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
Meet William Wong
The call came in around 3:15 on Thursday, October 19, after I’d settled back into work after a game of basketball over lunch. Actually, it wasn’t a proper call, since the microphone on my phone had died a few weeks earlier, making having actual telephone conversations a bit of a challenge. So instead I got a series of text messages culminating in a definitive directive: it was time to go home, because the baby was coming. Here’s a look at what the exchange looked like:
I was a little surprised to be summoned because on that particular day because it was our actual due date, and both Julia and Joseph had been substantially late—Julia by nine days. But Julie was having regular contractions with increasing frequency, so home I went.
Naturally, then, things seemed to subside while I was en route from Palo Alto. Whereas I was pretty convinced that we were going to have a new baby imminently when I left the office, I was now mentally gearing up for a protracted period of false labor and fruitless late-night visits to the hospital, much as we’d experienced before Joe was born. Since I was home anyway, I took Joe to soccer practice and did my best to calm my nerves in the park while he scrimmaged and Julia socialized with friends.
After soccer, we headed home for dinner—it’s always a treat to eat with everyone else during the week, because my work schedule rarely affords me the opportunity to do so—and as we ate, Julie’s contractions started picking up again. She called the hospital to check in, and based on the information she was able to provide, they recommended we head in. We grabbed our bags, which we’d finally finished packing just a few days earlier, left the dishes and the kids’ bedtime rituals to Julie’s mom, and headed up to El Camino Hospital in Mountain View.
We arrived in the hospital in the early evening, around 7:30 or so. We went through what seemed like a lengthy check-in process and settled into our room in the perpetual twilight of the Labor and Delivery ward. Another couple had arrived at about the same time we did, but overall, the department seemed quiet. Thanks to the monitoring software running on the computer next to Julie’s bed, we could tell that there were only three other patients at the time, and most of them seemed to be further along in the birthing process than we were. I was tickled by the fact that the software seemingly hadn’t been upgraded in the nine-plus years since Julia was born, and it still included the adorable—and completely incongruous—train icon that had no obvious function. Unlike the last two times Julie delivered there, I owned a phone with a camera this time around, so I was able to capture a screen shot of the train for you all to enjoy in the album.
Now that we were in the hospital, Julie’s contractions started to decrease in intensity and regularity once again. Of course. I figured that this meant we’d be sent back home to try again another day, but the doctor noticed that Julie’s blood pressure was running a bit high. High enough, in fact, to cause her concern about pre-eclampsia, so she decided then and there that she would induce labor with Pitocin and keep us there until the baby was born.
Things moved pretty slowly the rest of the night: there was enough downtime that I had an opportunity to hop online right at midnight and place an order for a new iPhone to replace my dilapidated model with the broken microphone. As usual for Julie, her contractions didn’t show up as regularly and dramatically on the monitor as those of the patients in the other rooms. Also, the baby was wiggling around quite a bit, so the external monitors wrapped around Julie’s belly couldn’t get a consistent read on his heart rate. Over the course of the night and into the morning, each of the nurses that came on duty tried to re-position the monitors, but none of them could get things lined up quite right; at one point, we had four staffers in the room trying to find his heartbeat. Eventually, they gave up and inserted an internal monitor so that we could get a consistent signal, where by “inserted” I mean that they screwed an electrical lead into his head.
Once the internal monitor was in place, it quickly became apparent that the baby’s heart rate was a bit inconsistent: it seemed to be dropping fairly dramatically during contractions. As a result, and also because one of the nurses observed what she thought was meconium in some of Julie’s fluids, staffers from the NICU were on call to step in after the baby was born.
Finally, bright and early the next day, Julie started to feel the urge to push. She hit the call button, but when the doctor arrived, the baby was high up in the birth canal, and Julie’s cervix was hardly effaced. Julie gave it another couple tries without success; the baby just didn’t seem ready to come out yet.
By late morning, Julie’s sense of urgency came back with a vengeance. Her nurse checked and announced she could feel the baby’s head, but once again, he had receded back up the birth canal by the time the doctor made it to our room. It seems that he was coming pretty far down with each push, but then popping almost all the way back up whenever Julie relaxed.
The nurse stayed with us for a while to tabs on how Julie was feeling. Finally, she made a decision: we were going to have the baby right then and there. Julie started pushing again, and we were seeing definite progress: William was inching closer to freedom with every contraction. The OB/GYN returned and noted that the baby appeared to be turning while Julie was pushing; she concluded that this twisting, corkscrewing motion was helping him to pop back up in between contractions. Nevertheless, she seemed confident that we were on track.
Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, but probably wasn’t more than a couple dozen or so pushes made in earnest, William was born. At Julie’s request, I wasn’t supposed to look, but I did anyway. My first thought as his head emerged was, “Is he not going to make it?” In the seven years since Joe was born, I’d forgotten what babies look like as they come into the world and how incredibly malleable they are.
Of course, he was fine. The NICU staffers were sent away, and William slowly acclimated to his new surroundings. His color seemed a bit off to me, but the doctor was unconcerned, though she noted that the heart rate issue we were so worried about had been caused by his umbilical cord, which he had cleverly wrapped around his neck. William got to spend some quality time with Julie before one of the nurses took him aside to administer a few vaccinations, take prints of his feet, and give him his first bath. Interestingly, one thing that had changed since the last time we were there was that all of this took place in the delivery room, whereas for Julia and Joe, the kids were whisked off the the nursery while Julie was moved to the maternity ward. The hospital is placing a much greater emphasis on keeping mother and child together nowadays, so William was rarely out of our sight while we were there.
One time they did take him away was when the time came to have him circumcised. After the experience we had with Joe, Julie was certain that this was the right thing to do, and I found it hard to disagree. Even our pediatrician, Dr. Kim, mentioned early on the pregnancy that he assumed we’d have it done when William was born, rather than opting out. The jury still seems to be out regarding the benefits and tradeoffs associated with the procedure—there are a lot of people with extremely strongly held opinions on both sides—and I realize that it’s largely irrational to base our decision for William on the exceptional circumstances Joe faced, but neither of us wanted to go through that again.
The remainder of the hospital stay was largely uneventful. I spent most of my time shuttling back and forth between the hospital and the house helping Grandma Flack get the kids to soccer and other activities. Julia and Joe visited for the first time Saturday morning after soccer, and their excitement and joy could be plainly read on their faces. The one hurdle we had to overcome was one Joe had encountered as well: jaundice.
We were due to check out of the hospital Sunday morning, but William’s bilirubin levels were still a bit high, so he ended up spending more or less the entire day under the bill light, only taking breaks to be fed and changed. The staff was anxious for him to have bowel movements to help clear his system, so they closely monitored his feedings, concerned that Julie’s milk supply might not have been high enough to push things along; at one point, they even asked us to supplement his feedings with formula. Given her experiences nursing the older kids, Julie was completely unconcerned on this front, but she went along with it anyway, figuring the last thing she wanted to do was to appear resistant to accepting medical advice. Once she started pumping and the nurses saw how well she was doing, it became a non-issue anyway.
As the day wore on, were waiting for a positive blood test that would clear us to go home. Finally, in the middle of the afternoon, a tech arrived to take a blood sample to be sent to the lab. For reasons we were never able to determine, she had a very hard time getting the blood from William’s heels, needing several apparently very painful attempts to get a sample. We were very happy to see her go (though William didn’t seem particularly thrilled to go back under the bill light), and then we waited. And waited. Dinner came and went, and we were still waiting. Finally, one of the head nurses came back with bad news: the blood sample had hemolyzed and was unusable; it’s unclear why it took so long to figure this out. A new tech took another sample—getting it right on the first try this time—and ran it down to the lab. And then it was back to waiting.
Finally, around 8:00 that evening, we got the news: William had been cleared to go home. We packed up our things, dressed him in the very same outfit that Joe had worn when he came home, and piled into the minivan for the drive back to San José.
Gallery: Meet William Wong
Honeymoon in Italy
You might have expected us to be ready with an update regarding a certain major event that occurred last week, and we are working on just such a post. But first, I wanted to share a set of much older photos that we’ve never posted online before; in fact, we didn’t have them in a digital format until just last year.
The pictures in question were taken on our honeymoon in Italy way back in the year 2000. We took them with a little APS film camera that we bought more or less specifically with this trip in mind, and until last year, the only copies we had were in a gorgeous album that Julie put together using the prints and a few souvenirs from the trip. We still had the original APS negatives, however, and as photographic technology advanced, it bothered me a bit that we didn’t have backups in a more durable digital form. That unease, coupled with a gradually dawning awareness of the fact that the APS format was disappearing from the planet, finally motivated me to do something last December, before we ran out of options.
We didn’t have the time to scan the prints ourselves, and I was a little concerned that taking that approach wouldn’t yield the level of quality I was hoping for anyway. Instead, I shopped around for a service that could scan the negatives directly and give us high-resolution, good quality JPEG files. Some online research turned up a couple different firms that offer mail order processing: you send them your negatives, and they scan them and post the digital copies online for you to download. These services give you very high-resolution scans at reasonably affordable prices, but they require you to send your precious negatives—by far the best representation you have of your photos—by mail to faraway places like India, and in many cases, they don’t send them back. Seeing as Julie and I aren’t in any position to take a make-up trip to Italy to recreate these photos, that made me a little uncomfortable.
With that in mind, I looked around for a local solution that might give us a bit more peace of mind. It turns out that there’s a photo processing business less than a third of a mile from us, just a five-minute walk from our house, that is very well-reviewed online. It seemed like a perfect solution to our problem, but when I called to ask about the job, the owner informed me that he did not have the equipment required to handle APS negatives—see the comment above about running out of options as the format disappears from the planet. Luckily, he was able to recommend someone else in town who is still set up to handle this kind of work.
The scans we ended up getting are much lower resolution than the online services provide: the lab would have charged us significantly more for high-res scans, as the owner of the shop would have to do them by hand, and he convinced me there wouldn’t be a significant benefit in terms of quality for the uses I had in mind. He was probably right, too, as many of the original photos weren’t that great to begin with. Lots of them were shot using ISO 400 film, even though they were taken outdoors in bright light: we were taking a lot of low-light shots inside churches and museums, so changing film all the time didn’t seem to make sense, and I didn’t fully understand how much more grainy this would make the resulting photos look. He ended up having to process some of the rolls by hand anyway, due to the condition of the film, and he didn’t charge us extra.
In the end, I was moderately happy with the results. Most of the scans look decent, but many of the photos came through the scanning process looking somewhat overexposed, so I had to work with them one at a time in iPhoto to bring out highlights. It’s not clear whether this was related to the state of the negatives themselves or to the challenge of quickly scanning a couple hundred photos without knowing exactly what they looked like to begin with, but we got the negatives back, so we can always send them off someplace else if we decide we want higher-quality scans at a later date. In any event, after a bit of tuning, the final results are perfectly acceptable for posting on the web.
As an aside, I’m taking the time to wrap up this project now because we’re putting many of our old photos—including the ones from Italy that Julie didn’t use in her scrapbook—into storage since we turned the office, where they had been kept, into Joe’s bedroom. Rather than dig them out later (or not, as would have probably been the case), it made sense to get the information we needed from the pictures, like the date and time they were taken, while they were still handy. Now that the project is complete, we can put aside the box of photos that’s been sitting out ever since Joe changed rooms and free up some space on our bedroom floor.
Gallery: Honeymoon
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.
Joe’s Room
Sunday was a pretty momentous day for us here on Harmil Way, even when you take into account our diminished standards. After a year or so of preparation, Joe finally moved into his own room with an actual full-size bed. Naturally, there are pictures.
At Joe’s request, the room is decorated with a space motif, complete with space linens, space bedspread, space lamp, space pillow (which Joe calls “1-2-3, Yay!”) and glow-in-the-dark space wall decals that we haven’t applied yet. The space theme also dictated the color of the walls: blue and orange. According to Joe, this color scheme is required to capture the essence of traveling through space. Both colors ended up being a bit stronger on the walls than they appeared in the store; I take solace in the fact that, with luck, I will not be responsible for painting over them.
Our cleanup efforts were not limited to painting. Julie rented a Rug Doctor and gave the carpet a thorough cleaning: in all the years the room had been used as a spare bedroom and, later, an office, the only member of the family who paid much attention to the carpet was Maggie, and her standards of care were shockingly low. After a few cleansing passes with Nature’s Miracle and the steam cleaner, the carpet is in much better shape. Long term, it’s still in need of replacement, but it’s no longer completely appalling.
We did encounter one significant wrinkle during the rehabilitation of the room, however. As we were washing the walls in preparation for painting them, I went to work scrubbing the baseboards as well, thinking that we’d touch them up. Things were going along swimmingly until my thumb actually went through the wood. It appears that Joe’s room, at least, is infested with termites; further inspection revealed more baseboard damage, as well as an actual termite who poked his head out of the damaged wood. He’s dead now.
Obviously, we will need to do something to address this issue. We’re not yet sure of the scope of the problem, so we don’t know if it can be treated locally in and under Joe’s room, or whether we’ll need to have the whole house tented. Complicating matters is the fact that Julie’s online research on the effects of termite mitigation on pregnant women and fetuses revealed that some studies have found a increase in brain tumors among children who experienced prenatal exposure to the kinds of pesticides used to kill termites. With that in mind, we’ll likely leave things alone for the next couple months and figure out what to do after the baby is born. Hopefully the house isn’t reduced to sawdust by the end of September.
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.
Occasional Dispatches from San Jose 
