We were in the locker room getting dressed after swimming tonight. Amelia & Luka noticed that another baby from their class was using the hair dryer. They asked to use it, and then this conversation happened:
Amelia: Daddy, you do it first
Me: Amelia, I don’t have any hair to dry
Amelia: No daddy, on your back
Yeah… that just happened.
Book update for the New Year’s resolution:
I’m reading, in parallel, three books. It’s not the best way to nail one book per month, but I’m really enjoying it because the context switch keeps the content of each book fresh. Here’s where I am with all three:
Kanban: Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Business – 100 pages to go, and we’re starting to apply a lot of this to our design and product development process. Not overly explicitly yet, but we’re understanding WIP, the amount that can be delivered in a sprint, and I’m mentally creating the stages for projects. From there, we’ll want to start telling the story of how it all works, and there are some good folks helping me out with that.
Above the Fold: Understanding the Principles of Successful Web Site Design – This one I’m about halfway through. It’s not a lot of new content, but some good examples of existing best practices. Useful to read, but not really a life changer like the Kanban book.
Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days – I need to dive back into this guy. I’m only 25 or so pages in (PayPal’s Max Levchin, and the founder of Hotmail). I didn’t realize how much the Hotmail guys hated their VCs. A lot of lessons to be learned in this one.
And so the resolution is slightly revised to be reading 12 books this year. But other than that, I’m on course!
This was a good week.
On Friday I had lunch with Dave Sloan. I’ve inherited a lot of friends in San Francisco from Micky since she’s about 10,000 times more social. There are some where I think… Hmmm. Random. We would never have met otherwise. With Dave it’s more like, yup, I get you. We’re homies. I can’t tell you why. But he’s great to hang out with. We had lunch at Tin which is a favorite of Isaac W. as well. I ate my weight in pho, and it was awesome.
And then this week wasn’t so great 🙂 the kids were sick, and I was constantly covered in throw up. Not a good look.
Micky and I ran away Wednesday night and had a killer date night (another win).
And… I’ve restarted the piano project. I have keys, and now I need to rewire the piano to work with the new setup. Let’s call that a draw 🙂
All in all a pretty good one. Here’s to the next one.
We just got back from Manas’ house. He bought it one year ago, and he was throwing a warming party of sorts.
Since Doruk is in town, Doruk, Hanna, the babies and I piled into a car, and made our way down to San Mateo. On arriving, the babies immediately ran into the backyard, and met Simba – Manas’ 2-month old puppy. That poor dog had no idea what he had in store.
After chasing around in the backyard for a while, we made our way inside to see the house. The babies (and Gustavo’s kids as well) kept Simba busy as the rest of us toured the house.
It’s a really great place. Nice kitchen. Plenty of rooms. And the vibe is very Manas and Vibhuti. I think that that’s exactly what you want in a house, and they nailed it.
Then came the food…
First, some background. I’m not very nationalist, but I do give my brown brothers from another subcontinent a tough time. That said, and all claims that the food they cooked was Turkish aside, the food was AMAZING.
Amelia had a bunch of this potato cake like thing. They both had the chapali in droves. I made them a bit of vegetable soup, and they were good to go!
At this point poor Simba was passed out on the kitchen floor.
The company was fantastic. The conversations were good. It was a genuinely wonderful evening.
At the wonderful home of Mr. Manas.
Even though their flight got canceled, and they were delayed for 4 hours, Doruk and Hanna have made it to town. The babies are sleeping, and missed seeing them, but I fully expect Amelia to catch up quickly in no time at all.
Over Thanksgiving, and then in January when he flew out for the weekend, I could already see the bonding between Doruk and Amelia. I think on this trip the bonding will be at a whole new level, and then of course Luka will get in on the action as well.
The game plan is mainly to stay low, have fun in the city by the Bay, and just hang out. It’s gonna be awesome
This morning I finally heard the sound of normal.
Genevieve was out sick Tuesday, and so we called in a back up nanny, and the hand off there was a bit harder than I would have liked.
Amelia was sick Wednesday, and couldn’t make it to school.
Luka has a bum left foot because his ankle is sprained, and he’s clearly in a lot of pain. The doctor said to not take him to school, and so he ended up at home with me too.
There was a turning point somewhere post last throw up, post Wednesday nap time, where I knew we had turned the corner. Amelia held down her dinner. Luka started putting weight on his left foot again. I had a good feeling we were going to get a good night’s sleep, and get back to normal.
But you’re not really back to normal until you hear the kids dancing about in the living room. Toast and eggs are made and waiting on the table. And you can take a breath, soak it all in, and lose yourself in that single moment.
The sound of normal, a sometimes very boring thing, was music to my ears.
We went out on a date night tonight. It’s been a tough week. A lot of throw up (all Amelia’s), and a lot of long nights. At least Galatasaray tied Chelsea 1-1 🙂
We’ve been running like chickens with our heads cut off. Big projects. Not big enough teams to help execute. Trying to hire like crazy during the dead season (between Thanksgiving and March bonuses no one moves. Then in April the flood gates open). The 20 minute drive each way in the car is about the depth of conversation we get to have.
So tonight, when we headed back to the Pizza Place to have dinner it was really fantastic. Pouring with rain. Chill restaurant. Good pizza. And great conversation. We laughed with each other. We laughed at each other. And then we had ice cream before we came home to crash.
It was one of those nights where you get to remember why we got into this craziness together in the first place.
We just got back from swimming. We’ve changed from our Saturday afternoon slot to a Tuesday evening slot, and it’s totally changed how the kids engage. I feel like we’ve finally found their swimming sweet spot.
Our Saturday teacher was a woman named Simone who is a fantastic swimming teacher. Amelia bloomed under her, and grew by leaps and bounds. Unfortunately, Luka just couldn’t get into it. Worse… we were always late, and they were always waking up early from their naps to go.
It was just way too hard to make it all happen, and so even though leaving Simone was a hard choice, we decided to try out a new night.
I think Jenny is going to be a good teacher as well, but, more than anything else, I think we’re finally not stressing out their sleep cycle, it’s much easier to get there (and so we get the full lesson), and the class size is slightly smaller. It’s meant that Luka is finally putting his head under water, and Amelia just keeps getting better and better.
It also gives us our Saturday afternoon’s back, and we don’t feel like we lose an entire day of the weekend to having to do kid’s activity.
I just don’t get why the pool would have their 1 – 2 year old classes at THE primo nap time for that age group. It just doesn’t make sense :-/
We’re really sad we’ve lost Simone, but we’re really excited about the kids being into swimming. We’ve found their swimming sweet spot 🙂
In case you missed it, Dale Earnhardt Jr. won this year’s Daytona 500.
My driver is Kasey Kahne (a choice I made by saying whoever won Rookie of the Year the first year I watched NASCAR would be my guy). It’s been a good choice (even though there have been some rough years), and while the Daytona 500 wasn’t good to him, I have a good feeling about this year… but I digress.
Junior has the fortune/misfortune of being the son of the greatest (or maybe #2) stock car driver of all time. He’s ridden that to some great highs (twice winning the Busch series driving for his dad’s team), and some incredibly lows (two multiple year winless streaks that have haunted him). I think personally though that he’s handled it all well, and this win is I think the beginning of him coming out of his father’s shadow.
The thing is, I really get what it’s like to be Junior.
My dad started and sold a company during the first bubble at first bubble valuations. My aunt got him a t-shirt that translated the price to Turkish lira, and given the ratio was $1:1mil TL at the time, it was a huge number.
All I knew growing up was science and technology were going to open the doors for me to do the same thing. I never considered anything else except computer science/electrical engineering as a profession. I loved economics, french, and the film class I used to sneak into with Jordan, but those were never going to be a profession. At most, they’d be a hobby.
And there has been a really long lull where I felt like this was an awful choice. I would never find a way out of that shadow. And I don’t know that I’m out yet, but it’s really starting to feel like the possibility is there. And it’s really uplifting. And it’s really terrifying. But mainly, it’s exciting.
It’s a long and lonely thing a father’s shadow. But the other side is a story of a journey well traveled, and a life well lived.
I work too much 🙁 But we had a great week anyway.
Saturday after gym class the Green family came over. They are our co-conspirators in activities of parenting, start ups, travel, and SF living. It was out first true guest after moving in (Betsy gets the first true guest badge), and it was a blast. We were in the garden; the kids had fun; it was great.
Today I conned Micky into pizza for lunch. Luka was so tired he passed out in the car on the way back from the zoo. The new playground at the zoo is epic (and scary too). In his sleep state, the poor guy overfilled his diaper and ended up peeing through soaking me in the process (I was the make shift bed). I really do love The Pizza Place. And this story will live on in family lore
When all was said and done, it was a good week. Laughs. Sleepless nights. Ideas blooming.
Let’s see where it all takes us.