Growing Up Together

Our friend Robert had back surgery. He was home for a few days. His wife told Jo that she was so ready for him to not be in her way. "So, do you and Arun spend all that time together?", she asked with the kind of fascination we usually reserve for National Geographic series exploring the habits of strange creatures.

Yes we do. We are together a lot. And together with the kids a lot. I see it as a darn lucky privilege that I get to spend all this time with the people that I want to spend all this time with. Perhaps the kids don't. We won't know till they are older and talk to their therapists about that. But the kids end up spending a lot of time with each other. Here's Vivian holding Evan's hand while he gets his flu shot.

But lately there has been a disturbance in the force. Vivian doesn't play much anymore, in the old-fashioned sense of the word play. She doesn't jump on the trampoline, or play "char-char", Evan's favorite imaginary game. Or Harry Potter trivia, or on the ninja line out in the backyard. She talks to her friends about boys and pansexuality and other things like that. She reads books that are too mature for Evan in subject matter. She paints and draws her anime characters. And her busy social life means that she is constantly at sleep overs or with friends.

I didn't know what effect this is having on Evan. Till the other day when Jo went to his parent-teacher conference. He had to write about a character in a story who was lonely. And he had to write whether he ever had felt that way. His answer:

"Opal feels lonely because she does not have many friends in her new town. Yes, I have felt the same way. It was because my sister doesn't like me and my cat is dead."

Oh my god! A stab of cold ice cut through my heart when I read it.  Jo and I will gather around him a bit more. And give him the opportunity to play with his friends after school and on weekends more often. Growing up sucks.

Predictable Halloween Costumes

From around August, Evan says "I wish it was Halloween today" at least once a day. And he wonders what he's going to be for Halloween. In the end he's always a bat, a vampire, a bat vampire, or a vampire bat except for the one year when he was the goth Nico di Angelo, the demi god son of Hades from his favorite book series. This year he was a vampire.

Their school pretends Halloween doesn't exist. But around that time they have a "dress-as-your-favorite-book-character" day and for that Evan predictably dresses as Harry Potter. This year his teacher from a few years ago also dressed as Harry and they were both very excited about that.

Vivian on the other hand is predictably unpredictable. Her theme, if there is one, is obscure book characters. One year she was Zoe Nightshade, the lieutenant of the Hunters of Artemis. This year she was Rayla, the Moonshadow elf assassin who hates to kill.

Jo and I just dressed like we do everyday. It rained a bit and then it poured in the middle of trick-or-treating. We came back home early and a wet loud bunch of kids watched movies upstairs and ate candy while parents ate samosas with wine downstairs.

Cross Country

Vivian came back home from school wearing her team cross country t-shirt today. They had their end of semester party at the park. No more waking up at the crack of dawn. I'll be glad to sleep in and I bet she will too, but I think we'll miss it just a little bit. Here's one of the many pictures of downtown I took from Pfluger Bridge during my walk around Town Lake after I'd drop Vivian off in the morning.

Vivian discovered she enjoyed running last year at PE class. And that she was faster than most of her classmates. So she signed up for cross country. They met twice a week at Zilker Park before school and ran a couple of miles. Her favorite math teacher and his wife were the coaches. The kids were from 6th to 8th grade. They bonded the way people doing unpleasant things voluntarily do. By the end of the semester Vivian was running a mile in around 7:30. Nothing amazing, but faster than I ever was.

The running was only a part of the story though. Vivian set her alarm for 5:15AM on Tuesday and Thursday mornings. She'd wake up, dress for cross country, and pack a change of clothes and stuff to shower. Most days she had volleyball games after school so she also packed her volleyball stuff. Then she packed a breakfast, a snack for school, and a snack for after school. All this in addition to her normal school stuff and homework. And she'd have everything ready at the door by about 5:35AM - we didn't have to leave till 5:50AM. We'd drive in the dark to Zilker where she'd hug her friends, and start warming up. And lose a jacket or two or three.

In the beginning I tried to help Vivian get ready. Put her snack and water bottle together, for instance. But she firmly said "Daddy - I got this". Then, when I noticed she was consistently ready fifteen minutes before we needed to leave, I tried to get her to sleep in longer. Again, "Daddy - not everyone likes to rush in the morning".

Jo or I never had to wake Vivian up or drag her out of bed or hurry her up. She didn't expected us to help, and in fact discouraged it. My little girl is growing up and taking care of her life. I like it and I hope she keeps running. 

Reluctant Entrepreneur

Evan is in an entrepreneurship club at school, but not very willingly. He could have gone to school after care or to come sit in class at the club's weekly meetings where I volunteer. He chose the club. Our teacher, Amber, has done an amazing job. And we have kick-ass speakers / mentors who come to the meetings and share their stories and inspire the kids. Here's Leslie chatting with the kids. 

But Evan insists that he's not learned one thing at the club.

For the business fair, Evan reluctantly decided to run an arcade game. He asked me to help him cut a circular hole in a large piece of cardboard he found in the garage. His plan: for $1 you get three shots at putting the soccer ball through the hole. He called his business "GOAl!l!l". Besides, he had a soccer game right after the fair, and this way he figured he would already be dressed and ready for soccer.

Evan said he wanted to give 10% of sales to a charity because that could be an incentive for parents to cough up the money for their kids. He picked Project Schoolhouse - a small organization that does very meaningful work in rural Nicaragua. I have dragged Evan to two or three meetings with them  when I didn't want to hire a sitter or leave him home alone. I was surprised to see that he actually was listening to what we were discussing.

Evan's enterprise was a success. He hired Vivian to help him. He stood out in front and explained his game to would-be customers and had over $100 in sales. But he still insisted that he didn't learn anything from the class.

This evening we were driving to his very last soccer practice for this season. At the stop light at Koenig and Grover they are demolishing the old Howdy Honda dealership. There was a temporary chain-link fence around the whole thing. Evan read a sign on the fence - something like the one on this stock image I borrowed from their facebook page.

He: "Wow - why would anyone rent a fence?"
Me: "I guess so that the construction company doesn't have to deal with it"
He: "But why doesn't the construction company provide this service?"
Me: "May be it isn't a part of their core value"
He: "Besides, the fence company gets free advertising on each fence"

[pause]

He: "I mean - look at their business - they are actually getting paid to advertise their own service"

[longer pause]

Me: "So you didn't learn anything at the Entrepreneurship Club?"
He: "A little"

All The News That's Fit To Feed

News is forced fed to us in our brave new digital world. My newsfeed is supposed to be hyper-customized for me because the phone knows everything about me. What I like, my desires and searches, how much I spend and on what, what I click on, what I stare at, how many steps I walk, in which direction and where, and everything I say.

Then I saw this newsfeed the other day and realized that either they got me all wrong, or the algorithms are a lot stupider than I had credited them to be, or some other really dark plot that I don't understand is afoot.

But now that I've been tagged thusly, I just had to go ahead and click on another princess story!

Traveling Without the Fam

We travel quite a bit as a family. Jo and the kids are easy to travel with. And we do things together that we all usually like. So when they don't travel with me, it boils down to not wanting them to miss school.

I ended up taking two trips this Fall without the family- to Mexico and India. I missed the little turds before the end of both trips.

I went to Mexico to see my old friend Bill, a.k.a Navaneet. He has settled in Baja Norte and spends his time between the beach town of Ensenada and the wine growing Valle de Guadalupe. Bill was a great host and we made a very small dent in the region's 122 wineries and restaurants in the few days there.

I went to India for my college friend's daughter's destination wedding in Goa. We spent a couple of days in the party-crazy north Goa beach village of Baga. This is what the beach looks like at midnight. Incidentally, Sharath and his family and Jo and my dad and I had spent a few days at this beach in early 2005.  

Then, we met up with the wedding party and continued our party at the Charles Correa designed Cidade de Goa hotel in Dona Paula. 

After the wedding, I flew down to Hyderabad and joined Alu for a week for the ostensible purpose of working on my dad's estate. In reality we ate our way through the city with much help from the Choudary's. The Charminar, Hyderabad's landmark, appears in this mural in the courtyard of the new Zaiqa-e-Hyderabad restaurant, across the street from Sunflower - the home where Alu and I spent our formative years. When we did work, hanging out at banks and lawyer's offices was made more bearable upon returning to my new best friend in Hyderabad - Messi - Sharath's cocker puppy.

I flew Qatar Airways on my way to India and back. Qatar is under diplomatic blockade by American ally Saudi Arabia because of it's close ties to Iran, with the the start of the crisis coinciding with Trump's trip to see the Saudi king in 2017. Confusingly though, Qatar hosts the largest US military base in the middle east and is pivotal for American operations in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan. Qatar will host the 2022 World Cup and has a very shinny new airport in Doha through which I transited.

Getting in and out of Doha is tricky because the Qatar Airways airplanes can't fly through the airspace of any of it's neighbors. So the inflight entertainment console shows your airplane twisting and turning to hug the Qatari coast till it makes a dash across the Persian Gulf to the coast of Iran, which it follows northwestwards over the Shatt-al-Arab into Iraq and over Baghdad, Kirkuk, and Mosul, and into Turkey and beyond.

And by the miracle of modern technology, I returned home to huge hugs from Vivian and Evan about 24 hours after stepping aboard an airplane in Hyderabad. 

Looking Out of Windows

When I was Vivian and Evan's age, I didn't blink when I was in a rare airplane ride - because there was so much to see outside the windows. Sometimes, I can get Vivian and Evan to look. Mostly they don't. But I continue to stare. Here are a few photos from a recent trip to San Diego.

If it's particularly interesting I come back and look it up. This is near Dateland, Arizona. It is one of the world's largest solar power plants and provides energy to California.

Below is the Yuma Proving Grounds north east of Yuma, Arizona. It's the world's largest military test facility. On the western (left) edge of the picture is the Colorado river just before what remains of it flows into Mexico. The Army Corps of Engineers tested amphibious crossings and built pontoon boats to train it engineers during World War II here. The air strip at the south end is the Laguna Army Air Filed. To the east is the circular track for testing army vehicles and is a part of GM's commercial Yuma Desert Proving Ground.

The lake in the photo below is the Salton Sea and is California's largest lake by area, but it was made accidentally. The area occupied by the lake has apparently filled and dried in 400-500 year cycles historically, but was a low dry desert when a rail depot was built here in the 1860s. Then in 1905, excessive rain and silt in canals built five years prior from the Colorado river breached their banks and the main flow of the Colorado started filling the dry lake bed. It took two years to plug the breach and by that time, viola - there was a lake. Since then it has been in it's drying cycle and has gone from freshwater to more saline than the Pacific Ocean, killing off the resort towns and resident fish populations. 

And here's Lake Travis - as we came back to Austin from the west - with a splash of the setting sun reflected off a cloud and the lake. Mansfield Dam and the outgoing Colorado River - not the one in Arizona and California - are on the the top leftish. The Oasis restaurant is the large built-up blob at about 7 o'clock on the main basin of the lake. The body of the lake carries on to the right and the Cypress Creek arm is on the bottom right. This is the lake where I mostly do my sailing.

Arguing

This happened several weeks ago. Evan and I often argue about arguing and it drives Vivian and Jo crazy.

Evan was eating dinner. His bowl of noodles was half full (or was it half empty?). I enquired if he needed any more. He asked "Can't you see I still have noodles?"

He said he couldn't understand why would I ask if he wanted more when he already had noodles, and ended up calling my original question unreasonable. I didn't fight it. I knew the next course was cookies.

When he had taken a bite into his first cookie,

Me: "Do you want more cookies?"
Me: (before he could reply) "I shouldn't be asking such unreasonable things."

Evan saw the problem right away. But instead of admitting defeat he attacked the basis of the analogy, which is pretty good strategy. Or plain unreasonableness.

Evan: "Daddy - don't you know that we are talking about cookies now and not noodles? You are again being unreasonable."