Rob and the California George Family

My blog was dormant for a long time mainly due to heavy work demands on my time.

The dwarves sang their working song with such joy. I enjoy my work, but I don't live for it. However, being a consultant leads to busy times and slow times. You dread the slow times because consulting is all about utilization (i.e., being busy). You dread the busy times because they usually lead to trade offs in life between long work hours, family time, helping with homework, volunteer activities, etc. For me personally, the trade off is usually met by cutting back on activities that are fun for me personally and sleep.

The key is to remember that this is all a phase. The need to spend time with the kids for homework, volunteer work for their groups, etc. is drawing to a close soon. Bethany will be away from home next Fall leaving us with just 3 people at home. Hayley is just 3 school years behind her. I expect that a few years from now I'll look back at these times fondly and wonder why they are gone. I am saving up a lot of the fun things that I want to do for then when I will have the time to do them. Maybe that will keep me from looking backwards too often.

I have heard an expression that no one ever gets to the end of their life and regrets that they didn't work more hours. Really? I'm sure that there are plenty of people that are miserable at the end of their life because they weren't willing to put in enough work hours. For me, the trick is balance. I need to work enough to provide for my family and hopefully have something left over to retire someday. However, I need to be around my family enough to enjoy and share the fruits of my labor. I hope that I will look back at the end of my life and think that I found a good balance of work, family, and meeting my personal needs.

Labels: Family, Work

We have had a definite summer mix of entropy and order in our household.

Entropy:
My work watch battery died. My casual watch band broke. The stores are always packed when I go to get them fixed, so I keep waiting for another time.

The Tivo that I got Celeste for Christmas didn't work as billed. It was not recording programs and was randomly resetting. We have gotten 3 replacement units to test (the latest seems to be working finally).

My cable modem stopped working together with cable TV. I could only get one or the other - in the middle of trying to test one of the replacement Tivo units!

The suburban needed new tires after we got a flat on a family outing.

The refrigerator was slowly dying, but gave us enough warning to go find a replacement.

The first replacement refrigerator had a leak in the freezer. It made beautiful ice sculptures, but that was not enough to offset our real need for a freezer.

The day that the first replacement refrigerator was delivered, our clothes washer decided that holding water was optional and dumped it all out on the floor. It gave us no warning, so we went appliance shopping again.

The second replacement refrigerator was obviously damaged, yet the retailer sent it to us anyway. The delivery guys were smart enough to show us the damage before unloading it.

The third replacement refrigerator and the new washer both arrived today. Both seem to work, but the delivery guys did some carving in the wood door jam to the kitchen as they moved the unit in.

I've missed some details, but that gives the general direction.

This is not a rant, but rather an observation that sometimes the bad luck cycles like to coincide. However, it's easy to forget the good things (i.e., the order) if you don't stop and think about it.

Order:
Bethany made it to Norway to visit Ina and family, stayed for more than 3 weeks, and returned as planned. Our webcam and cell phone communications allowed for daily contact as planned.

Bethany finished her Girl Scout Gold Award and we got to hold a nice party for her and her friend (they had "twin" projects at the same location) at the park where they did their project.

Celeste and I made it to our first no-kids getaway in almost 20 years last month. Hayley had a great time with Flying Van and family, Bethany was in Norway, and Andrew is still lives with Gramma in Costa Mesa.

Hayley has started summer Volleyball in preparation for trying out for the high school team. She is also moving into high school as a freshman and will join her sister at the same school for the first time in 5 years.

Hayley got a preview of being an only child while Bethany was away. It was good practice for when Bethany heads to college in a little over a year. She seemed to like it, although she did miss her sister.

Celeste and I had our first chance to see Andrew and his band perform recently here in Lake Forest. He has been working with them for a while, but it was the first venue that was close enough when the kids were busy for us to check it out together.

Labels: Andrew, Bethany, Family, Hayley, Ina, Scouts, Vacation, Volleyball

Things have been very busy for me since the cruise. The week after the cruise I was in Montreal visiting my current customer. This was followed by a week of preparing for another prototype review for that customer. This week, I am in the Toronto area at another office for the same customer. However, I hope to find more time for blogging again.

Since it has been a while, this post will cover a lot of ground.

Andrew has been playing with a couple of bands and starting to make some money here and there. He is a lead singer and plays guitar and bass guitar. His band has had a couple of out-of-town trips with the most recent to Arizona where they played at a bar and Utah where they played at a wedding. Celeste had a chance to see him play at a local bar/restaurant near home while I stayed home with the girls.

Bethany has started the SAT/ACT testing process. You can definitely tell a motivated teenager when they are willing to PAY to get up early on a weekend and take a grueling test! She is especially looking forward to getting out of school. The day after her last final, Beth is off to Norway to visit Ina and her family for three weeks!

Hayley has continued playing volleyball. She moved up a level and has real coaching instead of just me now. Her skills have definitely improved with her specialties being serving and setting. Hayley is about to graduate from 8th grade and become a freshman at the high school.

Hayley and I went to see the latest Shrek movie last weekend while Bethany was taking her SAT Subject Tests. It was fair, but not as good as the first one IMHO.

Hayley continues to be my last hope for playing my board games. Bethany is not into them at all, Andrew will play some when he is around, and Celeste will only play a few. Hayley has really enjoyed quite a few of them and occasionally I pull out an old classic. The most recent classic was Battle Masters. This is close to minatures, but still on a game board. Granted the game board is around 4' by 5' and with lots of cool plastic pieces to move around (knights, orcs, archers, beastmen, etc.). We pulled aside the dining room table to have room to play and kept it around for the weekend. Lots of fun pulling out the old stuff!

As I write this, I am in the Toronto area for work. I am outside of town without a car since my hotel is across the parking lot from my customer. I can see downtown Toronto in the distance from my hotel room, but no time on this trip to visit. I've posted some pictures from there. Also, when I checked in they were out of regular non-smoking rooms. Rather than moving me to smoking (Yuck!), they upgraded me to a suite with a Jacuzzi and Sauna. Despite all of my trips to Finland, I have never tried a sauna. I did try out the Jacuzzi, so maybe I have to give the Sauna a try tonight. Maybe. I posted some pictures of that too.

I did take a nice walk last night and found a local geocache. I was disappointed to see the the geocoins that were supposed to be there were not. However, when I read the log today I see that a new geocoin was dropped off. If the rain stays away, I may go get that one.

My hotel is very near Pearson International Airport, so I can see planes in the final approach to landing from my room. The hotel is soundproofed nicely, so it is cool to watch. This is obviously a very international destination. Here are some of the airlines that I can remember seeing from my hotel this week:

* Air Canada
* Jazz
* Continental
* United
* American
* Korean Air
* LOT (Polish Flag Air Carrier)
* AlItalia
* Lufthansa

OK, that is enough for now. I'll try to post shorter blurbs more often for a while!

Here is the Toronto skyline as seen from my hotel window:

This is the jacuzzi and sauna in my hotel room:

Here is the jacuzzi in my room when I prepared it for use:

I found a geocache in that small tree behind me:

Labels: Andrew, Bethany, Blogging, Family, Games, Geocaching, GPS, Hayley, Ina, Movies, Rob, School, Travel, Volleyball, Work

During the cruise, we had a very cool cabin. Since this was a Girl Scout trip, we had to have a separate bedroom for the girls and the adults. We got an "Obstructed View Family Suite" cabin. This gave us a cabin with two rooms: a living room/bedroom combination and then a 2nd bedroom. Each bedroom had a bathroom. Having two bathrooms was essential with 3 teenage girls!

The picture below was taken from the main room. The door straight ahead is the exit to the hallway. You would enter the room from this door and be in a small hall. The door that you can see to the left side of the photo is the entrance to the 2nd bedroom.


Some of these pictures, taken with the camera on my phone, are pretty fuzzy. Sorry about the quality issues. However, these make the cabin easier to explain.

The picture below is turned around from the one above. My back is to the door out to the hallway. On the right, you can see part of the 2nd bedroom. Straight ahead, you can see the couch in the main room. On the far wall straight ahead, you can see part of the curtain. Our room had windows looking out the starboard side of the ship.


Here is a picture from inside the 2nd bedroom. You can see the window. It was enough to let light in, but the view was very obstructed by the lifeboat hanging right outside of our window. When I took this picture, the closet for this room was directly behind me and the bathroom was to my right (out of view of the picture).


Here is the main room. As I said before, it served as a combination bedroom and living room. This picture is taken from the bed. The doorway across the room to the right leads to the short hallway entrance to the room. The couch seen in the prior photo is straight ahead in this picture.


This picture is taken from the doorway into the main room. It is looking back at the bed that was the origin point of the picture above. In this picture, you can see the large window on the left (there were two in the main room). What is not seen is the bathroom door on the left side of the bed from this point of view.


Here is a view of the window by the couch. In the main room, the lower part of the window was covered by the lifeboats. However, we had a decent view above the lifeboats.


Here is the view from our main room window at sunrise on our first morning on the ship. We are approaching Maui when these pictures were taken. I have included a photo looking left out the window, looking straight out the window, and looking right out the window.

Labels: Family, Scouts, Vacation

One of the highlights of the Hawaii trip was when Bethany, Udara, and I went zip lining. They have tall stands of pine trees brought in by Captain Cook long ago. These continue to grow tall and strong. Very tall!

After an earlier post, Shoo asked if I weighed myself before and after the cruise. I definitely weighed myself before the cruise. The zip line company has an upper weight limit and, at my heaviest, I have been above that. I started the cruise at 250lbs looking at a weight limit of 265lbs. The zip line excursion was scheduled for Thursday (nearly the end of the cruise). That gave me an incentive to watch the good intake! On zip line morning, I weighed in at 251.4. I was happy.

The course went in a roughly circular pattern so that we did not have to do much walking. There were some bridge crossings, but no hiking from one line to another.

Here are some photos.


... and one video. Unfortunately, I ended up backwards on this landing. I came in facing forward for the rest, but this is the one video of me on a full zip line run. This was towards the end of the 7 zip lines that we did. They tried to get us to do a trick. I was going for a 360 degree spin. The 180 that I got was pretty weak!

Labels: Bethany, Family, Vacation

The cruise industry is doing a lot to try to increase the revenue per person once they get you on the ship. Don't get me wrong - you can have a great time without spending on any of the extras. The price includes a room, food, and entertainment. A "service fee" is automatically taken at the end of the week to cover the standard tips for the restaurants and the room steward. You have opportunities for extra tipping, but it is for anyone special that you want to recognize or for some of the "extras" on the ship.

One extra that we partook of was the ship's photography department. We didn't purchase all of the pictures that they took and we bypassed some of the photo opportunities. However, we did buy a few photos and a scrapbook. Our arrival photo purchase included a photo of the ship and the scrapbook included another photo of the ship.

Here are copies of the photos that we bought.

Here is our ship: the Pride of America. This is the photo that came with our arrival photo.


This is when we arrived to the ship on Saturday, April 3. We had flow in from LAX, taken a shuttle to the ship, and we were about to check in and get on the ship. This photo was taken in the arrival area with a few hundred of our soon-to-be-ship-mates around us. They had entertainment and some reading to get ready for the first day, so overall it was a decent check-in experience.

P.S. They claimed that it was an important tradition to set me on fire upon arrival (see my hand in the photo above).


The ship's photography department had opportunities for formal portraits. We didn't do that. However, we did have some fun with some green screen photos. Below is the only one that Celeste and I liked. The girls were busy with the teen club and didn't join us.


At each port, there was a photo opportunity as you left the ship. We skipped the photo opp in Maui and Hilo. However, we got a nice family shot when we got off the ship on Wedneday, April 7 in Kona on the big island. We were on our way to kayaking and snorkeling (I have already posted a few of those photos).



On Thursday morning (April 8) we arrived in Kauai. Bethany, Udara, and I left the ship for another one of our shore excursions. More about that in a future blog entry.


On our final full day of the cruise (Friday, April 9) we left port early enough to sail along the Na Pali Coast of Kauai. As you can see from this photo, the scenery is very dramatic. This part of the island is off-limits to any development.


The next day, we got off the ship at around 9:15am (after one last buffet breakfast). Little did we know that we had more adventures ahead. But that is a story for another blog entry.

Labels: Bethany, Family, Hayley, Rob, Scouts, Vacation

On our trip to Hawaii, we made use of 6 different digital cameras. The quality of the cameras ranged from a very nice one that Bethany purchased last year to my cell phone camera at the low end. Hayley also had her first chance to try out a camera that she bought last year too. She was happy with the results.

Anyway, my laptop was the repository for the pictures all week. Yesterday, I sent an external hard drive full of pictures and videos home with Udara to back up. Then Bethany wanted copies of the photos. All we had left was a couple of 2GB SD cards and a 256MB SD card. Between those three cards, it took around 8 passes to get all of the files transferred.

We took a lot of photos and videos!

Of course, we followed the digital camera rule of taking lots of pictures to get a few good ones. A lot of the shots are marginal at best, but that strategy allowed us to get some pictures we might not have otherwise gotten.

Anyway, I will continue to post some of the interesting items as my schedule permits.

Labels: Bethany, Family, Hayley, Vacation

Again, he pleaded that he had a lack of time to blog properly. In an attempt to at least post something, he picked a few random photos to post. These were taken with the Fuji waterproof digital camera that he borrowed from his brother, Ronny.

Labels: Family, Vacation

Rather than not posting due to lack of time, here are some initial pictures from our Hawaii trip.

Here we are at LAX before leaving for the flight. This was officially a Girl Scout trip - the girls saved up their money for many years for this. However, we only ended up with one non-family Girl Scout on the trip (Udara). Udara is one of Bethaany's best friends and like a daughter to our family. Udara's dad drove us to the airport.


Here is a starter picture taken by each of the girls on Easter Sunday on Maui.

A photo taken by Hayley:


A photo taken by Bethany:


A photo taken by Udara:

Labels: Bethany, Family, Hayley, Scouts, Vacation

Last week, during normal operation our family computer gave a dreaded Blue Screen of Death (BSOD). Sometimes a simple reboot solves the problem, but no such luck this time. I tried various diagnostic techniques over the next few days, but with no luck.

Jumping to the end of the story, the problem turned out to be a memory module that went bad. I have no idea why, but the diagnosis is 100% certain. Unfortunately, I believed that the problem was related to the hard drive before the real problem was determined. I reformatted the drive and re-installed the operating system before determining the real problem.

Even with a good data backup, it will take a long time to recover everything on that computer. Hayley has been helping me with cleaning out the dust and getting everything plugged back in again. Wow was there a lot of dust - maybe part of the explanation of the memory failure? If nothing else, it was a good exploration into the guts of a computer for Hayley and a good memory upgrade for the computer that should extend its useful life.

Labels: Family, Hayley

Life has been really busy, but it is hard to make it interesting enough to post. Here are a few notes nevertheless.

Volleyball Season came and went. I had a lively bunch of girls that made a pretty good team, but we had an ok season. I don't have stats, but we were right around 50% on our win:loss record. The important thing is that I am pretty sure that the girls had fun.

Celeste had a birthday last week and we celebrated yesterday. It was a low key day with all of the kids around. We helped her do some work around the house, played some games, saw a movie (Night at the Museum 2).

Work is busy, but not overly so. My European customers are getting ready for the July/August vacation season. They sure seem to have the right idea about vacation time over there! Even the newest employees get somewhere around 3 weeks of vacation per year plus a ton of holidays.

I took a day trip to Arizona last week to see a customer. That trip reminded me that I am very lopsided on my international vs domestic travel. In the past 2 years I have travelled to 2 US customers (Arizona, Texas) and a whole bunch of international customers. For the foreseeable future, that will remain the same. My next planned trip is to Finland in September. The international travel has been an interesting turn in my career. It takes extra travel time that would have been much more difficult when the kids were younger. I have enjoyed the chance to see some parts of the world that I would not otherwise get to.

School gets out next week for the girls. Hayley gets out a day early since the 7th graders start a day early for orientation to the new school (7th grade is the start of Middle School here). That means helping with final homework and studying for finals. However, it also means that my mornings will be my own again instead of helping get ready and driving kids to school!

I'll try to dig up some interesting stuff (at least stuff that I find more interesting) next time.

Labels: Bethany, Family, Hayley, Volleyball

I received a text message this morning from Ina that she was back in Norway. Her parents met her in Oslo and she is on her way home with them now (from Oslo she still has a ~1 hour flight and then ~2 hour drive to get home).

Ina Therese Alvaeren is an exchange student from Norway who lived with us from last August through yesterday. She attended our local High School as a senior. Due to a family event, she finished the school year early. We dropped her off at LAX yesterday afternoon and have been watching the British Airways updates on her flights since then. Now that she is with her parents, our responsibility has been passed back to them.

Ina's visit helped us have a fully packed year of family activities! A few examples:
- San Francisco
- Monterey
- Yosemite
- Las Vegas
- Sea World
- Hollywood
- Universal Studios
- Knotts Berry Farm
- Disneyland Annual Passes
- Attend a taping of America's Funniest Videos
- Visited more beaches in 1 year than we have in the last 10 years!
- Purchased a new family Christmas Tree (we go the artificial route - Ina talked us into the new tree that we bought)
- Our version of holidays such as Thanksgiving, Christmas, etc.

I am cutting the list very short, but this provides a good sampling of the things we got to do with her.

More importantly, she got to be a member of our family. She got to know a number of American kids her own age and see what we were like. She got to tell us and our friends about Norway. She walked to school with Bethany daily. She gave her extra US and European coins to Hayley and answered Hayley's questions about how to say things in Norwegian.

This is not the end of our story with Ina - just the closing of the first chapter.

Labels: Bethany, Family, Hayley, Ina

Once again, work and life activites are keeping me busy. It shouldn't be that hard to write a few lines once in a while, but I obsess over my postings. Usually. Not this one. I will keep it free flow and let it go no matter what warts it may contain. My goal is to post something despite not having a lot of time. I am also not checking what I have written before, so apologies in advance if there is any repeat material here.

My customer in Sweden has gone live with our software. They have been using it for a few weeks now and so far, so good. There are still issues to resolve, but nothing that is stopping use of the software. This customer has operations around the world. The next step is planned to be Germany in September.

Last week I was in Finland working with another customer. They plan to go live with the software in January 2010. I have 2 more planned trips back to Finland during the process.

Hayley is in the middle of volleyball season. I had to miss our first game against another site last week. I understand that the team won 2 and lost 1 game. This is a co-ed league and not very competitive (no playoffs for example). However, the kids really like to win and try hard. My team is in the 11 - 15 age bracket. I happen to have all 7th grade girls. The one team that they lost to was mostly boys on the older side. From what I hear, they made a respectable effort against them (the score was something like 25 - 15).

Ina (our Norwegian exchange student) goes home next week Tuesday. This is before school gets out, but she is getting home early for a family function. She has finished her finals and is going through her last week of school. After school on Friday, we are going to a beachfront hotel in Oxnard to let her get one last California beach weekend. It has been a great experience having her here, but after this weekend we need to give our budget a break from all of the travel and activities!

Bethany is taking French as her language in school. She plans to take it all 4 years and is finishing her second year. She was invited to join a French student honor society and had the ceremony last week. I missed it due to being in Finland. I really, really don't like to miss things like that, but had no choice this time. At least I take solace in knowing that I attend way more than most dads (based on my experience when I do attend). My job requires a lot of hours, but it gives me a lot of flexibility most of the time to attend events like this.

Andrew has gone back to school and is almost done with his first semester. He seems to be more serious this time around and in some of our conversations has recognized that he has lost a lot of time. On the other hand, he has gotten some real life experiences. He still performs a lot: singing, guitar, some keyboard. He has had a chance to play in a few for-pay shows which is good experience. However, they have been places that are not "family friendly" so far. We really want to see him perform sometime, but need to wait for a venue that he thinks will be ok for the girls to attend.

Damn. I couldn't resist. I just went to paragraph 1 and made a correction. I caught myself and stopped before doing any more. It's like an addiction!

OK, back to work. I think I spent about 10 minutes typing this up, although I really didn't time myself. In any case, it was significantly less than I usually spend!

Labels: Andrew, Bethany, Family, Hayley, Ina, Work

I have not updated for a while, so here are a few random tid bits.

Live has been very busy preparing for a "User Acceptance Test" with my customer in Sweden. This is a very important step where the users get to say if the system is ready to be used. I was in Sweden last week and we passed with some caveats. We have a few things to fix, but we are basically ready to go at the end of this month. This is a world-wide company, so if the pilot project in Sweden goes well then I have potential to travel to much more of the world.

On the home front, we took Ina (our Norwegian exchange student) to Las Vegas for a weekend. She really liked it and wanted to stay longer -- even though she is not old enough to gamble. She enjoyed taking lots of pictures and generally seeing all of the flashing lights and interesting decor. Andrew went along with us, so it was a nice family reunion weekend of sorts too.

Here are a few random photos that I have gotten lately.

In January, four representatives from my customer in Sweden came to visit. The weather was great. We went to the "Great Park" to ride the balloon. The weather was clear enough to see almost all of the way to downtown Los Angeles.


We have been keeping an eye on some of our outside wood, and decided that it was time to replace some pieces and get the house painted.



Ina (top photo) and Bethany (bottom photo) at the Treasure Island pirate show in Las Vegas. Unfortunately, the show was cancelled due to wind. However, they did not make that decision until after we had stood out there for 1/2 hour.



Hayley at M&M World in Las Vegas.

Labels: Exchange Student, Family, Travel, Work

As Lee pointed out, I have another large gap in my blog. Rather than waiting to get pictures, here is a summary of some things that have happened since I returned from Finland.

- Uneventful trip back home - as it should be! No serious delays, the entertainment system worked on the plane, and I had an aisle seat instead of the middle seat for the London - LAX flight!

- Celeste's Suburban needed some major repairs. We are not ready to downsize the car due to school and Girl Scout transportation requirements, and we are not ready to purchase another large vehicle. So we fixed it.

- Joined Hayley with her Sea Scout ship (the one she will officially join when she is 14) in the Newport Harbor 100th annivesary boat parade. The boat had problems, so we dropped out of the parade early. However, that let us watch the parade close up from the deck.

- My brother and his family (the "Colorado George Family") arrived for their Christmas visit. They stayed with my mom for a week before visiting the other family in San Diego.

- Semi-annual teeth cleaning and check for Celeste & I. All is well.

- For the second year, I got a work break around the holidays. This year, the company closed down (with pay) from Dec 24 to Jan 2.

- The girls (Celeste, Ina, Bethany, Hayley) and I visited Knott's Berry Farm with the Colorado Georges, my mom, Andrew, and Ina.

- Christmas celebration with Colorado George family, my mom, Celeste's mom, Andrew, and the family at home (including Ina) on Christmas Eve.

- Christmas Day celebration with Andrew, Celeste's mom, the the family at home. Ina was somewhat homesick, but she got a lot of gifts from both the Norway family and her American family. She made Celeste cry on Christmas Day (in a good way, that is a story for another day). We went to see the movie Marley & Me which was very different than the ads led you to expect. We generally liked it. Andrew claims that the movie made me cry. He can't prove anything.

- Celeste, Bethany, and Ina went out for day-after-Christmas sales with Celeste's mom. Hayley and I stayed home to play games together. Hayley and I were lured into having lunch with everyone at the new Ruby's that opened at the Irvine Spectrum and then we joined them for a little bit more shopping.

- Celeste, Ina, Bethany, Hayley, and I went to visit Hollywood for a day. We stalked some movie stars homes and then visited the area around Hollywood & Highland. This turned out to be one of the highlights of Ina's visit to America due to the brush with fame and lots of photo opportunities.

- New Years Eve was pretty low key. Bethany went to a dance at a local church with some friends and had a great time. We played some cards with another family at home. We popped some streamers at midnight and then I picked up Bethany and a few of her friends from the dance.

- New Years Day was an outing day, but it was cool and foggy. Celeste, Ina, Bethany, Hayley, Rachael (Bethany's friend), and I went to Corona Del Mar State Beach ("Big Corona") to let the girls play and take pictures on the rocks and jetty. I think that the last time that I was at this beach was with Shoo and Lee when we used to meet there by taking the Route 57 OCTD bus from each end (Lee and I from Costa Mesa, Shoo from El Toro). We stayed about 2 hours and left when we decided that the fog was not going to clear. We went to see the movie Bedtime Stories which got mixed reviews from the family. Andrew was not there to accuse me of unmanly emotions.

- Hayley and I have been playing the Xbox game Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliances together. We spend and hour here and an hour there. At one point we lost our save and had to start over. However, we finally finished it. It was a fun experience and I am proud to be raising a Gamer Grrl! Now I need to find a cheap copy of the sequel so that we can take the next step.

- Jan 5 was back to school and back to work. A general sense of dread was felt by all at the loss of freedom.

OK, now I need to go find some pictures to better document some of the events listed above. I will not wait 24 days for that.

Labels: Andrew, Bethany, Family, Hayley, Ina

As I sit here procrastinating due to some work that I need to get done, I am catching up on blogs and reflecting on my day. Thinking back to this evening, I covered a lot of volunteer ground.

4:30pm - Arrived home from work to prepare for the evening's activities. Spent time reviewing a homework assignment with our Exchange Student from Norway.
Group: EF Foundation

5:00pm - Left the house to coach my daughters' volleyball team.
Group: US Youth Volleyball League

6:30pm - Dropped the girls off at home, picked up Celeste & a friend to drive to Anaheim for Girl Scout "Older Girl" leader training.
Group: Girl Scouts of America

9:45pm - Arrive home to continue the work that I was not able to finish earlier when I left early for volleyball, etc. I have a demo with my customer from Sweden early tomorrow morning and I have to make sure that everything is ready to show!

Lee / Tina / Shoo (probably a large percentage of my reading audience!): Sorry that I missed our WoW session tonight. I forgot about the training that I had to attend to become an official Girl Scout leader.

Not exactly solving the world's social problems, but doing my little part to help others when and where I can. I know that most of you reading this have similar stories. What are your favorite volunteer organizations?

Labels: Exchange Student, Family, Scouts, Volleyball

The family went to a Girl Scout family camp outing in San Pedro this weekend. Nice camp, lots of cool things to do there (both in camp and nearby outside of camp).

Ina had her first chance to actually touch the Pacific Ocean on this trip. We had taken her to Laguna Beach on Labor Day, but only had time to get to the cliffs overlooking the beach and let her take some pictures. On this trip, she got to play in the sand and visit the local tide pools.

On Saturday night, the girls had a campfire. The girls were trying to come up with a skit and I made a couple of suggestions. The first suggestion was considered too gross even by their standards (which are much lower than I thought, but that is another topic). That skit was "A Hot Meal." I won't go into details, but those of you who know it understand when I say it is gross.

The one that they did like was "Rise, Egor." This was one of our favorites when we were in Boy Scouts. I have very fond memories of Lee as the mad scientist and Shoo as the Avon Lady. But I digress. The girls talked me into playing a part and I had the honor of being the first to die. The little girl that played the part of the mad scientist did a great job. Hayley played Egor and at the end of the skit had the audience cheering her on.

The campfire included the making of s'mores. This was another first for Ina and she seemed to enjoy it.

Ina is a great sport and is doing a good job of putting up with our kidding and even starting to return it. I don't think that camping on the sand is what she expected, but it is definitely a unique California experience!

Labels: Exchange Student, Family, Hayley, Scouts

I completely glossed over Bethany's birthday earlier this month. She turned 15. It has been a busy month between the reunion, our new exchange student, keeping up at work, and so on. Anyway, one of the busy items this month was the celebration of Bethany's birthday.

Bethany has a number of friends that have Disneyland annual passes. As a result, we decided to allow her to have a Disneyland birthday. This included renting a room at the Residence Inn nearby for 2 nights and covering one day of admission for a couple of friends that did not have passes.

By staying at the Residence Inn, we had great meals in the hotel room courtesy of the full kitchen. The hotel also offered a nice breakfast. We saved a ton of money by not eating at Disneyland!

The weekend was called a great success by the girls. We parents were a bit worn out though. Bethany had a good 15th birthday celebration!

Labels: Bethany, Disneyland, Family

Major kudos to FlyingVan and family for their hosting of a reunion of various high school / college years friends this past weekend. Everyone in the family had a great time. The problem with reunions is that they are often fun for those that were there and wicked boring for those that were not. This was not the case here. The kids had a great time, the spouses seemed to enjoy it, and there was plenty of variety in food and activities for everyone.

It was great to see everyone, but also equally great to have a fun weekend for the entire family.

Labels: Family

A few days ago, an email plea came through our company looking for families to host exchange students. Several of them are due in the country soon and their trip will have to be cancelled if they are not placed. Since we have an extra bedroom now, we decided to look into it. Lee and Tina had such an awesome experience that we decided that it would be worth a try.

Wow are things moving fast! We have an in-home interview tomorrow and we have started cleaning up and painting that extra bedroom. Tons of work, but hopefully a life changing experience is on the way. The girls are excited about the idea.

If all goes well, we will have a student living with us before the end of the month. Hopefully we will survive the preparation process!

Labels: Exchange Student, Family