Monday, February 23, 2009

How Things Have Progressed...

...with work, family, and life.

Work
I had 2 people move to a different department, and was able to fill their spots with 2 more excellent people from other departments.  A lot of people applied, and all were qualified for the positions.  I had the luxury of balancing technical ability, personality, accomplishments and potential all at once.  In the end, I wished I'd had 6 spots.  I would have been very happy to take my top 6 candidates.  

It was a true gut check.  I had known several candidates since I was a newbie to my company.  Some I'd worked together with projects, and some had mentored me.  Some I'd taught Japanese to a few years ago.  In the end, I realized that my company pays me to manage its money wisely.  And the best investment of its money was to invest in the 2 people I chose.  1 of them I'd known for a while but had never been directly involved with, and the other I had never heard of.  Not being able to tell some friends whom I think the world of that I'd be able to offer them a position was difficult.  But as a manager, it was the best decision for me to make.

Family
The kids are getting older (as they tend to do), and each is entering a different age bracket.  Aria is becoming a tween.  She speaks intelligently, can reason, deal with disappointment well, and likes to explore.  There are still too many times when she clings to a preconceived notion and won't listen to a new one.  But she's getting better at it.  The biggest struggle we have now (thank goodness this is our biggest one!) is that when she gets a redically new type of homework assignment (like her first book report) she is so decided that she doesn't get it that she won't listen and engage as we try to help her understand it.
Christian is getting better and better at reading - you can't quite see his face light up with it yet, but he's very very close.  If we don't push him, I think some day soon he'll come to us and say, "I read this whole book!"  
Libby is finally leaving the toddler stage and becoming a little girl.  She wants someone to play with, and enjoys playing house.  
Jakers is, probably because of how unavailable Katrina and I have been, a holy tornado.  He can talk really well, but the boy will grab anything he can find, open it, and eat it.  Tonight, we found that he had opened (and eaten!) a new stick of deodorant.  It wasn't on his breath, though.  He says he ate it.  We haven't found it anywhere else.  

Life
With interest rates low and a family that is getting bigger (if not more numerous), it seemed like the right time to take advantage of the opportunity to do an addition.  So we're looking at adding 1300sf.  The drawings are in progress, and if the financier thinks the new work will appraise high enough, we'll be in business.  2 weeks for the drawings, 2 weeks for the financing, 4 weeks for the permits, and 3 months until project completion.  Assuming there aren't big problems with the first 3 steps.  
The Morning Stars is still a blast.  We're at 6 members now, and watching our capabilities grow has been lots of fun.  They're great guys to sing with.  We warm up with the hymnal each week, and it seems that more and more often we're at performance quality on our first run through.  Which is cool, especially when we're reading something new.  
Piano lessons are fun as well.  It's a little humbling to go back to beginner level.  I was secretly hoping that I would get something more difficult and work on it longer to improve my skills.  Turns out that it's best to do it from the beginning as a beginner.  But I'm getting better.  And now Aria and I have some duets to play, and our skills are improving quickly.  Yay!  Soon I'll be 2-handed at the piano.
One more thing: I've had a few plastic bags of old family photos (of my uncles in the military in the 50s) and I scanned them all recently.  Really cool.  I'm getting the scanned and printed versions ready to pass around at this year's family reunion so my uncles and aunts can comment on them.  

Sunday, February 15, 2009

Sesquicentennial Report

A smooth and seamless event it was not.  

We made it to the capitol mall at about noon.  We wandered around the blacksmith areas, saw the old trucks there, and visited some of the statuary on the grounds.  We tried to go inside, but there were people guarding the doors.  "The entrance is closed until 1, there are too many people in there."

So we walked around some more.  The governor was there on the steps outside, and made a little speech.  Cool to see him in person.  We got in line (in line to get in the Oregon capitol building???) at 12:55, and got in at about 1:20.  The place was packed.  The main recepetion area (with the Oregon Seal on the floor) had a little room to move, but there was no movement in the connector hall between the front and back of the building.  Christian wanted to buy some rocks at the gift shop.  20 minutes in line.  The lines to get the free birthday cake and hot dogs were 20 minutes each.  So we skipped those.  We did find the cookie decorating area, and my mom decorated cookies with the other 3 kids while I was with Christian buying rocks.

Now who decided to have the hot dogs and cake inside the building?  I really wanted the kids to get a sense of the wonder of how the government works in a way that's a little more fun than it was on school field trips.  We were able to peek in the House chamber, and we pointed out the governor and his office on the 2nd floor.  So it wasn't bad, but it wasn't as fun as I had hoped it would be.  We'll go back some day when the legislature is in session and spend a day there looking at the paintings and walking through Oregon history and observing the legislature at work together. 

Pics are posted on FaceBook.  

Tuesday, February 10, 2009

On My First Adult Piano Lesson

A little over 2 years ago, Aria and Christian started piano lessons with Joseph Hoffman at the Hoffman Academy.  They learned a lot and had a lot of fun.  But their parents didn't do so well at followup.   It looked very likely that we were going to move for work, so we dropped out.  And the next year was just too busy with me in school, etc.

But I finished in June and have had some time to decompress, so it was time to head back to learning.  This time, Aria and I enrolled in partner classes at the Hoffman Academy.  This is a cool place - highly recommended.  Great staff, great price for the quality, good location.  

Partner lessons are what they sound like: 2 students, 1 teacher.  The homework assignments for both are similar but not always identical.  The idea is that the students reenforce each other.  For Aria and I, it also means that we play piano together every night. 

We showed up for lessons early - our session with Kim was due to start at 6:15, but we were there at 5:45.  We sat in the car for 20 minutes waiting, which was totally my fault.  We walked in the place, and found Dave Thomas in the back room, finishing with some vocal students.  Kim was in the next room, and had just started to eat an apple.  Turns out that she gets a break between students.  

In our first session, I did a ton of things I'd never done before.  I improvised at someone's request.  I did an improve without title first.  Then Aria did one called Snow.  Then she picked Thunder for me to do.  We practiced singing and plunking the notes out (Kim called it voice matching).  We transposed a song from D to C.  And one of our assignments was for Aria to play an arrangement of "Go Tell Aunt Rhodie" on the right hand while I accompany with the guitar.  So lots of variety - this is not a place where you see a song and master a few songs.  This is a place where you learn to transpose, improvise, play by ear, and read notes.  All at once. 

It's a little outside my comfort zone, which is good for me.  I'm loving it.

Friday, February 6, 2009

Reply to Peggy Noonan's latest column

I posted a reply like this on the WSJ forum.  I lost the copy paste, so rewrote it below.  The post is in response to a post by Peggy Noonan, the conservative columnist.  The whole column is here.  
I responded to this part of the column:

On Wednesday, in an interview with Politico, Dick Cheney warned of the possible deaths of "perhaps hundreds of thousands" of Americans in a terror attack using nuclear or biological weapons. "I think there is a high probability of such an attempt," he said.

When the interview broke and was read on the air, I was in a room off a television studio. For a moment everything went silent, and then a makeup woman said to a guest, "I don't see how anyone can think that's not true."

I told her I'm certain it is true. And it didn't seem to me any of the half dozen others there found the content of Cheney's message surprising. They got a grim or preoccupied look.

The question for the Obama administration: Do they think Mr. Cheney is essentially correct, that bad men are coming with evil and deadly intent, but that America can afford to, must for moral reasons, change its stance regarding interrogation and detention of terrorists? Or, deep down, do the president and those around him think Mr. Cheney is wrong, that people who make such warnings are hyping the threat for political purposes? And, therefore, that interrogation techniques, etc., can of course be relaxed? I don't know the precise answer to this question. Do they know exactly what they think? Or are they reading raw threat files each day trying to figure out what they think?

In the post, Ms. Noonan restates the conservative talking point that either we torture or we'll have another (and worse) terrorist attack.  This is equivalent to saying that operating under the rule of law is a bad thing; that American law can not deal with terrorism.  That the only way to deal with terrorists is to operate in an extra-legal manner.

This is a bad assumption.  Most obviously, the reverse is actually true.  Places like Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Pakistan and Egypt are well known for poor treatment of prisoners at the least and torture or murder at the worst.  Where did the majority of 9/11 hijackers come from?  Suadia Arabia.  Where is Al-Qaeda based?  Pakistan.  Torture, rather than extracting extra important information, instead reenforces the idea that "the state is evil and must be overturned".  Its continued practice means that we get old information that is probably inaccurate, while new terrorists are hatching evil plots and have not been captured.  It creates a new threat while not obviating the old threats (because either you have the potential perpetrators already in custody or the plot has changed since you captured them).

This is a false choice, and somehow that has to get through the chatter and make some sense.  Torture does not equal safety.  It equals tyranny.