no go

So we learned yesterday that our oldest son will not be joining the military after all. His three alcohol related traffic tickets were too overwhelming for the Navy and Air Force. This means a major change of plans are in order for him. He can no longer depend on the military to help pay for his future schooling nor give him something to do until he gets his license back as a Christmas present at the end of this year. Now he has to get a job locally somewhere and try to start all over with his life. Just when we thought a change was in order, it will be hard for him not to revert back to the same old life he led before. He was hoping the military would help point him on a new path, but now he has to take the hard way and do it himself.

Our next to oldest son is attempting to go to Expression College for Digital Arts in the beginning of August. He went for an orientation session in the beginning of July and really liked it. The amazing thing is that he arranged the whole thing, but of course I had to pay for the airplane ticket and the hotel stay! He is trying to get financial aid so he can actually attend, so he is motivated to do it quickly as August is almost here. He has been approved for housing, which is really subsidized furnished apartments near the school. He keeps mentioning that he wants to drive all of the way from North Carolina to San Francisco, California as a major road trip. We keep trying to suggest that is probably not a good idea; however, he keeps insisting. We will see how it all pans out shortly...

We are still playing tennis daily, which is a still a shock to me. It is fun as the oldest and youngest son are definitely improving slowly as they learn how to hit and server the ball. It has been such a long time since I played so much tennis. It is a fun sport to learn.

Our daughter has been away at grandma's house all week long. She is learning how to do cross stitch and crocheting. I taught her how to start cross stitch as my mother taught me when I was just a young thing. No one in the family believes I know how, as everyone thinks only women and girls know how to do such things, so I guess I am a victim of reverse prejudice. My wife's sister is an expert at crochet so the extended stay is a reason to learn yet another new thing. Hopefully when our daughter returns she will not suffer boredom and complain as she will have many projects to complete and to keep her busy. We are about half way through the summer school break, so we don't want boredom problems affecting the family this soon.

Teens, Tennis and Texas Hold 'em

Today marks the one week anniversary of no bad news in the family, which is quite remarkable for us. I don't remember when a whole week went by without one of the kids failing to think before they did something stupid. Sad but true. This week was very different. Maybe it was the one month span since they got out of school for the summer. Maybe they are bored and need attention. It is just shocking that after so many years that they actually want to hang out with their parents. For example now in the evenings my middle son always wants to play cards with out fake poker chips. He has been watching TV where they show world class poker players. They typically play Texas Hold 'em, which is a new game for me, but very easy to learn. In just a week my son has learned how to maintain a poker face, whereas at the start you could obviously tell when he had a good hand as he got excited about it. The nice thing about playing cards is that you talk about life in general since it is not that mentally challenging. The other event I have already mentioned in previous postings, where my oldest and youngest son want to play tennis with me as soon as I get home.

I remember when I was a young teenager and found tennis the greatest thing ever. We would play every day after school for a couple of hours. We rotated which courts we played on just to keep life exciting but normally which ever one we could find that was free. I took tennis quite seriously until I was a sophomore in high school and ended up breaking my right wrist right at the start of tennis season. I wish I could say it was from diving for a tennis ball on match point or some other brave event. However, it actually happened in our high school gym when it was raining outside and we were practicing tennis indoors in the gym. I was only 5'7" and a couple people told me there was no way I could even touch the basketball rim, so of course I had to show them. I took a tennis ball in my hand and ran from half court and dunked the tennis ball to everyone's amazement. The only problem was on my way down I got my hand caught in the basketball net and lost my balance and fell back on my arm. That ended my tennis career. I kind of fell out of sports in general and started a bad life on the wild side. It was not until I got married that I took up the sport again as my wife and I played a couple of hours every day until our oldest son was born. In between high school and my marriage, I grew 6" my freshman year in college so took up basketball which was originally my favorite sport. I lost interest in basketball in high school since I was took short for the team. Even though clearly I was never professional quality at any sport, I certainly enjoyed playing team sports regularly until I turned 40 and decided to retire while I was completely healthy.

The one thing I have done consistently since the seventh grade is run. I ran on the high school cross county team and was the youngest person to ever get a varsity letter at our school as I was a ninth grader. I loved to run on county dirt roads typically 8-10 miles a day. Back then it was important how quickly I ran each mile. I ran to keep in great condition for basketball and tennis. Now I am still running 30 years later as I enjoy it, but don't even care how long it takes me to run each mile. My only goal now is to be running when I turn 50 years old.

silsila vs vivah

This weekend we watched two very different Indian movies.

The first, Silsila was made in 1981 but had pretty shocking subject matter for it's time. The main character's brother had premarital sex and his girl friend became pregnant, which was revealed at his premature death. His brother had a choice to marry his brother's wife or to follow his heart's desire to marry his girl friend. He choose his duty of taking his brother's pregnant wife to cover up her pregnancy. He regretted it and finally had a long term adulterous relationship with his girl friend. Quite shocking subject matter indeed for an Indian movie even today.

The second, Vivah was a complete contrast. It is about the prefect premarital engagement process. Long drawn out and shows how traditional marriages are arranged and work themselves out. I found the movie very entertaining as for me, this is the "real" India that I saw when I lived there.

On a complete different subject, this weekend was a long 4th of July holiday and it seems like we have changed as a family all of the sudden. And I don't mean that the kids started watching Indian movies with us. The kids all went outside and we played frisbee together on Friday, which was the first day of the long weekend. That set the tone for the weekend. As I have mentioned previously, we typically only get together during vacations, but we got together several times this weekend. Eating together, playing cards together, talking together was enough to send me into a state of shock. I even took two of the kids to play tennis with me. We repeated that again today, so at the moment life is very good in our household, which I cannot always says was the case. I am going to keep it all positive and now regress in time to contrast to our current situation.

The sickness

Sometimes it just does not pay to get out of bed. As our beach vacation ended, everyone started getting sick. Our daughter got sick right before our vacation started and slowly it spread to the whole family. Every one but the two left handers in the family. This certainly is an odd illness that only affects right handed people! What is even more strange is that the disease affects every one differently. My wife got tonsillitis, which I thought only young kids got. In fact for her she got it quite often as a child and had not had it since. Also both my wife and daughter got really bad sores all over their tongues. My middle son who was the first to get it from my daughter never had a sore throat but had a cough and felt really run down. Our oldest son had the symptoms the longest and after the initial sore throat had a cough that lasted two weeks. For me I had a sore throat for over a week and then cough and then a sinus infection and now may have bronchitis. Recently any time I get a viral or bacteria infection it always spreads to my sinuses. Now can one illness spread by my daughter have so many different manifestations? I think someone has come up with a biologic weapon than finds the weakness in the person affected and takes advantage of it. The only problem with this theory is we are not important as a family for someone to try it out on us. The sickness mystery will have to remain unsolved - I just hope we get well soon.

Almost perfect vacation

As the kids get older, we seldom take vacations together. For the past two years we have made a weekly trip to the beach right after the kids got out of school. Last year we went to Surf City, NC and this year we were a couple of miles down the coast at Topsail Beach, NC. This small strip of NC beaches is almost all beach houses with very few hotels or condominiums. It forces us to relax, enjoy the beach and the kids. It is so interesting to watch the kids change how they interact with each other while on vacation together. At home, they all separate into their rooms and seldom interact. While at the beach, the play around in the surf together, play games in the rented beach house and talk to each other while taking a break to watch TV together. It is worth it to take a vacation just to see them talk to each other! For me, a vacation means no computer, no work and no thinking about work and spending time with my wife. In that regard this year was a perfect vacation.

Well I should say almost perfect as we all got sick except for my next to oldest son, who somehow avoided it. My daughter picked up some nasty virus the weekend before from her friend's family. She had a temperature of 104 last Thursday, right before we left on Saturday for the beach. Then our middle son got sick on Wednesday, but in desperation still made it to the beach each day as he had been waiting for a very long time to learn how to surf. Then our oldest son got sick on Thursday. Finally on Friday my wife got sick and today I am not feeling to well either. It starts with a sore throat, then a high temperature, then fever chills and finally after a couple of days it is over. That is pretty amazing that we could still say we had a great family vacation in spite of us getting sick, but it was that good. It may be our final family vacation together like this as our oldest son is joining the Navy soon and our next to oldest is talking of attending a recording studio school far, far away. This may be a year of major change ahead for us.

I must get back to the beach vacation to end on a positive note. My wife and I walked both morning and evening on the beach sand. We had a couple of thunderstorms but it did not really affect us as the kids normally spent a couple hours in the morning and a couple in the afternoon fighting the pounding waves and loving every minute. Even though my wife's parents live at the beach in Wilmington, NC just having a week of continuous beach activity makes them become immersed in it and enjoy it much more than a couple of hours during a weekend visit. The older boys all learning to surf to some degree and that kept them busy trying to conquer a new thing. We also did the ritual sand burying ceremony a couple of times to take a break. One night was especially nice as the full moon appeared in a yellow tint and the moon light reflecting on the water was really special as we could see it from our top floor balcony. Nearly every day we saw black dolphins swimming near the shore when we were in the water playing around. Normally we only see them in Wilmington in the winter, so that was nice.

One final thought on beaches. As a family we have stayed on all of the North Carolina beaches (except Cape Hatteras as it takes a very long time to get there) and all of the Texas beaches and the Gulf Shores in Alabama and Florida. The Texas beaches are not very nice, but were convenient when we lived in Houston and Austin. The drive to Gulf Shores was an all day event but worth it as that is one beautiful beach with white crystalline sand. All of the NC beaches are nice, with some nicer than others and some way more expensive than others. For now I must say that the memory of this last week was really special as it was more than just a beach trip but a true family vacation.

What was amazing to me was the vacation transformation quickly reverted back to normal life in our house as within 30 minutes of arriving, my daughter was on the phone talking to her friends, my next to oldest son took off in his car to see his friends and the other ones were on the computers - all back into their individual worlds as if they never left.

users

That is such a bad term for people who use computer software to help them get their job done. Sounds like a drug addict, who uses drugs to try to alleviate pain in their life. What a second, that does match. Computers are painful to use and most software does not really help; software just softens to emotional distress of sitting in front of a computer all day. Working with computers can definitely make a manual task automated, but there is so much more we can help our customers than what we are doing today.

I much say that I really enjoy visiting customers and observing them do their daily tasks. It reminds me of one of my previous jobs, where I did this daily. The technical term is contextual inquiry for shadowing a customer in their daily work environment. The more you observe and collect notes, the better you will understand exactly what problems and tasks they are trying to complete daily. Another favorite of mine is called task analysis where you try to understand the tasks and come up with a better or automated flow to help them do the task quicker or eliminate it altogether. For me, there is just no better way to learn about your customer than seeing them in action. Even though this was but a single day in my life, it was totally worth every minute. It also reminded me that I enjoy doing it and it was part of my life for two years. I need to incorporate it more into my life!

jail time

I have mentioned this before, but just have to say something more on this topic today. My oldest son got out of jail yesterday. It was his third trip to have some down time in jail and hopefully his last. All three were short stints, but for me it demonstrates how the world is changing. I did many stupid things when I was a young out of control teenager, but I only visited jail once and that was on a school field trip. I think it would be a good idea to re-introduce this kind of a field trip into public schools again today as there is way too much glory in going to jail. Of course it does not help that I am writing about it, but I have to blow of some steam. Jail up until recently was not a merit badge and had a derogatory aspect to it. For some odd reason that was lost somewhere along the way in the last few years. My son has been three times. The first time occurred when he was caught by police on a NC beach as a drunk underage 18 year old. Since he ran his mouth to the policeman and got out of control, they put him in jail for 36 hours. I remember talking to him about later on and he said that he never wanted to do that again as it was not a good experience at all. I guess that can be explained from massive alcohol consumption causing his good and bad brain cells to be lost. His second time was when he drove drunk after loosing his license last summer. They compounded his friend's car which he was driving and decided a little jail time was in order overnight to sober him up. The last time ended yesterday as it was a follow up visit to the previous time, and I have blogged about that already. I pick him up today, so will find out the details later as to whether it will be his last. He is joining the Navy finally and maybe all of this will be the final straw to teaching him a permanent life lesson. Hopefully jail will be a history lesson he does not want to repeat.