Curious social observation

As I may have stated in an earlier post I grew a beard for my snow camping adventure. Now I already had a goatee and mustache but many many people commented on my beard. In fact I had enough compliments that I decided to roll with it for a while.

Well this past weekend I decided to cut off the beard and go back to the original look of goatee and mustache.

The curious thing was to me that no one including Melissa noticed! I went out with friends, went to a kids birthday party where I knew many people including work folks and not a single person noticed. This included the two folks I now carpool with nearly everyday.

Curious!

Priceless

So if you read my previous post you'll think that road trips are pretty much a grind, and they are for the most part. But every now and again one gets a chance to something different. And on this most recent trip we were able to slip in a little personal time to go see a Red Sox game while in Boston. It actually worked out quite well as summarized in this Mastercard style note crafted by one of the guys I was traveling with.

Driving back to the hotel after 5th briefing of the day...see the lights at Fenway from the mass pike...what the heck, the games already started so maybe we can pick up some cheap tickets....

Finding parking spot 500 yds from the park -- Free.

Getting 2 8th row, 3rd baseline seats (face $125 each) -- $100.

Pick up 3rd ticket in upper deck -- $20.

Grab beers, show usher 2 good tickets and bump squatters from the row of 4 -- would have been priceless, except...

Watch Lester throw no-hitter -- Priceless.

Road Warrior!!

It has been a few days since I had a chance to post primarily because I've been on a road warrior like trip at work. I've compiled a few stats about the trip I was on last week:

5340 - miles flown
320 - miles by train
180 - miles driven
18 - meals eaten out
15 - number of times we gave the same presentation
5 - days
3 - cities (Boston, New York, Washington D.C.)
2 - rental cars
1 - very tired John

Whew, no wonder I didn't have time to post!

Lea competitive? Puh-lease!!

Lea has a sweet side, and then she has her competitive side. Yesterday at the pool the competitive side came out in spades, double spades maybe.

We invited some friends over to the pool who also have a competitive middle child and that drove Lea to a whole new level, and I might say a good one. We instigated a couple of competitions for the children in order to provide some structured things to do (besides climb on and maul daddy).

The first competition was a contest to jump off the side into the deep end and get judged on two different aspects, style and splash. The other middle child Mateo immediately set a high bar by doing a running forward flip (not bad for a 6 year old!) He got high marks! Lea did a couple of cannon balls and then decided to step up her game. Having never before tried it she did a backwards dive, and executed it nearly perfectly. After some strong jumps by Mateo she came back and did her own forward flip! Mateo gave us a running flying cannon ball which created a huge splash. Again high marks. Lea, not giving up on this one did a back flip off the side, nailed it on the first try! High marks! This was all positive IMO. I am sure that Melissa having left with Nicolas (ear infection) allowed the competition to go to another level as she probably would not have been comfortable watching these first time moves.

The second competition was a swimming relay. I didn't want it to be girl vs. boy so I split Diego and Mateo with Julia and Lea. Julia and Diego started off and the swim lessons over at the Santa Clara swim center clearly showed through as Julia's good free-style stroke put her out in front and gave Mateo a body length or so lead entering the water. Again Leas was not to be denied however. She got in there and executed a nearly flawless stroke (in my un-biased opinion) and erased the lead in the first length (about 10M) and extended the lead to win by a body length!

It was quite a performance by our little Lea, I wish I had video to share.

Fashionista?

Nicolas really like clothes, he thinks about them a lot, insist on changing if there is anything dirty on them, and he likes to pick out his "handsome man" clothes.

The other day when we were getting ready for church he was quite insistent that he pick out my clothes and that we wear the same thing. He ran into my closet and picked out the exact shirt and pants which were the same as his (black pants and a blue and white striped shirt). It was pretty funny and we snapped a quick picture before church.

First 10k in 20y

Well Saturday I completed my first 10K race in 20 years! The race was called the Human Race and was the 15th annual race and is run in Mountain View. The weather was great if not a little too warm and it was really well run and they also had a 5k run, a 5k walk (which Melissa and kids did,) and a 5 k dog walk which I thought was thoughtful. The race had a lot of sponsors and one of them, National Semiconductor, matched donations to our school organization and we were able to raise $5600 for DSCO (school organization which Melissa helped found and was vice president of for a year)

I was able to meet my goal on race speed but it was pretty tough. I was over dressed and it was pretty warm so I was laboring a bit. I was not the oldest, youngest, tallest, shortest, thinnest etc. runner in the race. The race started off fast and it evened out over time so that I was basically running with the same 20 people for 3/4ths of the race.

I also relied pretty heavily on my friend Steve (dj steveboy) to help with the race, he was with me all the way.

I am definitely inspired to do more races, it was great to have a goal to train for and combine that with fund raising for the school!

To Teachers - Thank You!

From time to time Melissa and I teach Sunday school at our Church. We feel it is one of our obligations to give back since we utilize the program so heavily. :)

There is a really great kids program at our church called BLAST and there is a common theme taught for a 6 week period and the material is presented in different forums like theater, cooking, computers etc. The way the class works is that each week it rotates through the grade levels in no particular order. So as a teacher you see different grades each week.

Last week we had the 5th grade class - and man it is tough to teach when they don't want to be engaged!

This particular week the content was a bit light for the class and as Melissa and I went through the material the kids (9 boys and 3 girls) where quite ornery. We were trying to keep them engaged by asking questions however they kept coming back to us with questions like:

"Do you need to be certified to teach this class?"
"What if the angels aren't real in this story?"

and so on and so on...

So as the questions kept getting tougher and the kids squirmed more we naturally started sweating!

So as we walked out we felt that we really had a new appreciation for what the teachers of our children do and how hard their job can be.

Thank you teachers!

Reading Comprehension ++

Our oldest daughter has always loved books. She devours books. She read the last two Harry Potter books at 7 1/2. Not only does she read a lot of books she reads them incredibly fast. So the other day I was wondering just how much of the stories she comprehends as she blasts through them. She is currently very into a series called The Children of the Red King - Charlie Bone. She just finished one of the books so I thought I would ask her a few questions to test her comprehension level. I didn't have to go very far to see that she was indeed putting it all together.

The conversation went something like this. D= Dad, J=Julia

D - "Did you like your book?"
J - "Yes very much!"
D - "Can you tell me about the book?"
J - "Yes, what do you want to know?"
D - "Tell me what happens to Charlie."
J - "Do you want the short version or the long version?"
D - thinking to myself "ok she can either summarize or give detail, that is good"
D - "How about the short version."
J- "Would you like me to summarize the series up to this point or just start where this book starts?"
D - again to myself "wow, OK so she can go at any level of detail here - the entire series to date or just this book"
D - "Lets just go with this book for now"
J - "Well in this book Charlie is..."

Needless to say she is not only comprehending the books she can summarize or drill to any level of detail. And she can do this across all of the series she has read including Harry Potter and the A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket.

Oh to have a young agile mind!!!

As an aside to say that books are always a good gift for Julia is an understatement.