surprise!

I got occasional arcane updates about the progress of J’s birth certificate: an email from Juvenile Court saying they sent a form to the state, a letter from the state saying they did their thing and handed it off to the next state, and then finally a letter saying the birth records have been updated! Awesome, that was like 2-3 months, instead of the year the Court told us it would take.

I ordered 3 copies of the new birth certificate, and they’re gorgeous: too: all I had growing up was notarized copies, but no, this is full color, on heavy paper. And they listed me as the father!

In an unexpected twist, the mother was "Not Stated."

The city clerk said, "It was the natural mother blank? Yeah, I think I know what happened. We have this new system for entering adoptions…". She sent replacements, and an envelope to send the bad ones back—practices you want to see in a city clerk—and now it’s all official, with both parents and everything!

So the preparations to send him off to college now also include changing his name, which would be a lot easier if we had gotten him a state ID with his deadname, but it’s his deadname, so we sort of didn’t want to, and also didn’t get around to it. Now we change the Social Security number so it matches the birth certificate, then comes the state ID, and after that pretty much everything is easy.

It’s a nice feeling. All three of us have worked really hard for this. It’s good.

how to start your weekend.

Most of San Mateo County’s operations are in the county seat, but for departments that don’t have a lot of traffic with the downtown offices—the county library system, the coroner—are up the hill in San Mateo in what I can only describe as a citadel. It’s cleverly set in terrain that offers remarkable privacy, and chunks of it are somewhat fortified, because the biggest occupant is Juvenile Court, including detention, and a variety of things that look like they’re there for the children of juvenile offenders.

When I picked a date for the hearing, they told me all adoption hearings are on Fridays, and it didn’t occur to me to wonder why until we were there, and the staff was relaxed and happy. There are signals of what a more ordinary day is like: signs like "NO HATS IN COURTROOM" and "GENTLEMEN, TUCK IN THOSE SHIRTS.’ Adoptions are obviously one of the most joy-inducing things they do, so it makes sense to just pick a day of the week where people show up for court and they’re there to make a family.

The courtroom blew my mind. There’s the usual judge…podium? pseudo-throne? pulpit?…arrangement, but when the judge entered, she brought a giant smile down to a floor-level lectern. The walls had two-foot wide emojis, lined up like shields in a medieval great hall: "To acknowledge that all emotions are valid in this room." There was a five-foot tall teddy bear, with dozens of smaller bears surrounding it.

And in a final surprise, by tradition, adoptees pick a bear to take home.

just like that.

I’ve never really looked at the child adoption procedure. In part this is because we’ve had no adoptees in the extended family until my cousin adopted her stepson. Normally at this point I would say "Right, suuuure you don’t," except that the genetic variation goes from this:

all the way down to this:

Good luck telling the guys apart on the telephone.

Adoption results in a new birth certificate, which is obvious when you think about it, since the entire purpose of a birth certificate is to legally define the parent-child relationships via the circumstances of birth. I find it weird for a bunch of reasons:

• Rewriting history is not really something my brain will do. I can usually remember what we’re supposed to say about the past (true or false), but I also remember the past.

• I’ve never been a legal parent before, and I always very carefully avoided the word "father." (And still will, really: the birth certificate will list us both as "parent." J’s word for "adult male who shows up with patience and kindness" is just "Chris.")

• A birth certificate will now attest that I had a kid a few years before I met the kid—the form said "Enter your name as of the date of the child’s birth." I remember that year very clearly, and the most I could claim was being uncle or uncle-like to a marvelous trio or two of girls.

In my world growing up, birth certificates were static, authoritative documents, not just because I come from a line of lawyers, but because our genes allow no doubt about where we came from. We look, sound, smile the same. When my grandmother died and I went back to the Rust Belt village my grandfather settled in after leaving Pittsburgh, I went into the one coffee shop, and the owner, Marit, came out from the back and said "You’re a D—, aren’t you." (My cousin tells me Marit loves telling the story as much as I do.) All but one of Generation #4 is through high school. My uncle was on the School Board for a bunch of years. His father was a judge, whose portrait is in the courthouse.

I tell a story, and I hear the more or less uniform voice the men have. I make an expression with my face, and it’s the same smile gifted to a few dozen other people on the planet. 

So in my life to date, a birth certificate is a set-in-concrete record of past events involving biological parents, the ironclad thing you use to sign up for soccer teams or get a passport. It’s wonderful that we can alter the law’s view on our relationship, but it’s also just viscerally odd.

"Come back and see me, if I'm still here."

A month or two ago I joined Ancestry.com, where my uncle Stephen said I would find all the work he'd done over the years. It's fun, like a particularly nerdy sort of video game. I've mostly been fleshing out the Norwegian side of the family. But I have a calendar event for today! Peg died, in 2000. I wasn't told until after the fact, so I didn't get to go to the funeral.

Peg, our next door neighbor, was a huge presence the first half of my life—essentially the grandmother who was always on scene. She and her husband Jack lived in that house for...a long, long time. I see them listed there in the 1940 census. The story I know is that they lived there with a Greek guy named Michael, who left them the house and a dragonfly-green Mercedes sedan; that's a relationship probably lost to history, except for the deed transfer.

Peg was born in 1906, in Cambridge, to Scottish Canadians—I had no idea about that part, but they were from the places that really preserved Scottish folk traditions, in Nova Scotia and Cape Breton Island. She was Very Very Catholic™, which I imagine she was raised with, given the family naming scheme:

Yes, Lochlin's mother was Margaret, Lochlin married a Margaret, and they raised Peg, another Margaret. It's not clear to me that there are Saints David or Sarah, but maybe they skated past a less assiduous priest or two. Peg was staunchly anti-abortion, which in all our time together was probably the only disagreement of substance, so we did what grown-ups do, and talked about everything else. She was always on the ball, a sharp Bostonian tongue that ran at lightspeed, and a conversational engagement that was basically improv comedy.

(Ancestry.com claims she and her husband Jack had a child who is alive enough to remain anonymous; that's sort of mind-blowing, if true, but I Occam's Razor says it's a computer hiccup.)

One Christmas Eve I went to visit her in the nursing home, I think after Jack died, and she got crabby at me: "Go away. I told everyone not to visit me."

Being an honest relationship, I mocked her with a sentence of grouchy animal noises: "Rahrahrahrr. Rarrararar. Raarerrrrarhar!".

She didn't miss a beat: "And I understood every word!".

She had a lot to offer a super-smart wiseass kid. I'm sorry she never got to meet Honor or J, and also sorry she never got to meet Honor's grandmother. I'm not sure what they had in common besides being spectacularly feisty elderly women, but what else do you need? It would have been fun to see.

Every time I saw her at the nursing home, I would head back to college, and she would give me a couple of the most brand-new $100 bills I've ever seen, with the same message:

"Don't spend it on beer and women. Come back and see me, if I'm still here."

Not to worry, Peg. I spent it on gin and bagels. 

it was a bad week.

It happens a lot that while I meander through all the paths of my life—walk the dog, mess around in my workshop, hang out with the household, teach engineers how to communicate with each other—I'll think of something I don't know about Tim, and that maybe someday I could ask him. But he's gone, so that won't happen.

I wish Tim had found his way through. I wish we had my brother I rarely saw or talked to. I wish his kids had their dad around for their graduations and marriages and kids or whatever. I wish his students had their amazing teacher.

I think about Tim and the rest of my extended family of origin all the time, though I think they don't believe it. I've never really Done Family The Right Way for them, whatever that means in the moment.

All I know is that my heart is full of grief upon grief. A lifetime of loss and isolation, laid like a building, stone on stone. We can mourn things we never had; feel the lack, the voids that intuition tells us should be populated.

My extended family on both sides is remarkable. We have:

• Vast evidence for a biological component to intelligence. It's so bizarrely obvious, and it doesn't matter where any of us grew up, or what our childhoods were like (though mostly bad), or if we went to or finished college. There's even a handful at least as smart as me.

• The magisterial suffering of intergenerational trauma. It's tricky to speculate about where it started, when almost everyone is unable to remember their experiences (which isn't a good sign).

Tim was a casualty, and it sucks. It never stops sucking. I don't even know if I'll get used to it at some point.

Fri Mar 671 23:14:06 PST 2020

It's almost a year since Tim died. The funeral wasn't until the end of July, with everybody staying home until the vaccines rolled out; the first stretch of grieving done, like most of the past two years, at home. Christmas was pretty rough, and I'm expecting to not be terribly useful next week, either.

Yeah. I just can't even.

and to all a good night.

We had a very mellow, low-key Christmas here in California. J has been with us 100% since March--without any change to the official court-ordered custody arrangement, which is a thing that can happen--so this is the first Christmas we've had him for the entire day. Historically he's gotten a present on each of the "12 custody days" (our house) leading up to Christmas, so he got up on Christmas Day and asked, "Wait, is it actual Christmas, the day? I have no idea." He's never been a calendar-watcher: the only exception that comes to mind is when he was waiting for me to come back from Chile.

(He asked so often that Anna used an aikido calendar to mark off the days. Not the usual behavior for 5-year olds. Anna just today unearthed and tossed the calendar.)

The gifts this year felt well-chosen, with lots of good surprises coming from knowing each other well. J got some excellent games, and gift certificates to buy more games. I got Anna a scholarly book on RPGs, which hopefully isn't terrible, and a gift card for the art store, where she will have to buy things for herself. Anna got me a basic Swedish textbook, because while Duolingo is entertaining, it's unable to teach the rules for things like making plurals or (much worse) combining plurals and definites:

• en kvinna = "a woman"
• kvinnan = "the woman"
• kvinnor = "women"
• kvinnorna = "the women"

It's funky and different from English, without being excruciatingly difficult, but reverse-engineering it from examples is tiresome.

Anna also got me my own set of metal dice for our family Dungeons & Dragons game, including a bright red one for my character who has some sort of fire elemental in his ancestry, and really enjoys and is quite skilled at setting things on fire. (J created him for me some years back. His name is Sneaky McStabStab, he has a pet rat named Bitey, and he hates seagulls because seagulls killed his parents.) Anna also took pity on my musical obsessions and got me a tenor guitar, an obscure instrument experiencing a bit of a revival.

I can't play that, but I'll eventually be able to play this:

It's a lovely, fun little thing to play.

inter alia.

Evidently I don't write blog posts these days. I started the blog when I went to Chile, and happily my life is not so eventful as it was in Chile; I'm unraveling a bunch of emotional stuff that I don't want to blog about, and then I have this fabulous job, but I'm a manager and that comes with an extra need for discretion. Even the dog has settled into a routine, as long as that routine involves alternating between "lying on hot pavement," "lying on Chris," and "lying next to Chris," with food scattered throughout, especially if the humans are thoughtful enough to drop bits of cheese.

Walks are also important.

(I've considered assembling some sections of fence just so she can stick her head through them.)

Work is quite nice, on the whole, although I have 14 direct reports across 4 different teams, and both those numbers are too big. I mean, I can do it, inasfar as it can be done, and I'm doing it successfully, but it's far from the best thing either for me or for my army of dreaded minions. I can't track the work very deeply, or get much into the product/business end of things, and it turns out that with this much scope, it can be very difficult to catch little problems before they become medium-size problems.

Anna got the house painted! It was a horrid, peeling taupe, and now it's a nice light sage with a purple door. It spruces up the whole intersection. She's currently mulling over plans for our small back patio, and advancing the garage replacement as quickly as possible, which is not very quick at all: we didn't know this at the time, but if replacing the garage were going to be easy, someone would have paid cash for the house long before we got to it.

The boy! The boy is very large, scarcely qualifying as boy-sized, now. He's scarce months away from being taller than me, and he's 12! We may end up putting bumper-foam on our doorway lintels, until he gets the hang of whatever awe-inspiring height he ends up at. (I don't think he's gangly or awkward. He's always had his own quite distinct manners of movement, and so far he's just a bigger, adolescent version of that.)

The Snugglehaus abides.

back on the farm

We're just back from a week with my parents on Cape Cod. I've been lucky to have been going there my whole life, and it's interesting to see it from other perspectives that don't have decades of memories behind them. We rented our own place, and the rental agency wanted to give me piles of tourist literature. We always used to have it around when I was a kid, because when it's pouring rain out and you have 3 young children in a small 2-bedroom cottage with no privacy and no Internet--what's up, 1985?--you want a comprehensive list of every straw you can desperately grasp at. So we went several times to Sealand of Cape Cod, which I thought I might have glimpsed in the damning documentary Blackfish, though I don't think they kept orcas. We did see dolphins, seals, and sea lions every year, though I found the latter two indistinguishable until I moved to California, which, elephant seals notwithstanding, is mostly sea lions.

The niece I'm used to thinking of as "my younger niece" is now almost 14, and since her title was taken nearly 6 years ago, I may re-brand her as "Brunhilde," which I'm sure she'll find hilarious once she learns who Brunhilde is. She definitely will not roll her eyes yet again and text "omg Uncle Chris is so weird" to my wife.

(Funny enough, she does have a living-memory ancestor named "Borghild." Great-great-aunt, I think.)

It's summer, which means even more things are growing. Oranges ripen in winter, which I never bothered to learn until I had an orange tree, but the rest of the food on the estate comes in summer. (Even in California, at sea level apple season is not in August.) I can't really tell you when pomegranates are ripe, because we can't figure it out, and anyway the opossums eat them.

Anna fertilized and calculated proper watering for everything, and I worked the irrigation system and the compost bin.

• Both peach trees, the big gnarled one out back and the spunky little gnarled one on the driveway that seems like it should be dead, put out a wealth of fruit this year. Per Anna's suggestion, we stripped them both, and dried most of it. It turns out that peaches are mostly water and maybe 15 pounds of whole fruit became a few pounds of dried fruit. It's now a long way toward all gone.
• The opossums when gonzo on the peaches, and good for them. Pretty funny to pick lots of good-looking peaches only to discover the skyward-facing half has been eaten out.
• The plum tree took the year off again, but has very kindly continued leafing and providing shade.
• The pluot is our real success story, with pounds and pounds of amazing fruit that is easily twice the size of our first year, and better tasting. 
• It's still too much of a pain in the ass to process and save, though: it's very hard to separate the flesh from either the skin or the pit. (I have blanched, X-ed, cold-watered, warm-watered, pared, and food-milled in every combination. It all sucks.)
• I'm not too sorry we can't save them, because I did get some dried last year, but the raw fruit is already so sweet that the concentrated sugar of the dried stuff literally hurt my teeth.
• The apple tree is going gangbusters, but in addition to the normal variability of a tree's fruit year to year, the opossums like it, so.
• Anna pruned the fig tree heavily, and in response it is...bigger than it's ever been. Possibly not with more figs, but Figpocalypse 2016 is gonna be a thing and you will hear about it.
• (I have not finished the dried whole figs from last year, though I have some prosciutto ready to help me out.)

My garage may be held together by inertia and termite excrement, but the trees are all good!

dog, dog, more dog, and also dog

I'm still on leave from work, so life is still mostly Dog and Emotional Processing. The dog helps, in unexpected--to me, because I've never had my own dog--ways.

I've been bad about taking her for morning walks, but then in the afternoon (not very smart, because it's hot) I've been motivating to take her on excursions. Saturday and Sunday we went to the two closest off-leash areas, and she did great! She was tired.

(On the right there is a standard Jack Russell Terrier sleeping position.)

I'm not sure how her obedience is with other people: she's very focused on me, very much My Dog™. She's excited to see me, and when she's most excited, she doesn't actually want anything except my company and attention. Faced with that daily onslaught of unconditional love and patience, I could possibly start believing I deserve it as much as I think everyone else does.

It's hard to know what her story is. Clearly she started out well-socialized and cared for, and then later encountered abusive people, and spent time as a stray. People with lots of rescue-dog experience say she's settling in really, really fast, relatively--I guess rescues often try running away, so it's a while before you can have them off-leash. On the first day, she did check the yard perimeter and had a short go at digging under the fence--good luck digging there without a pickaxe--but we started obedience class the day after we got her, and we're kind and gentle and take good care of her, and she's super smart, so trust and communication have been happening quickly. When I took her off-leash on Saturday, I started training her to come immediately to a dog-whistle, and she got it super fast. ("Ooh, the whistle means food and scritches! Lemme check that out!") It's a tool for rare use, just for interrupting squirrel chases or if she's stalking someone's picnic.

I tried her out with doggie daycare a couple times last week, and while she made it through without incident, she was clearly unhappy overall. After some discussion, we realized that she and I would both be happier if we bring her along to the East Coast next month, instead of boarding her. That's its own little project, though luckily she can ride in the cabin. She will hate it, since it's 6 hours of not being able to stand up, but (although she lacks the temporal consciousness to make the connection) she will hate it less than not being with us.

(Someone is ready to come back inside. Or wondering if I'm coming out.)

She's good company.

all dog, all the time.

For various reasons, just as Anna is the primary parent for J, I'm the primary parent for Leela, which mostly means I'm the Feeder, the Trainer, and the Scary Gender. All at once! She tracks my movements a lot, partly because we're pals, but--and this is inseparable where training is concerned--I give her food. I'm not sure if she's always hungry, but the shelter says she spent time as a stray, so it may just be a survival-mode "eat everything you can while it's available" thing. She tracks my movements pretty carefully, when not doing her Beagleshark patrols, back and forth across the house looking for food dropped on the floor.

J is adapting to her, and she to him. She licked his hand this morning, and he was so grossed out he had to leave the morning snuggle to wash it; on the other hand, this morning I coined the name "Beagleshark," which made him laugh, and then he was singing "Beagle, Beagle, Beagle, Beagle" in the bathroom, an honor reserved for things he likes. And he started out the day saying "Hi" when she was 10 feet away from him, and now says "Hi, Leela" when she's more like 5 feet. And, while it's difficult to gauge these things in doggy brains, she seems to have stopped sniffing at his feet, which he doesn't like.

I'm getting the hang of dog training, at least for a relatively uncomplicated case like Leela: she's pretty bright, and if she's not exactly eager to please, her apprehension makes her attentive, which is useful enough. She knows her name well enough that today I actually interrupted her progress toward exploring a new room. We've been doing some "Sit," and experimenting with "Up" and "Down": I used "Down" to get her off a bench at the dog park, and realized that if she can learn those as "move up/down one level from where you are" that they then have applications beyond getting her on or off the furniture.

It's a good time to be on leave from work.

I'm still worried about her getting bored and seeming to be unable to really have fun: as much for her happiness as the fact she can't be left unsupervised, lest she destroy things. A friend pointed out it will take some weeks for her to really settle in to this being home, and that seems very wise.

She is very much like everyone else in the household: traumatized, dealing with it as best she can, and healing. Last night we watched the first-ever episode of Doctor Who, and when men (not women) started talking on-screen, she got all rigid and started growling and barking. (She has the cutest growl, which you might expect from a dog with a head the size of a Little League baseball.) I took her to the back of the room and soothed her as best I could, and she never really relaxed, but she did stop shaking and barking.

Tonight, we watched the second episode, and voilá! Not only no growling, but the TV barely got her attention.

It's nice to provide a safe space.

so this happened.

This is Leela. We adopted her from Pets In Need on Monday night. She's supposedly 2 years old, she's definitely 13 pounds, and she looks like either a Beagle or a Jack Russell Terrier, depending on the angle. (If you get to hear her mournful wailing of sadness, it is clear she is part Beagle.)

We've been talking about this for months, and I've met some dogs, but finding Leela herself was rather sudden, so we're a bit overwhelmed today. While she is not not-mellow, exactly, she does turn out to have more energy than she displayed in the shelter, and no well-established toy or chewing habits, which wasn't one thing or another until she chewed through the cable (luckily not the 120VAC side) of Anna's MacBook Pro power supply. So she can't be unsupervised even in the dining room/living room area that we've gated off from the bathrooms: she clearly gets bored, but she also doesn't like to play, and there's no great signal that she's bored. Maybe we get a Pack 'n Play for dogs and confine her to a smaller area when we need to. It's a little stressful right now.

She was clearly abused at some point: she often shrinks from me putting her harness on or picking her up (which has to happen all the time because she won't jump in or out of the car right now), and she'll shrink from anyone who looms over her too closely. Last night she was growling whenever the stereo played something too much like talking; tonight we were watching the first-ever episode of Doctor Who, and she got rock-stiff and growled and barked, and could barely be induced not to. The 3 of us here know something about being wounded and being triggered, so we have a lot of empathy for her. We trust she will have empathy for us, once we're all less focused on freaking out.

This is all new to me. I knew my parents' dog, but really I got to know him after Mom had socialized him properly, got him to stop jumping on people, got him to respond to his name if he felt like it. Before I can train Leela in basic-sounding things like "sit," I have to teach her her name, because a dog can't listen to you if you don't get her attention first. Luckily we started obedience classes last night, and the instructor covered it (besides Leela, a couple of the 5-month olds were none too responsive to their names either). Leela is beyond food-motivated, so we worked on it at the park today, and eventually she got it pretty well. At home I built on that and mostly taught her "down" as applied to putting her front legs on the couch. She wasn't even crabby that I don't give her a treat when I call her name. (She may not remember, exactly? Doggy brains are not like our brains.)

Anyway. Lots of stuff like that. It's a shock to the system.

Though it is certainly the fuzziest, snuggliest shock to the system I've ever had.

nothing good can come of feeding him.

J, at age 11, is well on his way to claiming his genetic birthright, which is to say that of being the size of a tree, or perhaps a black bear. It's unclear how gangly he'll be and for how long, but we don't expect he'll be under 6'4". He grows, in addition to taller, ever kinder, wiser, more empathic, and more aware of his own unique balance of strengths and deficits. He has actual friends, has made one friend all on his own with no parental assist, and he's disrupting class by talking with his classmates: music to the ears of the Asperger's parent.

He had a successful shadow day at an area private school! This is the first one that the school hasn't sent him home early from. Also unlike other shadow days, he was full of stories about all the interesting stuff they did. Normally the interesting part of his school day fits in a short sentence, so this is something to note. No telling if he'll get in, but this is progress.

J and I have had some major Dad time lately, which I value the way you're supposed to value these things. His biological father has been lowering the bar, but I am objectively awesome, and gentle and constructive where his father is...not. He has pushed and pulled and poked all these years, and I have still yelled at him exactly once (which stopped the bad behavior, but then required 20 minutes of reparative snuggling, so it wasn't all bad), so he feels justifiably safe with me. In addition to his using me as furniture--one of his signs of comfort and affection, signaling that you are an unthreatening part of his world, like furniture--we've fallen in lately with my reading Ready Player One to him at night. He was all nervous when we first came around to it.

"But, um...well, you probably won't read it, so never mind. Forget I said it."
"Why wouldn't I read it?"
"It's got bad words in it. Mama would filter them out."
"Well, I'm not going to do that. I thought you'd said you'd read it already."
"I have. I've read it like seven times. It's one of my favorite books in the history of ever."
"It seems a little odd to protect from words that you already know, and and have also already read in the context of the book. So let's try it and see."

(One of the special parenting features Anna and I pull off  is to have a bedrock unity of decision-making and boundaries, but different roles in the execution. Anna does everything as strict as she can manage (sometimes her patience is shot from dealing with the kid all. damn. day.), while I exercise broader discretions, if the boy can remember to ask me instead of freaking out. In the moment, I'm not sure the overall fairness makes us less infuriating.)

My reading met with his approval (it doesn't always), so it's been a Chris+John thing we do, and I am more frequently requested during this time of increased conflict with his father.

Far from our days when we learned there's only one Chris, the word "Chris" in our household has developed totemic associations of strength, reassurance, patience, a wicked sense of humor, and, of course, mind-blowing good looks.

changing self-perception.

I was just in Seattle, and Alaska Airlines tore up my suitcase a little bit. They were super nice about it, and offered to fix the bag, or give me a travel credit. The woman asked, "Do you fly a lot?", and I started to answer "No," but stopped myself.

Since I work remotely for a company in Seattle, and Seattle is what an Edmonton co-worker described as "a long bus ride" for me, and I enjoy Seattle, I go to Seattle fairly often now. And since we have most weekends kid-free, Anna and I make and take opportunities to go places together.

This is just the stuff that made it into Google Calendar.

So, yeah. I travel a lot.

2014

• Feburary
• Massachusetts (parents)
• March
• San Diego outskirts (Legoland)
• April
• Santa Cruz Mountains (Zen retreat)
• May
• upstate New York (college reunion, never doing that again)
• June
• outside Seattle (in-laws)
• July
• Seattle (job interview)
• Cape Cod (parents)
• August 
• Seattle (job onboarding)
• September
• Marin County (in-laws wedding)
• October
• Seattle (company community summit)
• multi-family campout
• Santa Cruz Mountains (Zen retreat)
• Las Vegas (RICON)
• November
• Vancouver
• Seattle (job training)

2015

• January
• Seattle (in-laws + company rally)
• March
• Fuzdome (my chill birthday weekend with friends)
• Massachusetts (parents)
• Santa Clara (company conference)
• April
• Santa Cruz Mountains (Zen retreat)
• May
• Seattle (work [emergency product re-focusing for my group])
• June/July
• Connecticut (high school reunion)
• Seattle (work)
• Seattle (with the boy: combination Anna's work/my work, then in-laws) 
• August
• Cape Cod
• September
• Santa Cruz Mountains (Zen retreat)
• October
• Seattle (company community summit) 
• upstate New York (college a cappella group reunion)
• November
• San Francisco (RICON: not far, but still counts)

Seattle.

We just got back from vacation a few weeks ago! In Seattle.

I was already in Seattle for work, of course, about 2 weeks before that, and then maybe 5 weeks before that. Sea-Tac Airport and I are old friends. I've been flying in and out a lot since July of last year. Most of the power outlets in Terminal A still don't work.

Anna went to her corporate client's offsite, for which they pay airfare and hotel for everyone's families, and we decided to bring the boy along and combine that with a visit to my in-laws in the area.

The offsite was at the Four Seasons Hotel. I'd never stayed at a Four Seasons, normally deciding I have better uses for the extra $500 per night, so I didn't really know what to expect.

It's really nice.

That seems obvious, but I have never stayed in a hotel that nice, so the level of niceness was a bit beyond my previous understanding of hotels.

First we're in the lobby, and the boy is saying something about how this is a really expensive hotel that only rich people would stay at. (In his other household, "rich people" is a unified and negative entity in the world, and it can be hard for him to keep his paradigms straight.) He wasn't into a class-war rant just then, but you have to catch these things before they build up.

"Okay, so while we're here, we need you to keep any snarky comments about the hotel or the people here inside your head, okay? If you need to let them out, do it when it's just us in the room."

That...worked. Immediately, and for the duration of the trip. I didn't have to remind him even once, which is rare.

Our room was pretty cramped, and had a single bed, and faced the big neon sign of the Seattle Art Museum. Even on someone else's dime, I wasn't looking forward to three nights there. Clearly there had been a communications issue, so Anna started on getting us moved to a different room. J immediately started doom-and-gloom about how we'd all have to sleep on the floor or something.

"Oh, man. It'll be just like that time in Grass Valley, remember? We couldn't get the key to the house, and just like you predicted, we had to go back into town and sleep in our cars?"

"That's not what happened!"

"You're right, you're, right. I forgot. We had to sleep in the street."

'That didn't happen, either."

"Right. We didn't panic, we got the key, and everything was fine. So. The way to think of this is that all these dozens and dozens of people working in the hotel, their job is to help us have a good time. So they're all going to be very nice and helpful. They'll set us up with another room, because that's their job."

Thus ended the doom, more or less.

Our new room was just a couple degrees short of palatial. The bathroom was literally the size of our bedroom at home, only coated in marble. There was a TV embedded in the vanity mirror. There was a telephone next to the toilet.

Instead of a bright neon sign, our window looked out on the pool area, over Pike Place Market, and out to Puget Sound. It was a much, much, much nicer room. I was boggled. J was literally speechless for several minutes (as common for him as it is for me).

I could have sworn I took pictures of the room, and lots of other things besides; maybe I deleted them without actually taking them off my phone first? I'm not at all sure what's going on there. Just imagine the kind of hotel room that comes with this view.

They have a Coffee Concierge. Dial 4505 in the morning, and they will bring you coffee and/or tea service. It's good coffee.

Anna was actually working, which meant that J and I had two whole days together, and confronting me yet again with the fact that compared to her, I am a bit of a slouch as a parent. I don't think I forgot to feed and water the kid, but I did have us on sort of a long adventure the first day. J navigated us to the MONORAIL stop, which goes up to Seattle Center, where we went to the Experience Music Project, then ate some pretty solid pizza, then went back to the Experience Music Project, then went back to the hotel and gratefully spent a few hours not talking.

Day 2 was "let's play Chris Sits Around By The Pool While People Under Age 11 Splash Around In The Water For A Few Hours." The game of kings, handed down from my ancestors.

If you can stay at a Four Seasons, I highly recommend it. Extra delicious if you're not paying.

talents.

The Super Bowl just came and went, and with it the usual round of "sportsball" jokes. I make them, too, though in my case it's genuinely ironic because not only have I grown to find the game interesting, I more or less know the rules to football, baseball, and basketball.

I grew up in a sports household. My father played team sports way back when, was at least pretty good at them, and remains convinced of their value, and my brothers are preternaturally gifted at them (it never seemed to matter which one they tried). I don't think it's cynical to say that if you're good at sports, you'll probably find sports teams to be welcoming and rewarding places to be.

I was not good at sports.

Outvoted as I was, sports tended to rule the television. As long as I shared the house with the Patriots, Red Sox, Celtics, or whoever happened to be on, I wanted to at least understand what I was seeing. So maybe Dad and I didn't have the same ideas about sports, but we did (and still do) very well together talking about how the world works, and I learned about free throws and off-sides and safeties and bunts.

(As I'm talking here about how I didn't fit in growing up, I want to give a shout out to Mom, who not only doesn't particularly care about sports as far as I know, but spent decades as the only female in a house full of males. There's a lot I don't know about how that was for her--only that she has been even happier than I would expect to have our wives join the family. Maybe she should start a blog.)

My two older nieces are now teenagers, and of course they're good at sports. So close! I've got a third niece, so maybe she'll be awkward. Probably not, though, since her father is the brother who, in addition to being preternaturally athletic, was also graceful enough to do some dancing.

I was not good at sports. In between having to suffer through sports, I read books and learned big words and things that interested me and coasted through school until it required hard work, at which point I underachieved because there didn't seem to be any point to working hard at things I didn't like. (I know, right? That's a different blog post.)

(Of course, now my son underachieves, and I worry about him like my parents worried about me. But he's underachieving years before I did, so my worrying is totally different. File under "The Great Wheel Turns.")

Funny enough, some years ago I was up in Gold Country for Thanksgiving and started throwing a football around with the teenagers, and I was surprised to discover I was good at it. I could feel the weight of the football in my arm and the roughness of it in my hand, and it gave just the right resistance for me to throw it in beautiful spinning arcs to where I wanted it to go.

This has its limits: I tore a muscle or something--undiagnosed, because why bother, as long as it gets better?--that took a year to fully heal. I still suck at basketball. But after a mere decade of martial arts, I developed a fraction of the sports ability my brothers were born with.

Not to undervalue the martial arts thing. As my niece discovered through ten minutes of trying to torment me in Cape Cod Bay, I'm really good at making people fall down when they're not expecting to.

trust me! I'm an expert.

My parents just left after a long-ish visit. We spent Thanksgiving in Grass Valley, as usual, and after a quirky motel experience last year (and leaving this year until the last minute), I found us a rental house on VRBO ("vacation rental by owner"). We use VRBO all the time, and it's surprising how easy it is to find something price-comparable to a motel, and then you usually get a yard and a living room and kitchen and everything.

(There is Airbnb as well, but VRBO is a bit less chaotic and deals with serious vacation rentals, where you don't even have to filter out the "cozy cottages" that are actually a 1960s RV in someone's driveway. Conversely, Airbnb is where you will find crazy shit for $40'night.)

This house's owner is new to the renting game, so we had a little snafu with getting the keybox combination, leaving us with a 30-minute delay waiting for him to call or text me--bonus points for the house's spotty cell phone reception. The boy arrived in the second car, and he was all revved up to explore the house, because that's what we always do. (Partly he's a kid, partly it's helpful for spectrum kids to know the full environment right at the beginning.) We had no key! Expectations crumbled, plans fell apart, and anxiety produced an unquenchable spew of doomsaying.

"Oh, no, we're never going to get in--"
"J--"
"--we're going to have to sleep outside, or maybe in the car--"
"Whoa. Hey. Buddy."
"--this is the worst possible thing that could ever happen--"
"Okay, look. The guy's gonna call back, we'll get the key--"
"--what if we never get home? we're not gonna be able to eat--"
"Okay, hey, look, everything's gonna be fine--"
"--how am I going to fall asleep? and I can't charge the iPad--"
"Hey. Hush. Stop. Let me ask you: how many times have I told you everything will be fine, and then it wasn't?"
"I--"
"Let me help you. The answer is 'never'."
"But--"
"So if you need to perseverate, that's totally fine, just get back in the car, close the door, and read your book, and we'll come get you when we have the key."
"I--"
"Yep, there ya go. Bye!"

The owner texted back, and I got the key. And I could have just played it straight, but have you met me? I held the key and opened the car door.

"J? You're right! We're completely doomed."
[that got his attention]
"Just kidding! Here's the key!"
"But...how...what...?"
"What'd I tell you? Am I batting a thousand on 'everything will be fine'?"
"HOW DID YOU GET THE KEY?!"

What fun is family life if you can't troll your kid?

in which a boat is bigger than originally thought.

We've been doing our regular summer traveling, up to the Seattle area for one family, and out to Cape Cod for another. I wound up being out of the office for at least half of July. This meant being gone when the completely new team structure at work began, but since I was reading books and playing in the water with my kid and my niece, the first part of the re-org went very smoothly for me.

J keeps growing up, and this time he was a perfect traveler, with nary a single meltdown before, during, or after, where previously he would do well in transit and then be a mess the next day. There was a bit of shouting at other kids or when losing too much at games, but that's to be expected. I watched him start crabbing at some kid his size who was with J on our small moored sailboat.

"Okay, come here. Why are you shouting at this kid who's all the way on the other end of the boat?"
"He's trying to take the whole thing."
"Are you sure? It looked to me like you were each staying on one end of the boat and there was plenty of space."

[inaudible grumbling]

"Did you ask his name?"
Annoyed. "Yes, it's Oliver."

That's actually pretty impressive.
"Did you tell him your name?"

Still annoyed. "No!"
"You didn't tell him you are Count Grumble von Hmphenstein?"

The smile begins.

"And that this is your boat, the Hmph of the Sea?"

Giggling!

"Based out of Hmph Harbor, Cape Cod?"

Victory!

"How about you assume Oliver is willing to share the boat, and you go talk to him?"

And then there was playing! Or at least bits of conversation and acknowledged coexistence. We try not to be too picky.

Getting the hang of this whole "parenting" thing. Just in time for the boy to hit adolescence...

this is new.

"Good night, my wonderful boy. I love you."
"Good night, wonderful Chris. I love you too."

water under the bridge.

Tonight was the annual cocktail party at my old house in Oakland. It's one of the least exclusive events I know, and you're encouraged to bring friends or co-workers--often it turns out they know someone else at the party anyway. Sometimes, it's a small Valley.

When Anna and I were dating, I once told her that if I got married, I could easily invite 200 people to the wedding without thinking very hard. She was skeptical, since she was still deciding whether I was a fountain of bullshit--I am, but not so it matters--but then she started meeting the horde, and saw that I wasn't showing off. It is actually a very big group, and while relationships vary as you'd expect, by and large we know each other well enough. The accumulated weight of shared experience.

Tonight there was my ex-girlfriend C, who was quite justifiably angry at me for a few years, until I got my head out of my ass and apologized, and eventually we became able to talk like old friends. Just last week, at a dinner party, I got to tell the remarkable story of our first date, which is one of my favorites. Of course everyone at the table has known me for years, and known her almost as long, and that just makes it all awesome.

There was also my ex from The Bad Relationship, who doesn't want to remember anything about our mutual past, but we did have quite a civil conversation about the labeling of the numerous cheeses. She reportedly acknowledged Anna's presence in the room, as well. Small steps toward a more peaceful world.

Many of us have dated, several have been married and divorced; sometimes the pairing up happens within the community, and sometimes the pairing up brings in a new person. (Or several, in my case: on the way home from the party when my late friend J and his wife H first met Anna, H commented how much she liked Anna and how well Anna and I seemed to fit together. J said, "Yeah...don't get too attached. We've seen this before, and they don't necessarily stick around." Anna was unable to convince H to tell this story at our wedding.)

(In my defense, this seems a little unfair, since my pre-Anna girlfriend was around for 3 years and still talks to my friends, if not, for mysterious reasons, to me. Nonetheless, a valid point.)

Most of the gang is a bit older than me, so they've had the pleasure of watching me grow from an obnoxious, if usually charming, twentysomething single guy, into a charming, if occasionally obnoxious, thirtysomething husband and father. These are my people. We've all grown up together, gone to Burning Man, eaten lovely food, helped each other, trusted each other, adjusted our expectations to what we're all capable of.

Across the community, biological families range from the fabulous like mine, to varying levels of dysfunction, all the way down to the horrific. No matter what we each started out with, now we have each other, too.

Our traditional dinner toast is "Here's to the family you choose."