Posts Tagged With ‘Ian’
Updated: 15 Aug 2010 08:12 pm by Ron
Filed: Books & Reading •Life in General
Tagged: books • Ian • Li • soccer • summer
Life has been pretty hectic of late… in no particular order…
- Ian heads off to school early Wednesday morning, leaving a huge hole in our home and our hearts. Deb is flying down with him. Li and I will get three full days together…
- Ian survived getting his wisdom teeth extracted last week in pretty good shape; he’s pretty much back to normal at this point and enjoying being able to eat something other than fruit smoothies and jell-o again.
- Fall soccer has started back up; I’m taking on my last season as the boys head coach for one of the local junior high schools. First three tryout sessions are behind us, with the final tryout session and the start of real training ahead this week — made all the more interesting by the fact that one of the local HS football teams has taken over our training field, so now we’re back to fighting for space with the lacrosse club and grid kid football programs.
- With the start of fall soccer, summer soccer (getting to play, rather than coach) has wrapped up for both Deb and me.
- Work has been pretty hectic, as well, with an office move a couple weeks ago introducing some interesting wrinkles. I will post a picture or two of our new digs one of these days. For the first time in over 20 years, I have a spot in the cubicle maze with… a window!
- We’re headed out looking for huckleberries today (assuming any of these lazy late-sleepers ever manage to drag themselves out of bed before noon). This is a good two weeks behind when we normally go, but the cool wet spring we “enjoyed” has everything — including our garden — way behind. Now we need the typical eastern Idaho early frost to also be a couple weeks late so our garden and peach tree have a fair chance at producing.
- Li will start preschool in September. Let’s see: one starting college, one starting preschool… interesting timing God has for us.
- I’ve done a bit of reading this past month or so: re-read John Irving’s most excellent A Prayer for Owen Meany and just finished C. J. Box’s Blue Heaven (not bad).
Updated: 30 May 2010 06:02 am by Ron
Filed: Life in General
Tagged: Ian • soccer
We are passing milestones with Ian at what feels like a frightening pace right now: Thursday was his last day of high school (graduation is this next week), and yesterday was almost certainly our last soccer match together as father/coach and son/player. Bittersweet, to say the least: we won an easy match against a Utah team after dropping a pair of close matches against teams from Utah and Nevada, matches we could have and probably should have won. Soccer is a funny game, and sometimes it’s simply not enough to play better than the opponent…
We ended our season with a trip to the Salt Lake City area to play in the Wasatch Classic tournament. We ended up coming down with 15 of our guys and played well, but were more than a little unlucky on both sides of the ball particularly in our second match. So that easy win yesterday represents what will be — unless something really unexpected would occur — the last time I will coach Ian or a team he’s playing with. This, in particular, has been a fun season to have been with these guys, in part because we had some success but more because the mix of young men and personalities were just a pleasure to work with and the be around.
It has been an incredible experience as a coach and as a father to have watched him grow and develop as a player and as a young man over these 10-plus years. I know it hasn’t always been easy for him to be a coach’s kid, but he has dealt with that aspect of this with grace. I’m tremendously proud of him, and grateful to have had this opportunity.
Updated: 28 Jan 2010 10:21 pm by Ron
Filed: Food •Life in General
Tagged: Food • Ian • St. Louis
Teagan (l) and Ian (r) at the top of the Arch on Wednesday afternoon (01/2010)
… and I think we are all ready to be home again.
Ian and Teagan’s presentation on Wednesday morning went really well, striking a nice blend of the geek stuff. They seemed comfortable doing it, and seemed to have fun in doing it. Very well-received by the audience, and I think it was more than just being polite; a number of them were genuinely impressed with what these guys had accomplished. As a dad, to say I was a little proud of these guys would be a big understatement.
They had a bit of time in the afternoon when there wasn’t anything on the conference agenda that appealed to them during the afternoon, so we wandered down to the arch (our hotel is less than a mile from the park with the arch, or “The Arch”, I suppose). I have to admit I was not expecting all that much, but it was way cooler than I had anticipated… and not just the weather, although it did start snowing while we were up at the top. I knew it was big, but I really didn’t have a sense of its scale and it really is pretty impressive. We walked back to the hotel in an increasingly-dense snow shower.
A rare splash of color in St. Louis: cool jazz sculpture in the snow near Laclede's Landing in downtown St. Louis (01/2010)
Food has been a pleasant surprise here in St. Louis, to put it mildly. We had excellent Indian on Wednesday evening at India’s Rasoi on Euclid with Bryan (Ian’s and Teagan’s mentor); it was exceptional and we all came home impressed and stuffed. We went a little lighter this evening with very good sushi (edamame, nagiri, and a couple different rolls) from Wasabi on Washington, then we wandered around in a cool foodie grocery/deli called Culinaria on 9th and came back to the hotel with ice cream.
Tomorrow we head for home, and we’re all ready — at least mentally — to be home again. Likely to be a long day, given that we aren’t scheduled to get back into IF until almost 11pm… I can’t say I will feel bad about leaving St. Louis. It has been cold, almost exclusively grey, and damp the whole time. Aside from the food and the Arch, there just really isn’t much here that we’ve seen that would make me want to come back but I also recognize that we haven’t had much of a chance to get out and do much and January in the midwest really hasn’t given St. Louis much of a chance to impress.
Updated: 07 Jan 2010 10:17 am by Ron
Filed: Adoption •Books & Reading •Geek Stuff •Life in General
Tagged: CFML • christmas • Ian • Li • reading • sleep
It has been a bit since I last wrote anything here, I realize, but I will try to get caught up on a variety of fronts with sort of a catch-all post here…
Christmas and Li
Li and the Christmas tree (12/2009)
We survived Christmas, with the combination of the holidays and an extended break from work (for me) and school (for Ian) being something of a mixed bag. My workplace shuts down (officially) between Christmas and New Year’s Day for a holiday curtailment, so I took all of the week ahead of Christmas (mostly) off as I had some banked comp hours I needed to use ahead of the end of the year (or lose them) and I’m taking a couple more days after New Year’s, as well, which will stretch my holiday break to almost three weeks. Ian has had the past week and a half off from school, too, so we’ve all been home together for the first time in a long time — which has been wonderful.
Li was definitely “in” to Christmas this year, and loved having three Christmases: ours as a family on Christmas Day, followed by two more as both sets of grandparents came to stay with us for a couple days each. We had decided, after traveling with her for Ian’s state soccer tournament in October, that travel just wasn’t in the cards for us at this point and in retrospect staying home with her (and having visitors here) was the right move.
We tried to keep as much of a routine through the holidays for Li as possible, but we still ended up with some sleep struggles beginning the Friday before Christmas. Lots of rest-less nights, particularly ahead of Christmas itself, and several days with no naps… which were trying and exhausting for all of us to varying degrees. Just in the past couple of days, it seems — based on sleep patterns — that she is working her way out this latest cycle.
Li "participating" in her first Christmas program at church (12/2009)
Aside from the sleep problems, Li is doing great. She continues to grow and develop in leaps and bounds. When it comes to food, her palette is continuing to expand (her new favorite is “pork chop” — pork tenderloin, in actuality, which she tried for Christmas dinner when I grilled a couple) and she’s more willing to try new things. She “participated” in her first Christmas program at church this year, where “participated” would be defined as learning “Away in a Manger” and then standing stoically at the front of the sanctuary with the other kids while they sang. It’s about what we had expected; when we asked if she was going to sing, she responded “No, I already sang that song.” She’s close to reading at this point, and her sense of humor is pretty amazing for a not-yet three year old. We took her sledding for the first time yesterday and she loved it, even being willing to go down the hill by herself.
Deb and Ian
Ian and his adoring little sister, both in tye-die splendor (12/2009)
Ian has a bad case of “end of break blues” right now, but other than that is doing well. He found out in early December that he and a couple of other interns from his summer job won the high school division of an international digital forensics competition sponsored by the DoD and will be traveling to St. Louis for a related conference in late January (we’re still trying to figure out how this will work). He’s in the midst of the college application process (continually being prodded slowly forward by Deb) but hasn’t yet decided where he will attend. He’s squeezing in a bit of soccer (indoor) when he can and generally suffering through his senior year of high school.
Deb also has been playing a bit of soccer (also indoor), playing in a women’s league and on a team that competed in a Christmas break tournament which was definitely a change of pace for all of us. The highlight of their tournament was playing the eventual tournament winners 3-2 (Deb’s team lost) with the winning goal being scored in the last minute of the match; not bad for a team with 3 players over 50 against a bunch of college-aged players. She has also been attending a weekly Bible study (one that provides childcare for Li during the class), which is a good change of pace for her in a couple of ways.
A Bit of Reading
Over the break, I managed to squeeze in a bit of reading, too. I finished “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy (a gift from Santa’s bibliophilic elf — a tradition at our house) and “Into Thin Air” by Jon Krakauer, sandwiched around a bit fluff (“Thunderhead” by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child). To Thunderhead’s fluff, “The Road” is flint: beautifully and sparely written, gripping, haunting, disturbing. It’s a movie I won’t see; the book is extraordinary and more troubling than anything I’ve read in a while. It’s the first of his works that I have read, but almost certainly will not be the last. “Into Thin Air” was a gift from Ian; engaging, fairly well-written, tragic.
Some Geek Stuff
I’m in the middle of a couple of projects on the geek front these days, too, in the odd moments of spare time I can squeeze out: working on getting a lightweight CFML and database server environment up and running on my netbook (based on Railo and Apache Derby, respectively) and also working on a CFML mode for ActiveState’s excellent Komodo editor. I will write a bit more on both of those at some point in the near future. I also did a bit of troubleshooting on another project (a cross-platform editor called “redcar” intended to be semi-compatible with TextMate but capable of running on Mac, Linux, and that other OS) and got to play a bit with Ruby in the process.
Those of you with reasonably modern semi-standards-compliant browsers (read: not MSIE) will notice a bit of geekery in the handling of the pix on this particular post. I’ve tweaked the styling for my blog here based on some CSS stuff I was playing with ahead of Christmas. Those of you still clinging to MSIE should consider an alternative…
Updated: 03 Nov 2009 06:48 am by Ron
Filed: Life in General
Tagged: Halloween • Ian • Li
The world's cutest lady bug (Oct 2009)
As promised, a couple of pictures from Halloween this year. The first is, as you can clearly see, the world’s cutest lady bug! (Or “leggy bug”, somewhat ironically, in Li-speak.) She was really excited about her costume — including the hat with the little antennae — which is always a question, but made it really easy to get her ready to go visit a few of the neighbors’ houses. There were a couple of houses with scary music or where the people answering the door were dressed in scary costumes that threw her off a little bit, but for the most part she did great. We’d been working on getting her to say the “trick or treat!” part of it (“No, you say it, Daddy!”) and after the first house, where she would only whisper it, she got the hang of it…
A couple of hippies that showed up and agreed to cover door-duty on Halloween (Oct 2009)
We also recently found the hippie on the left living in our basement. He and his friend Fi agreed to cover front-door duty for trick-or-treaters, including serenading them accompanied by guitar, as we took the little lady bug on her neighborhood rounds, which worked out well…
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