Bobby's Sunday Summary

Well this week was some what normal, but also very long. Robert has been getting better at talking. Today I wanted to see if he would say the name of his friend Isizey (Susan's comment: Isaac shortened to I-zy). Instead he ran to the door and started yelling bo bo bo. Which we learned this week means go. Susan made me break the bad news to him that Isizey is in California, and we couldn't go play. He was mad. Alice got him to say her name though.

As for Alice she has been at Nature Day camp much of this week. I dropped her of once day at the Planetarium, which is on the campus of he local Community College. But it took me half an hour to find it, because the address has it sitting on a street next to the college. It appears that there are no real streets on the campus. Every building has an address on this same street, but no direct access to it.

Yesterday we went to the Library. When we got there they were having a Sister City thing. Apparently Urbana has a sister city in Mulaui, and we got to try some food from Mulaui and play some games from there it was fun, and Susan really liked the corn meal mush and cooked spinach.

But that wasn't the only unusual thing that we ate yesterday. We were invited over to dinner at a friends house and they served us a goat shoulder. It was good. There was not much of a goat flavor at all. Apparently most of the strong flavor is in the fat and this was a fairly lean cut I guess.

Popsicles and Cousins

I couldn't decide on just one picture to share, so you get the whole series. Enjoy!

Nature Day Camp 2011

Alice just finished her last day of Nature Day Camp this summer. She seemed to like it a lot better this year. Not only did she keep me informed on what they had for snack and who got a time out for what, but she also remembered some of the new songs she learned. That's progress! And it makes me smile hearing her sing songs I learned at camp, too...Girls Camp. Camp songs are in a class of their own:

Baby shark (doot-dooooo, doot-doot-da-doo)
I'm bringin' home a baby bumblebee
Goomy goomy rump rump

Her new favorite game is "What Time is it Mr. Fox?" I thought it was a cool game in elementary school, but now I appreciate it for teaching impulse control, rudimentary time-telling, counting, and joy in physical activity. Not only that, but a 2-year-old can play it as competently as an adult. Perfect party game for kids!

Here's Alice with her two teachers, Shay (left) and Nicole (right). Alice went to camp for three weeks in total and really latched on to these two ladies (extra points for spotting Buddy in the photo).

More about Bob

Little Bob's personality continues to develop and reveal itself to us one bit at a time. Or maybe I'm just finally seeing the pattern. Anyway, he's a fascinating little puzzle that keeps me thinking...and on my toes.

First off, Robert is physically emotive. He feels emotion and expresses emotion almost entirely with physical movement. Joy, anger, silliness, jealousy, hunger, and excitement all bubble out of him as arm swings, twirls, running, head butts, hitting, face snuggles, stomping, and tackles. Any emotion can be expressed by any physical act at any time. Arm twirls don't always mean hunger and throwing doesn't always mean jealousy. It's more confusing than that. Once, he got so excited and silly that he bit Alice in the belly. Another time, he was so mad that he collapsed on the floor and slapped himself three times on the head. Yesterday, he was so thrilled to see Alice that he smacked her in the face with his sippy cup, then he was so jealous of the attention she got that he jumped and cried and threw things all over the room. This morning, he was so happy that he slapped himself all over and did push-up motions in the air and threw more things. When he comes running at you with a smile, you don't know if he's going to hug you or grab your toes or throw something at your face because ALL of those things would be normal for him in a good mood and expressing joy. I love him and live in fear of his flailing limbs at all times :)

As a result of Robert's physical expression of emotion, we've been doing a lot of explaining to Alice ("that's how he shows he's happy") and a lot of behavior modification ("uh-oh, we don't hit people with [insert object name here]"). It's a slow process, but getting better now that we discovered a more effective "time-out" strategy. Solitary confinement doesn't phase the boy. One minute in his room is a vacation! No, it turns out plain old "confinement" is a better deterrent. We just snuggle him on our lap for a minute and he's begging to get out and determined not to repeat the offensive behavior...until he forgets the next day (*sigh*). At least he hasn't hit anyone with the same object twice, even over a couple of days, so something is sticking :)

I'm looking forward to more one-on-one time with him once preschool starts again (Alice is eager to get back to Mrs. Strom, too). Now that Robert has (slowly, but almost) transitioned to one nap in the early afternoon, I'll have mornings with him. Maybe I'll go to morning aerobics again? Maybe we'll get into a Robert-aged playgroup? I don't know yet. We'll see.

In the meantime, we get to find/teach/explore less destructive forms of physical expression :)

Catch-up

Long time no blog. I can't believe Bobby has made five entries in a row! If you were to ask me what I've been up to, I wouldn't have an easy answer for you. I can't actually remember what I've been up to lately, so that tells me I've been making bits of progress on several little fronts instead of pushing hard on one front.

My little fronts include:

Selling/Buying a home. We lowered the price of our house by quite a bit. We've been out to see a few more neighborhoods. There are homes that we like, but nothing that screams out "I'm the one." I'm pretty sure we won't ever find "the one" that meets all of our indescribable ideals and expectations :) I've had a few good laughs, though. Our Realtor, Matt, is a great help, and I'm really glad he's on our side. Some of his comments on bits and pieces of the homes we see have been revealing...about the home and about me. Looking at one structure, he said something to the effect of "Wow, that's pretty hillbilly. I can't believe this hasn't been reported to the HOA." At the same time, I was thinking, "Wow, that looks like they made that themselves. Looks strong and practical. Wish I could do something like that." Ha ha haaaaa! I guess I'm a bit of a hillbilly at heart ;)

Sewing projects. Mending and tailoring clothes make up the bulk of it, but I'm breaking into some constructive sewing this week. I'll post picts soon.

Garden. Oh my heavens, I've loved my garden this year. Loved it! At this point in previous years, I would be avoiding eye contact with it. This year is different for several reasons. It's more aesthetically pleasing than it's ever been, it's more practical than it's ever been, and my kids are in it every minute with me. I love to see my kids in my garden. Can't explain the exact reason why, but it's literally breathtaking...I even got a little teary once.

 

Anyway, Alice and Robert eat peas, green beans and cucumbers straight from the plants. Buddy can pick geraniums and chard like a pro. Alice helps water everything, but especially the peas (her favorite). With the pathway mulch and the raised beds, the garden is more accessible and easier to maintain than any gardens I've managed in previous years. I've learned a lot about how I like to garden over the last, uh, 9 years. Holy cow. Has it been that long?

Alice's primary teacher brought some home-grown peaches to church for snack today. Alice was begging for fruit trees all the way home. Some day, Girlie. Our next place. I promise :)

Bobby's Sunday Summary

Well there was really only one thing that stands out this week. On Tuesday we went to Nauvoo. Our nephew was in town from Utah and went though the temple there for the first time. It was a very nice experience to be able to do that with him and his family. The big thing about that day was that it was upper 90's with 100% humidity right next to the Mississippi river. With the heat index it was 117 that day. We went and saw some of the things. We made rope and saw how the people in Nauvoo made bread, but by the time we got to the bricks Robert was about done. All he wanted to do was to run around and play. So Robert and I spent 20 min out in the heat while he ran around and I doused him in water. Susan and Alice were in an air conditioned room listening to a lecture on how they made bricks.

After that we spent most of the afternoon in the visitors center watching some of the films they have and talking with family. It was a fun day, but very tiring. We got back at just after midnight. Sorry we don't have any pictures or videos.

Zediva part 2

Well only a few people asked for the link, and I have gotten no free movies yet :( so here is the link for everyone to use. If you want to feel free, if not I will not be offended either.

http://www.zediva.com/user/register/TAjQEwWuKF

Bobby's Sunday Summary

This week was mostly normal. Alice had nature day camp again this past week and Susan gave a genealogical society presentation. One of the big things is that Robert has turned into a bit of a chatter bug. He has been babbling a lot and that babbling is starting to really sound like words. He learned hi this week. He said something that sounded a lot like buddy, but I think he was just copying. We think he has said Alice, but Mama is definitely part of his vocabulary and I think I heard dada.

Zediva

I have never done a promotional post like this before, and don't expect to see any more like it in the future either. I am not sure if you have heard of zediva.com or not. They stream movies to your computer over the internet, but in order to get around licensing the rights to stream the movies they actually rent you a DVD and a DVD player. Then they stream the output of the DVD player to your computer. Yes that is very odd, and yes they are currently in a legal battle to see if they can keep doing it. But they are also cheaper then I-tunes and not that much more then redbox, when you factor in the "you mean I have to actually go somewhere and do something" factor.

Anyways they have been overwhelmed with demand lately, and I have 10 invites to the service. If you sign up through my link and buy one movie credit you get two additional movie credits free, and I get one free movie too, which is why I have taken the time to write this up.

So here is how it works. the first 10 people to comment on this post will get an e-mail from me with the a link in it that you can use to register, assuming that I have enough information to actually know how to e-mail you. If I don't get 10 people after a few days then I will probably just post the link and let it be a free for all.

Bobby's Sunday Summary

Well, this week was very busy, with the 4th of July and all. The 4th was a very busy day.

We had a ward Lunch/BBQ. There were lots of games.

Some of them were water games.

After that we went home, and invited another family in our ward over. They have three boys Alice's age.

Finally we went to see the fireworks. Alice was very excited to see the fireworks, but they freaked her out. We had good seats, and she felt like they were going to fall on us. Poor girl. So we came home early.

The next day we went to the zoo in Decatur. It is a little zoo, but it was fun. Robert loves animals and I was hoping he would get really excited about it. He liked looking at the animals and petting some goats at the petting zoo, but he didn't get as excited as I had hoped.

They also have a playground to play on next to the zoo, which he did like a lot, probably because he loves to climb.

Tortellini

Alice and I like to play out the "Tortellini" sketch we saw on Sesame Street once. A little girl decides to teach her baby sister a new word, "tortellini", but the baby keeps saying "mama" until the end. I didn't think Robert cared much either way about this silly game, until yesterday. We were serving ravioli for dinner. I started singing, "Ravioli, ravioli, ravioli" and Robert chimed in, "Mama!" We all laughed and laughed and laughed. Now he does it every time. I think he's trying to learn the tortellini part, too, It's something like "mama-mee-mee, mama-meh-meh, MAMA!"

This first clip is a demonstration and the second clip is the inspiration:

RE: RE: Bobby's Sunday Summary

I have to make a few minor corrections, just for accuracy sake.

1) The Hack Day project was not presented at the conference. It was just a happy coincidence that I was in CA when they wanted the winners present their hacks. On a less happy note I missed free ice cream at work here in Illinois. Oh well.

2) I did not use Hadoop to do my hack. I work on Hadoop at work all day. I was in CA for a conference about Hadoop, I started to do a hack on Hadoop, but it didn't really work out, so instead I did the hack that I did, and I used a different open source project, OpenCV. Which is a project to do all kinds of things with Computer Vision.

3) Not a correction just a link to the ethiopian restaurant. http://zenirestaurant.com/

4) And finally the comment from my manager was made in relation to something else, the fact that we want to try and scale up from 4000 machines to 15000 machines in our largest clusters. There was also a spin off company called Horton Works but that is diferent.

Pondering a Sale

What is the line between "it's just money" and "a penny saved is a penny earned"?

I was chatting with a friend this week about how we haven't sold our house as quickly as I'd like and we may need to devise a new strategy and reconsider our priorities, blah, blah, blah. Something she said in the conversation really ruffled my feathers and I need to figure out why. That's the point of this post. If that doesn't sound interesting to you, I won't be hurt if you choose to skip to the next blog in your reader now :)

In our conversation, I mentioned that another house in our neighborhood (nicer/larger than ours) was on the market for $20,000 less than our home. I was concerned that we may need to cut our price by $20,000 if we wanted to sell in this depressed market. She brushed off my comment with a shake of her head and replied, "It's just money."

Just money? Just money?! Yes! It's a whole pile of money! A powerful pile of money! A year's supply of money for our family of four. A down payment! My entire college education! An LDS mission for Alice AND Robert. Ugh. It hurts to imagine that much choice simply disappear.

And then I try to see it her way. I try to think of anything that could make me dismiss that enormous sum so casually. Yes, it's a pile of money, but what good does that money do us tied up in a house, chaining us to a less-than-adequate school and one toilet for our growing family? And then there's the unsettling thought that it's imaginary money...a perceived value of an item we bought 6 years ago that is no longer valued so high...maybe the $20,000 is already gone...we may never be able to sell this house again for what we bought it.

With her one comment, my friend suddenly forced me to put a price tag on my urgency to sell. I think that's why it's bothered me so much...how does one put a dollar sign on something like that? She obviously values her/my child's kindergarten experience more than her/my $20,000. I don't. Or do I? I don't know. Should I? I was uncomfortable with my friend's assessment for two reasons: 1) it exposed how nebulous my reasoning has always been for this move ("uh, it's just time") and 2) this is a friend I admire in several ways and I was a bit ashamed that I couldn't instantly dismiss the money for the educational future of my own child(ren) as she had done so decidedly and emphatically just then.

Thoughts on reason 1): If we were moving across the country next month for a new job, then I might be able to choke down a $20,000 hit compared to paying rent PLUS a mortgage indefinitely. But we're not moving far away, nor urgently. We're moving because we want to. That can't possibly be worth $20,000 right now. Or can it? If not $20,000, then how much? We DO have clear goals for this move, but the timing is quite flexible. We know we will want more space and good schools in the nearish future, but there's nothing pushing us that way except, um, my own deadline. If we move, great! If we don't move, there's still a whole bunch I really like about our current place, so I'm not terribly disappointed...yet.

Thoughts on reason 2): that's absurd, Suz! No need to compare myself with others, even to those friends that I admire. I move through life at a different wavelength from this friend. That's obvious in several ways, and that's part of the reason I appreciate our friendship. We don't always agree. The education of my children is important to me, absolutely, but is Kindergarten that critical? Not really. At Alice's age, I feel the home environment is still the most important factor in nurturing a love of learning. I shouldn't be scared of a school. If we do not sell in time, and Alice does go into Kindergarten here, then I can work with the school to make it a better place for every student, right? Not the end of the world.

Ugh. I've made it a matter of serious thought and prayer. At the moment, I feel that we're on the right track with our original plan. Come September, we will re-evaluate our options.

As ruffled as my feathers may get sometimes, I do eventually come to appreciate the insights of my friends. We have worked out several solutions to situations that I thought were impossible to define, much less make progress in. So please don't take this blog post as a criticism of my friend. She simply brought to my attention a few sub-issues that had been sub-bothering me for some time :) Now that I know they really do bother me, I can think about them more openly. Now you can ask me about them and we can chat about it. I'd love to hear your thoughts on placing a dollar value on intangibles...especially idealistic intangibles like "education."

Re: Bobby's Sunday Summary

He has an entire week away from the family and only talks about the flights. (In his defense, he states, "That was the most memorable part!")

*sigh*

I cannot let that suffice! He hasn't told me much more, but here's what I know about Bobby's week in sunny San Jose.

It rained, which is very unusual for this time of year.

He presented his project from Yahoo's last Hack Day. Hack Day is a 24-hour period twice a year where Yahoo employees are allowed (and encouraged) to work on any pet projects that strike their fancy. If you complete a project well enough to submit it to the competition, you get a t-shirt. Projects are judged and awarded first, second, etc. and the winners present their projects in front of the whole company at their annual conference thingamajig. Bobby and his team happened to come up with a project that was so silly, so unique, that the judges made up a new award JUST FOR THEM. Bobby's team put together a program that will locate a face on any video and replace it with another. They used Hadoop to do it, which is the platform Yahoo has Bobby working on these. He really likes Hadoop. Anyway, Bobby and his team replaced everyone's faces in the live video with the face of Yahoo's founder, Dave Filo. They won an honorable mention as the "Least Monetizeable." He made a facetious case for the project's monetizeability (if they're making up awards, why not words, too?) and got a few laughs.

His presentation was at an event called "Demos and Drinks." He got a fluorescent green t-shirt for it which came in handy when he got home and realized he hadn't brought anything back specifically for Alice as he had promised. She's excited to use it as a smock.

Bobby and several friends visited an Ethiopian restaurant where they served a delicious feast atop a giant sourdough pancake.

One of his many meetings involved his team taking over for people who would now be part of a spin-off company that Yahoo just announced into being. The managers stated, "If this changes what you're doing next week, then we've failed. If this doesn't change what you're doing in six months, then we've failed." So...keep doing what you're doing but transition to something completely different soon. Hm.

That's everything I remember. You'll have to ask him for more details :)

Bobby's Sunday Summary

This week I was out of town in CA. Sorry Jon (My brother not brother-in-law) I didn't call the week was crazy and I didn't have much time at all to do anything besides work.

I left Monday morning at about 5 am. My flight took off at 6 am. Unfortunately there was a thunderstorm which made our flight a little late and we had to rearrange the other flight a little bit but we still got there. I was there with 5 other people from our office for the conference. We had meetings all day Monday and Tuesday. Wednesday was the conference and it lasted all day long. Thursday was more meetings and we had another meeting on Friday morning before our flight home.

Sadly our flight home had some mechanical issues and was canceled. We got the call early in the morning telling us that it was canceled and that we were al scheduled to fly out the next day. I spent half an hour on the phone getting things worked out. It turns out that it was worth it though. I ended up in first class for the flight home. I liked the warmed mixed nuts, free lunch, and all the soda I could drink, but I think the leg room is the really hard thing to give up.