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.