CA summer vacation

Just about a week ago, we returned from our summer CA adventure.  But it wasn't just our family that took the trip -- the Halls and Aunt Jan took their first trip out to the Bay Area.  9 additional people took residence at my parents' house plus RV parked in the driveway.  The girls greatly enjoyed sleeping in the RV (or Bounder, truck, etc.).

We tried to hit all of the big highlights of the Bay Area for our visitors.  Our itinerary looked like this:

Fri:  get to Fremont at 12:30am local (technically, Saturday).

Sat:  rest and play in the pool (brrr... cold spring in CA this year).

Sun:  church and play in the pool.  I rode Dad's bike up to near the top of Mission Peak.

Mon:  Monterey aquarium (Halls do a whale watching cruise (cold and pitch and rolly))

Tues:  Big Basin to see ginormous Redwood trees

Wed:  SF Giants baseball game (sorry to the A's.  They were out of town most of the week.  And their stadium is lousy now.).

Thur:  Mission Peak hike, with girls.  This was a mistake.  As expected, we had to carry the girls most of the 6 miles.  Unexpectedly, they wanted to play in the dirt or have specific adults carry them.  And their attitudes were poor.  (Upon reflection, this should have been expected)

Fri:  Santa Cruz beach (brrrr.  People often ask if I spent a lot of time at the beach as a kid.  No, for a few reasons:  water is freezing cold, sunburn is ouchy, and the drive to get there is rather sketchy with super curvy roads with much traffic).

Sat:  We stay in Fremont, taking the kids to Lake Elizabeth.  The Halls take a tour of SF.

Sun:  church and big dinner party.  High school friend Emily and her family of 5 along with adopt-a-student Shu joined us plus Lisa's family.  

Mon:  back to IL.

How did we do?  It would have been nice to hit Berkeley or some of the north bay sites (Napa or Point Reyes).  We did quite a bit of driving as it was, so no regrets.

Neither Jill or I have been wanting to take many photos lately.  We did put in some effort on the Big Basin trip.  The massive trees make for some fun backgrounds.  And for some inspiration of awe. 

 Plenty of room inside the biggest of the big trees.

Plenty of room on the 2nd bed in the RV for the girls.  We're thinking about setting up the queen size bed in the kids' room for both kids when Janny outgrows her crib.  We'll put a pool noodle in the middle to maintain sides (and peace).  Will they like it?

On both Sundays we visited the church my sister's family attends.  I have some reservations about attending churches with names like "Resonate" (in Champaign there is something called "Quest".  There is also a "Crusaders" church that still frightens me).  At 9 am on a beautiful sunny day, we walked into the "sanctuary" which looked like what I imagine night clubs are like.  The music was horribly loud.  I was stupified.  Then the pastor started to speak, and I was very impressed.  Either my ears adjusted, or the music wasn't quite as loud the next week.  In conclusion, we were very impressed with the church.  We have no plans to change churches here in Urbana.

Finally, apologies for taking so long to write this (and to write the blog in general).  I've been spending my free evenings watching the NBA playoffs.  The games lately have been amazing.

the grand and the gross

I know that when a kid is doing something gross, it's best to not make a big deal of it.  But the younger goes too far sometimes.  We attended the end of year middle school orchestra performance recently (with neighbor Rachel on viola).  The seats were of the fold up sort with chewed gum stuck in various places on the now-seat-back in front of us.  Janny reached out to touch the most colorful pieces.  Janny tried to scrape a piece off.  I could not keep my cool face nor pay attention to the music.  We fled to the hallway.

A few days later, Clara had a mini potty accident on our patio.  I sprayed the puddle to dilute it some.  Janny put her hand in the puddle and drank some .  That's gross.

On the brighter side, when mommy makes a particularly good meal (waffles for dinner or hamburgers), the kids say, "Thanks mom!  This is yummy!" with gusto.  It melts the heart, I tell you.

Returning to the theme of messes, this is what our table typically looks like after a meal.  Why are there cut-up bananas scattered throughout the table and a pile of rice not on a plate?  Why are there so many plates and bowls?  Not shown is the pile of food on the floor.

The kids definitely aren't troubled by the mess.  Mommy remains unfazed by the extra work.  I should add that Jill is less fazed than ever now, and she attributes this in part to her exercise at 5:30 am class.  She does "boot camp" for an hour and then hangs out in the coffee shop before returning home to feed and clothe and whack the kids.

Fort, house, and beach making with all of the pillows in our family room is a big hit right now.

We celebrated Memorial day with a visit to our state's capital.  Hint:  it's not Chicago.  It turns out that Mondays are the best day to visit the city as many smaller museums (like the Frank Lloyd Wright house) are closed.  What wasn't closed?  Our state legislature.  We popped in to listen to a debate about pet warranties which was not of general interest.  What was interesting was the chaos on the floor.  About 3 persons were listening to the debate, with the remaining 50 or so talking in groups of 2 or 3 or working on their lap tops.  It was dizzying at first, but I quickly got into to it.  Anybody need a lobbyist?  I've already got a suit that fits so-so and will work on growing my goatee and styling my hair asap.

The capital building was just fabulous.  Marble everywhere with a really cool domed ceiling.  We rode the elevator and walked some stairs.  Even the lovely buildings at our fine local University pale in comparison.

Faithful readers, it seems that the wave of pestilence is starting to recede.  The first blows (literally) came at approximately 2 am on Sunday, April 21.  Clara threw up 3 times in the middle of the night and continued vomiting for about 2 days.  During this time, Janny had a runny nose.  Then Clara had diarrhea, and Janny got the stomach bug (thankfully for only 1 day), followed by diarrhea.  Then they both got coughs and now Clara has an ear infection.

The stomach bug afflicted me with coming out both ends syndrome on Thursday night.  This was the third time I've been sick since fall, and all 3 rank among the worst I've ever felt.  On the bright side, during the most recent episode I made some strides in my vomiting technique.  In the fall, I feared that my stomach was getting ripped in half.  This time, I was able to relax and let the goods flow.

Jill escaped this round with tummy uneasiness (that and taking care of the rest of us).

While carrying Janny recently, I realized that she is now the size that I picture Clara being.  Yikes.  They're growing (with the mandatory aside that they are both still quite small for their ages, and yes we work super hard to get them to eat more and better food but all Janny ever wants to eat is Nutella...).

 What a wet April!  We celebrated the rain by stomping and splashing in our backyard puddles and rainfall-filled pool.  We are very pleased to not have a basement.

Our basketball team beat the undefeated 1st place team in the semi-finals!  Our superstar Bryan hit a 3 with five seconds  left to give us the lead.  I haven't felt so proud of a sports accomplishment in a long time (What's that?  Oh, sure I'll tell you the last time.  I won a bike race once).  We worked super hard and wore down the other guys.  Unfortunately, we had very little left for the championship game an hour later.  We couldn't handle the full-court pressure (punk college kids never get tired) and wide big guys of the champs.

Happy Easter!

Happy Easter!

We celebrated by having lunch at our house with a bunch of friends.  Thanks to Nancy and John for cooking up the yummy ham.

We're just about ready to start enjoying the warm weather.  Janny was knocked out by a cold early in the week.  Then Clara got it.  She spent most of the day Friday sitting on the couch staring out the window.  On Saturday, I really knew how she felt.  After sleeping for 10 hours at night, I took a 2 hour morning nap, 2 hour afternoon nap, and an hour evening nap.  Is part of getting older that colds/flus get worse?  Thankfully, I'm feeling much better today.

Last weekend before the big snowstorm, we were working on our garden.  In addition to removing  several big roots (we're hoping for a big yield this year!), I unearthed a big pinkish rock.  The internet told me that it's likely rose quartz.  No big money gained from the discovery (I was thinking giant pink diamond!), but supposedly there's some metaphysical healing bonus.  Alas, we could have used some physical-physical healing this week.

One of the perks for accepting a job at Wolfram (have I mentioned the other ones?  Free tea and hot chocolate, a discount card to some local businesses, a 6th floor window office (okay, cube) with a view of Assembly Hall, a mug) is that one gets a copy of A New Kind of Science by Dr. Wolfram.  Instead of using it as my monitor height adjuster, I decided to take it home and read it a little.  The big hypothesis of the book is that the universe is governed by a set of simple computational rules.  This idea is quite challenging to my engineering trained mind.  We like to have our equations and simplifications/approximations.  With Wolfram's rules, there is no shortcut to finding the solution.  One must compute the solution obtained by following the rules.  Is he right?  Hopefully, we'll find out soon.

I'm still enjoying the job.  This week I started my officially assigned topic of image processing.  When I start to get a handle on it, I'll show some really cool stuff.  For now, charcoal!

Janny is 2!

Our youngest kid, Janny, is 2 years old today.  We started our celebration last night with our across the street neighbors.  We had brownie cupcakes with pink yogurt frosting.  Yum (but a little hard to remove from the paper wrappers).  Tonight, we opened Janny's present from Grandparents K, a huge dollhouse.  Janny and Clara greatly enjoyed it.

Janny is an independent person, but even introverts invite friends for tea sometimes.

Recently, Clara was chasing Janny around the house shouting, "Are you my sister?"
Janny:  "NOOOOO!"
Clara:  "Yes you are!"

And so it goes.

Miss Tonya made a toy salad for Janny's birthday present.  All the kids had a blast with it.  Janny wouldn't let go of the carrots.

Maybe tomorrow Janny will open her present from daddy, a turkey baster and a pack of red funnels.  She loves to play with water (just like Clara used to and still does).  I'm hoping that my $4 gift gets much use.

I'm a little ashamed to confess a primary reason that I haven't been writing much lately.  We've been watching too many tv shows.  On our list now:  American Pickers (or just Frank and Mike), Suits / Psyche, and Survivor.  Plus, I've been watching Illinois basketball occasionally.  Sometimes we'll watch the Daily Show.

While I'm confessing, here's one more:  I bought another bike this week.  It should fit the girls from ages 9ish to 13ish.  So now I almost have their whole lives covered.  Maybe it's time to work on a new project for them?

We have one more regular season basketball game.  We were destroyed by the first place team this week, but again we were without our superstar (though it wouldn't have mattered much).  I think we'll end up in 4th place out of 8.

still wintering

Jill is turning into superwoman.  In addition to taking care of our girls during working hours, she watches another 2 year old once a week, tutors a grad student and some high school students 3 afternoons a week, and cooks extra food for dinners twice a week for our college student friends and neighbors.

Our Bible study group lost the only couple younger than us last year to graduation, but we have a lead on a new couple.  Here is the current crew.

Lately, moost of the 'what a cute girl!' comments from strangers have been directed at Janny (before that, Clara was the focus.  Before that it was Jill, though if a guy said so I would have socked him).

Being the slow on the uptake guy that I am, it took quite a while to understand.  Mind you, Janny is adorable right now, as I'm well aware.  Clara is as well, but she is now shy around strangers which does not translate into cuteness.  Janny is still young enough to look them in the eye and turn on her charm.

 Winter is dragging on here, so we've had to plan more indoor activities.  Good friends bring some much needed cheer.

It feels like the weather has been really terrible for weeks.  But only once did I have an icicle hanging off my rear fender. I'm really looking forward to spring.

Our church basketball team is now in 3rd place (out of 8), though we were crushed in our last game by the 2nd place team.  We were missing our superstar, so maybe we'll give them a better game in the playoffs.  About once per game, I make a good play.  

peace in our time

This 25 second video (yes, I now know how to upload videos to the blog!) encapsulates much of our home life right now. 

First, the girls are playing with something that has the potential (and often the will) to result in a big mess.  Then we have some sharing conflict with Clara taking the role of drama queen and Janny as the calm instigator (the roles can be switched, but this is most often the case).  Janny, in her calm rational mode, decides that the pleasure of holding the cup is dwarfed by Clara's wailing and gives it back.  A moment of peace is enjoyed by all.

Then there's me in the background-- not being a creep by the way -- working on the house.  I was adding some temporary caulk to our vertically opening wood windows.  I feel like this has helped cut air leaks a little bit, but we've had generally warmer temperatures since I did it.

We got our energy report for January this week.  We ranked 11 out of 100 of our neighbors in terms of limiting our use.  We use about 2/3 as much energy as the average house in this group.  During the fall months, our ranking dropped to around 25-30, which suggests that we use more hot water than low energy consuming neighbors.  I would like to see hot water usage drop, but the other members of the household aren't keen on taking very short showers and wearing outer layers of clothing (pants, sweaters, etc) multiple times.  For my part, I use cold water to rinse dishes heading for the dishwasher.

For the past few weeks, Jill has been watching another girl from a family in our church.  Their language at home is French, but perhaps an additional dialect is also spoken (how crazy is it that a 2 year old can be fluent in at least 2 languages!).  After I came home from work one evening, I was rather startled to hear Clara using that girl's accent for "l" and "r" sounds.  Words like water have a fun new twist at the end.

And speaking of water, Janny has started using Clara's old word "mado" for water.  I guess she says it for fun, since she can say the word "water." 

I'll conclude with a mid-season basketball report.  We are 2-2 with one loss a blowout to a much superior team and the other when our star player was out. For my part, my fitness level is fine and all joints are in great shape.  But I generally feel like I haven't played in about 10 years.  I'm looking to improve positioning for rebounds and moving my feet better on defense during the rest of the season.