote, “I would like a counselor who is not too strict.”

As the girls were unpacking after our arrival at camp, the counselors chatted amiably with everyone, trying to put the campers and their parents at ease. They asked Julia what she had put down on the form, and when she answered—a bit sheepishly—they knew exactly who she was. Julia can make an impression even before she makes an appearance.

Bats ’N Balls

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It seems that book reports aren’t what they used to be. This month, Julia was tasked with reading and reporting on Pitcher Pressure by Jake Maddox. Instead of standing in front of the class to recite the dry facts about the settings, characters and plot of the book, her assignment was to invent a fictitious brand of breakfast cereal relating to the story and to design its product packaging.

Seeing as the story was set at a baseball game, Julia chose the prosaic name Bats ’N Balls for her cereal. She specifically asked whether she could use an apostrophe and N in place of “in”—she felt this was very important for the brand. We worked together to create an enticing box front and design a fun game for the back: I suggested a word search (figuring that the magic of the electronic personal computer could help us out), but Julia insisted on crafting a fill-in-the blanks puzzle with a secret message that spelled out the title of the book. The sides covered more familiar book report ground, and Julia did a great job on them on her own. You can see the final product in all its glory here.

Of course, merely creating a new product of out whole cloth wasn’t sufficient for a book report; this is the third grade, after all. To finish things up, Julia had to actually sell her creation by putting together a two-minute (give or take) commercial extolling its virtues. We won’t be able to attend her in-class presentation, but we recorded her final run-through at home for the sake of posterity.

Student of the Month, the Sequel

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As you may recall, Julia won the Student of the Month award for her Junior K class just about two years ago. This month, it was Joe’s turn. Julie and I got a letter from the school a few weeks ago letting us know that he had won and asking us to keep it a secret. Then, this past Thursday, we got to surprise him at an all-school assembly, where he got called up on stage with the winners from the other classrooms.

The day was relatively devoid of drama, unlike Julia’s turn in the spotlight. Joe didn’t know what was coming, but he started to catch on when he saw us in the back of the room at the start of the assembly. He was a trooper about getting up on stage, though he did end up chewing on the zipper of his jacket, a habit we haven’t figured out how to break: he can’t actually zip up most of his coats, because the teeth on the zippers are mangled and bent. It’s probably not doing his teeth any good, either.

We have video and pictures from the extravaganza. I apologize for the poor quality of the video. The exposure settings on my camera got confused, so the second half—unfortunately, the part with Joe—is a bit of a mess.