Big Day for Melissa

If you know Melissa at all you probably know that she hates speaking in front of large audiences (large being bigger than 3) :) and would rather be almost any place else besides a stage in front of a crowd (even if friendly).

But when she is passionate about something, as she is with the refugees, she will overcome any obstacle to her in making a difference and today she did just that. She was asked to speak at our church in front of the congregation about her experiences with the refugee ministry. The very thought of it made her extremely nervous, but the thought that she might motivate even just a few families to open their hearts and their homes was enough for her to fight the fear and agree to speak.

Today she gave an eloquent, well thought out, funny and poignant speech about how getting involved with and hosting refugees has profoundly changed her life (and our family in general).

I am so very proud of her for getting up there and doing this (there were probably 400-500 people in the main service). As she was speaking I was thinking how grateful I am to her for leading us down this path and the wonderful experiences we have had so far and the ones that are out there yet. Many people came up to her and me after the service and congratulated her and mentioned how they were touched by the story and our openess to accepting strangers from another country into our house. So I am guessing that she did make a difference and in some small way move things forward for the refugee cause she is so passionate about.

Great job Melissa!

Wonderful weekend treat!

Melissa and I given a wonderful treat over the weekend from our close friends Darren and Carol. Darren and Carol were just married last year and do not yet have kids but are clearly going to be awesome parents because the kids love them. The last time we had them over for dinner Nicolas (yes the 3 yr. old) suggested that they could take all of the kids for a sleepover. Of course we did not have to take that advice but Darren and Carol seemed enthusiastic enough about it.

Well since it was my b-day weekend we decided to take them up on their offer and they kids had a great time. In fact it happened to be a weekend where the parenting duties were ratcheted up a notch b/c Lea lost her first tooth so the tooth fairy had to visit and Nicolas has an ear infection so he needed medicine in the evening and in the morning.

Darren and Carol spare no expense when it comes to the kids and they had all sorts of fun activities planned for the kids including making pizzas and cookies from scratch, watching movies, playing in their awesome yard (they are renting a house from a couple with small kids).

Needless to say the kids were super excited about going over and so were we! We dropped them off around 4pm and headed out for the evening. Apparently the cookie and pizza making got quite messy and there was a lot of cleanup to do!

We went to a bar and had a nice cocktail in downtown Palo Alto and then went to dinner and a comedy club. It was a great time. The kids were so worn out after all of the activity for the evening that they apparently crashed hard around 9pm which is great.

Darren and Carol reported that the kids were great! Everyone seemed to have a great time so hopefully this will not be the last sleepover!

Big thanks to Darren and Carol for giving our entire family this special treat! Hopefully we can repay the treat for them one of these days (hint hint)

Indicators of things to come

The other day at breakfast Julia and Lea were having a small argument over spelling which ultimately lead to several indicators for me. Julia had asked Lea to spell the word "wish" and at this stage Lea does not know how to spell it. So they were arguing about it something like this: Julia - "is not", Lea - "is too", Julia - "is not" etc. etc. You get the idea, it was quickly getting on my nerves.

So I suggested to Julia that just because a word was easy for her did not mean it was easy for Lea. I then said there are lots of words that you don't know how to spell which might be hard for you. This is where I got into trouble. I started to try and think of a word that was harder that she could not spell and the first word that came to mind was "indignation", which was my first indicator and in my defense this was still early and pre-coffee.

I said Julia for example the word "indignation" to which she said (somewhat indignantly) "OK, what's the definition?" and her mini-spelling B was on. After quickly deciding that "you" and "to be indignant" were not reasonable answers I gave her a definition. She took that in and then said "can you pronounce the word again please". Thank god at this stage she did not ask me for the language of origin!

I slowly repeated the word and without missing a beat she spelled it! and said "see daddy I am a good at spelling." Now I was somewhat backed into a corner so I said (somewhat indignantly) "Great, that was very good, but my point is still that there are some words which are hard for Lea and not for you." hoping that I could exit this gracefully, with a point and saving face. I did but this was certainly my second indicator of things to come.

A Visit to the Silicon Valley Mecca!

Earlier today I was lucky enough to visit what is literally the mecca of Silicon Valley and give a presentation. The top silicon valley venture capital firm is Sequoia Capital and they happen to be one of Mark Logic's investors. Now you may not have heard of Sequoia but you have heard of the companies they have successfully backed. These companies include Apple, Yahoo, Google, Youtube and many more! And they are not just into s/w they also backed Nvidia and many other hardware vendors as well. Amazing! Amazing run they have had.

So I went with our VP of sales to their offices on the famous Sand Hill Rd. to present Mark Logic to a German Publisher who was in town to learn about opportunities that might be around for them in the SC portfolio. The presentation itself went well and we will get some follow on meetings. The fun thing was seeing the actual offices where so many silicon valley legends have started! They may even have sat in the same seat as me! No wait, I never sat down.

Well hopefully that won't be my last visit to the Sequoia offices. It was certainly a lot of fun.

For a bit more fun look at some of their current portfolio, plenty of names you might recognize there!

Bee Movie Night

On Saturday afternoon we decided to treat the kids to a movie since they had been good all day and cooped up because of rain. I had heard that the Bee Movie was good and family friendly so we took them to a 5:20 show.

Jerry Seinfeld still has it because the movie was clever and funny. The animation was great and the characters and story were entertaining. The kids really liked it and even Nicolas stayed engaged throughout.

I highly recommend it if you have kids or are just looking for something light and funny to see.

Poker Night Almost Winner

Last Thursday I played in my second ever Texas Hold 'Em poker tournament with a great result! This was the Rivermark dad's club and they have the tourney about once every three months. There were 31 people there and as I have mentioned before it is very professionally run with timed rounds, fixed buy-ins etc. We had 3 tables divided into 10-10-11 and players were eliminated at a pretty regular rate including two very quickly from our table.

I played conservatively and did not try to steal any hands or bluff too much as there were a few very good players sitting at our table. I did get some good cards including pocket Aces when they guy to my right had pocket Kings and except for one hand played them well enough to make it to the final table. In fact I took a couple of players out and made it to the final three! That is well into the money places so I ended up taking home $150 net! The game went from 7:30-12:30! Whew I was tired on Friday but it was worth it! The picture is of the top 4 players and the huge trophy for the winner!

Milestones #2341

Over the weekend I had another one of those kid related milestones. This one was technology related and I am guessing one that comes earlier and earlier as kids get exposed to all kinds of electronic gadgets at a younger age.

In this case I was attempting to assist Lea in logging into one of the kid oriented social sites from Disney called Club Penguin where they have an avatar that represents the kid. We were struggling to remember both the spelling of the login id as well as the password. We were repeatedly trying different combinations in hopes of hitting on the right one. At some point I asked Lea to go and ask Julia if she could remember the spelling of the login id. Then I sent Lea to ask about the password.

Well Julia must have gotten the sense that we were having trouble because she turned up next to me to assist. Now we have windows XP on this particular computer and each child has their own login. It so happens that we were using Julia's account at the time (she must have been the last one playing on it) and each time I brought up the browser there was a cookie which defaulted to Julia's user id which I was attempting to override. It immediately occurred to Julia to suggest "Dad, just login as Lea and her id and password will be stored there". That worked. Brilliant. She solved the problem right over top of good old dad (and I consider myself reasonably tech savvy, after all I do work for a Silicon Valley software start up called Mark Logic.

I am sure she went back to whatever she was doing saying "Duh!"

p.s. I am sure in my defense that I would have eventually gotten to that too!

Halloween Fun!!

Last night was Halloween and our neighborhood was crazy! We had people knocking on our door past 9pm long after we ran out of candy.

We had two of our close family friends over to Trick or Treat with us in our hood because there are so many houses. Both the Wilde's and the Kokinos family brought their kids over, which meant we had 10 kids total in our not so little group. We managed to coral them long enough to grab a picture of all of the great costumes!

There was also a party at Julia and Lea's school as well yesterday (can you say all party all day!) and Melissa went up with Nicolas and shot some video of them chicken dancing in costume and of Julia running around in her costume.




All in all they had a great day and did not get to bed until after 9! Which is why uncharacteristically they are still in bed now at almost 7am!

Happy November!