Okay, here’s what’s been going on since the workshop:
J had his weekly piano lesson with Vatche, and immediately afterward, I took him to a Cub Scout meeting. In the photo, he’s in uniform.
The following day, I attended a Solar Probe EPI-Hi meeting at Caltech, since so many of us on the team from out of town were in town for the previous workshop. It lasted all day, and much of the morning was spent discussing a database that I’ve been trying to shepherd through the purchase process. By the middle of the meeting, the purchase order had been approved and sent to the developer, so now I’m waiting for the actual implementation.
At J's last weapons class at the Tae Kwon Do school, I found out that Edward, the son of the owner, was returning to town for a few months to help out. The owner had a colonoscopy, and an early-stage growth was found, so it was removed last week.
After Saturday Mass, we visited the old house in Glendora. The tenants had left at the end of March; they were good tenants, but they found a house closer to the husband’s workplace. The house itself is in good shape, though, and we have new tenants slated to move in at the beginning of May. Everything is so much easier with property management.
On the 8th, in the middle of the boys’ school’s spring break, we went to the California Science Center, to watch an IMAX movie about lemurs along with some of J's friends and their moms. Then we went to see the Shuttle Endeavour. In the exhibit, I saw a number of references to John Grunsfeld, with whom I worked briefly as a grad student and who later flew on four shuttle missions.
During last week’s piano lesson, Vatche spent the last five minutes of W’s piano lesson talking to him abut the four major time periods of classical music — Baroque, Classical, Romantic, and 20th Century — and how they’re generally played differently on the piano. He said that, for Baroque, W should try to emulate the more-detached sound of the clavichord, as Bach played it, and then he realized that he hadn’t shown us the clavichord he had in his studio. So he showed it to us. While a harpsichord plucks strings, like a guitar, a clavichord strikes strings like a piano. However, it’s a much, much quieter sound than a modern piano. It was a real treat.
This weekend, I went on a car camping trip with W’s Boy Scout Troop at Jalama Beach, near Lompoc. I think there were about 60-70 scouts and Dads, but only one other scout and Dad from W’s patrol came, so we hung out mostly together. The Jalama Beach County Park was very full, but our Troop had reserved spots. Also, the park is equipped with Wifi (albeit slow), a restaurant (beach fare, like burgers), a convenience store, real restrooms, and showers. All the modern conveniences, and at least one of our scout/Dad pairs inflated their air mattress and slept in the back of their SUV.
Anyway, despite bringing enough food for our patrol to eat for the entire campout, we decided to have dinner at the restaurant on Friday and Saturday nights. I had fish and chips on Friday and the famous Jalama burger on Saturday.
W spent much of Saturday morning with a few of the other scouts digging up and catching sand crabs, putting them in water bottles. They let them go after lunch.
After lunch, W and I went on a hike along the beach with W’s patrol mate and his father, who is an avid hiker. About halfway through the hike in one direction, we found a deer at the base of the cliff. It was hiding in the shadow, and it seemed obviously hurt. We guessed that it had somehow fallen off the cliff. We left it alone and continued, when we met another group of scouts coming the other way. They told us about a seal on the beach ahead of us, and we asked them to report the deer to the park rangers.
We found the seal, and at first I thought it was dead, but it turned out just to have been sleeping. W’s patrol mate kept trying to pour water on it, as if it were dehydrated, but it woke up and tried to crawl away a few inches. Then it tried throwing sand over its own back and going back to sleep, so we left it alone.
We later reached the practical limit of how far we could walk, so Randy (the other dad) lay down on some rocks for a nap, while the boys explored the rocks, and I watched the boys.
On the way back, we met the scouts we had passed earlier. They told us that the park ranger (or game warden?) had come and had tried coaxing the deer away, but the deer got spooked, ran into the ocean, then walked out of the water and collapsed dead on the beach. Examination of the body found injuries consistent with it having fallen from the cliff above. The scouts helped the ranger move the body into the back of his truck.
After returning from the camping trip (J had stayed with Hsuan for Palm Sunday Mass and Sunday School), we went back to the house in Glendora. I did some repairs on a couple of the toilets using warranty parts sent by the manufacturers, while the boys went swimming in our old pool. It’s nice to see them enjoy the house between tenants, even if we’re not living there any more.
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Finally, I finished doing our federal and state taxes last week in TurboTax, before leaving for the camping trip. Although we didn’t get the big refund I always hope for, our federal bill was almost balanced by our state refund, so that’s not too bad. I saved the work for e-filing today.
This morning, before leaving for work, I started up TurboTax to do the e-file, and it came up with refunds for both state and federal taxes, despite my work from last week. I spent much of the morning in a panic, trying to figure out what was going on, digging through all the numbers I had meticulously filed and entered in TurboTax. After a lot of digging, I found that the net proceeds from a stock sale had been calculated incorrectly, and no matter what dummy numbers I tried, the net proceeds came to $24.99. The real number should have been around $15k, so my panic was pretty serious. Eventually, I just forced TurboTax to use my manually entered number, and I filed the taxes. I sent off the check for the federal taxes after I got to work, but unfortunately, I wasted too much of my morning doing this.