Wintertime in the Valley

A couple of photos of the kids from warmer days. A lazy, quiet thanksgiving break where we were the only ones in the dorm for a few days. We had a lovely pot luck at the UU church on T-Day. We made one dish, sampled many, and only had a few dishes to clean. That morning it snowed for awhile and it snowed again on Saturday. We are back to our regular hectic schedule now but I hope to be able to carve out some time on Monday evenings while I am on duty to keep this site updated.

Life Gets in the Way

So....

Let's see, since the last post, what has happened in our lives?

Let's do this as a list

A) Moving day - Truck shows up. Wife and son and cats and fish head off to our new NEPA home.
B) Still moving day - Foreman tells me that the truck will not hold all of our stuff. Little girl and I will have to find a place to stay so that we can meet another truck the next day.
C) Still moving day - Wife and son arrive, party to welcome us all starts to warm up. Moving truck finally arrives hours after it should have. Wife misses party. Girl and I miss party because we are still at old town. We have a lovely time with friends, but still...
D) Girl starts new day care, boy is making friends and is hardly ever in the house. New neighbors and co-workers seem pretty terrific
E) Girl gets ill and we end up in the emergency room as she suffers from what they call bronchial spasms. Pretty scary and pretty expensive since we are between insurance plans at this point.
F) Getting settled in and starting to work. One week down and the kids seem pretty impressive so far. There is a WIDE range of talent at the school and this adds to the sense of diversity here. We've got kids from all over the world, we've got post grads and teachers with years and years of experience. I've got a pretty good feeling about the place so far.
G) Girl continues to struggle with pretty bad coughing so the wife and I are getting very little sleep
H) My first full weekend includes dorm duty. Check ins at dinner and at 11 or 11:30 with a 12:30 quiet time warning for all. 82 boys to keep track of. First night felt very stressful, second night is much less so.

Visual Evidence of Vacations

The photos here are of the boy at Venice Beach and him chilling with his uncle while in CA. More on the way...

Our Last Week Here and thoughts on LA

So, next Friday at this time our house will be a whirlwind of moving activity. The movers are due around 9 AM. We are in our last stages of packing, I did the CDs and the Lps and now the house is looking less like a home and more like simply a clutter zone. Balancing the kids at home with errands and packing has been tough with quite a few one parent errands with the kids while the other gets some work done.

So, thinking back on the LA trip which was too long in the making, I have a few reactions. My brother has long commented on the weather there which was pretty remarkable. Although we were there at the end of June, we never got hot. Cool mornings turned into warm afternoons which turned into chilly evenings. I was unprepared to be cold and did not dress appropriately for hanging out in the backyard with the Prof and the Geek. The boy slept well so I had some peaceful morning time with the paper, the Prof and some coffee before heading out on any adventures. Some highlights: Griffith Observatory was beautiful and we spent a great deal of time there, we visited Travel Town first which was fun, Venice Beach was overcast and cool (my kind of beach day!), we ate at some fun restaurants, a great morning wandering around downtown Claremont and visiting a fine music store where I finally replaced my old ECM Steve Reich Music for 18 Musicians. Some lowlights; TRAFFIC, and far too much driving for my taste. I've been spoiled since leaving FLA and I now rarely have to be in the car for any length of time. I get grumpy being in a car too long and had to placate the boy by giving him FAR too much time with his DS while we drove and drove and drove.

Photos and FLA trip comments soon.

Oh, Yeah

Another 'highlight' of the vacation is that I decided to take a swim with my cell phone in my pocket. The phone, apparently, does not like this. It has now been five days since I have been able to turn on the phone so many numbers are hidden away in an electronic abyss right now.


sigh

This might, however, be the motivation we need to break our phone contract and upgrade our phones. We'll see shortly after we move.

What a Month

Wow, it's been too too long since I have checked in here. Since I last wrote (the previous post was from my sweetie!) I have traveled across the country with my boy to LA to visit pals and my brother, I traveled down to FLA to see family and friends and visit Gainesville for the first time since moving out of the state, and spent a terrific week in between at an AP Stats workshop in Manhattan for a week.

Details will drip in (as well as photos) over the course of the week here as we pack and get ready for our big move to PA.

LA highlights include a wonderful day at the Griffith Observatory with our pals the Professor and the Geek (self admitted, by the way) where my boy learned abour Giffith j Griffith the mogul who gave the city of LA the property on which the observatory sits. The boy is amused by the story of the man with the same first and last name. He was also impressed by the mess at my brother's in home office and the state of the office of my host friend the Geek. Boy had remarked that he had never seen such a messy room before. I think he was jealous since he does not get to let his room decay into such a state.

More details soon...

Summer, on.

So it is definitely summer time here and the heat is high. Yesterday there was a power failure across our area, which is not a good thing when it is in the 90s. Fortunately, we were booked for a Fourth of July party (on the fifth of July) at our friends Michele and Sunil's house. It was a nice cook out and we sat out on their paved driveway which was well shaded and had a nice cross breeze. Mo devoured about half of a watermelon. Power returned around 5:30 pm which was about 1 minute before Jim made the call to book a hotel room somewhere that still had power.

Other fourth news: we watched the NYC fireworks Sunday night from the comfort of our livingroom (via television broadcast) and we listened to/saw the summit fireworks last night from same livingroom.