It’ll simply be too time consuming to enter new photoblog pages for every major (and minor) event since my last entry, so I’ll just try to summarize everything in this single entry. Some of the links are to my Flickr page, where maybe the photos will tell the stories that I don’t have time to type.
Okay, here are the major events that happened since our Disney World vacation last Fall.
The boys went back to school: W in 6th grade (his first year of middle school), and J in 3rd grade. It’s W’s first year in middle school, and he’s busier than ever.
In October, I went with a group of people from my lab to the Berkeley 80” Cyclotron to test some of our silicon detectors. For this trip, I was in charge of the data acquisition computers, recording our data, the same way I did it in our last run in 2006 or so. This time, I set up WebDAV sharing and transfer bash (or was it csh?) scripts to transfer data between the computers. (I had spent a lot of time in the lab with Jamie, but over the past few months since the Cyclotron run, I’ve been ceding supervision of her work to Mark and Rick, so I can spend more time on other things.)
After he received his Tenderfoot ranking, and later being recognized in a Boy Scout Court of Honor, W and I went with his troop on a backpacking trip along the Cooper Canyon Trail in October, after the Cyclotron run. It was exhausting for me, but it was an experience I’ll savor having had.
After we lost Enrique Gonzalez-Medina as a piano teacher for the boys — he got a new teaching job in Mexico City near his mother — we spent a few weeks with a new teacher, Bobbie, who left temporarily after about 4 weeks for maternity leave. We fully expected to return to her after her maternity leave ended, but meanwhile, we had Vatche Mankerian as a substitute teacher. Vatche is a magnificent virtuoso pianist, and the repertoire he’s teaching the boys is very traditional — and difficult and demanding. Like Enrique, he’s also very patient with the boys — much more so than I am — but at the same time, he has very high standards. When the time was approaching for Bobbie to return, I started telling the boys (and Hsuan) what a huge opportunity -- a privilege, even -- we had to learn from him, and then I started thinking about staying with him rather than returning to Bobbie. My rationale was that, by the time Bobbie returned, we’d have had about three or four times more lessons with Vatche than we had had with Bobbie, so it would be another big adjustment for the boys. So, we arranged to stick with Vatche, who is now the boys’ permanent piano teacher (or at least until they move on or he moves on).
In November, W and I went on a Boy Scouts car camping trip. The activity away from the campsite was Go Kart racing — the boys on Saturday, and a couple of dads on Sunday — as well as a visit to a car air-filter factory (K&N).
J has been to two birthday parties at a flight simulator center, where the boys flew F/A-19 fighter combat simulations.
For Thanksgiving, for the first time ever, I deep-fried a turkey. The results were as good as I always dreamed they would be.
J and his giant 2nd place trophy.
W and J attended a chess tournament in December, and while W struggled in his division, J brought home an enormous 2nd place trophy for his division.
Just before leaving for the Fall 2013 AGU meeting in San Francisco, I prepared gas ventilation bags for the Super-TIGER recovery team and sent them out to my colleagues at GSFC. Recall that the Super-TIGER instrument had a record breaking flight from December 2012 to February 2013, but it was left on the ice in Antarctica for retrieval this year. Unfortunately, weather was very bad in Antarctica, and the recovery crew was unable to recover the instrument or even land on the ice near it. Photos showed the payload was upside down on the snow. No idea how that happened. I’m not very hopeful about the condition of the aerogels. Up through this month, though, I have determined that we have enough remaining aerogel stock at Caltech to populate most — maybe even all — of a rebuilt Super-TIGER instrument. The collaboration is proposing to rebuild the instrument from scratch, unless we can get the original back next year.
Also in December, J did his Cub Scout biking activity for Bear Cubs using W’s old bike, and after Christmas, we got W a new bike. W’s Cub Scout experience wasn’t very rigorous. His den leaders were nice but not very active. Now that W is a very active Boy Scout, I’ve been trying to keep J active with Cub Scout achievements (kind of like Boy Scout skills sign-offs). As of this writing, J has completed 9 out of 24 achievements. He needs three more. (Biking, above, was one such achievement.)
The boys had a good Christmas in 2013. And I was able, finally, to locate a certain annual porcelain Christmas ornament at Disneyland. For the past couple of years, I had missed them — I think they’re limited releases.
In January, at the request of J’s Cub Scout den leaders, I put together an evening presentation for J’s den on astronomy. It was held at Caltech in conjunction with Patrick Shopbell and Mike Roy. Patrick does our computer support at Caltech in the Cahill building, and he’s also a dad of a couple of Cub Scouts from another Pack. Their den also joined us for the evening. Also, Patrick and Mike are part of the Caltech Astronomy Outreach Group, and both of them brought telescopes (as did I). For the evening, I gave a talk about various astronomical objects, and then Mike showed the boys his big reflector telescope. Afterward, we all went out to the athletic field to look through telescopes at objects in the sky, including Jupiter and the Orion Nebula. I don’t have photos of the evening, but it seems to have been a success. The scouts earned their astronomy belt loops.
In February, W and I went on a Boy Scout camping trip in the Anza Borrego Desert State Park. It was originally going to be a backpacking trip, but the park rangers didn’t want 60 or so dads and scouts hiking deep into the park, so it turned into a car camping trip, with our campsite set up near a road. On Friday night, W and I stayed in a resort in Borrego Springs. On Saturday, we went on a tour of the desert with other scouts and dads in a deuce and a half military surplus vehicle, including a stop at Font’s Point near the badlands. By now, W was his Patrol Leader and was also a Second Class scout, having been promoted in January. So, he was in charge of planning our crew’s meal for Saturday night. Unfortunately, only one other of his patrol was on the trip, and we were joined by a scout and dad from another patrol, so our food burden (what there was — this was car camping, after all) was pretty light.
In February, during the boys’ winter break from school (not the same as Christmas break), we went on vacation in Cancun. It was the boys’ first trip to Mexico. I was hoping they’d get to speak more Spanish, but everyone spoke English. Oh, well. Given how much we liked our previous stay there, we stayed at the Fiesta Americana Grand Coral Beach resort. Hsuan and I even sat through their vacation club presentation in order to snag discounts on food, drinks, and tours. In the end, I said no thanks. We took the usual, expected tour of Chichen Itza, but for the most part, we stayed at the resort, enjoying the beach and the pool. I wanted W to get lots of rest; his eyesight gets blurry when he’s tired. J really enjoyed the beach, digging trenches and building walls in defiance of the water and waves. W and I went parasailing. We even took a snorkeling trip, but the waves were too rough, and we both got pretty queasy.
At the beginning of March, W and I went on a Boy Scouts trip, staying overnight on the USS Midway in San Diego. The USS Midway is now a museum, but it served as an aircraft carrier for 47 years from 1945 to 1992. The docents were all retired military guys, some of whom served on the USS Midway, and they were all good at telling the stories. (Especially good were their “Midway Magic” stories of humanitarian missions that they told on Sunday morning.) During the evening and morning, we took tours of various parts of the ship — the catch cable room, the bridge, the catapult room, the secondary bridge, the air control tower, and so on. Overnight, we slept in the bunk rooms. The bunk beds were very tiny, and partway through the night, I got claustrophobic from having to sleep in such a tight space. I got up and wandered about until I found a docent in a break room. He suggested I could take my mattress out of my bunk and move it to a side area where there was more space. I did so and found another dad already there. There was room for me, so I stretched out and was able to sleep. On Sunday morning, before a quick drive to Glendora to get to W’s Sunday School class, we rode a flight combat simulator that was a full motion simulator. I was doing the flying, and I couldn’t get the hang of it, so we inverted a couple of times. (We were joined on the overnight stay by two Cub Scout packs and a Young Marines group.)
W running the 880.
W as the 3rd leg of the 4x440 relay race
W ran in three track meets for his school this past month. He ran a remarkable 2:50 in the 880 meters during one meet. During all three meets, he was also part of the boys 4x440 relay race. The first two times, he ran the third leg and managed to pass another runner and move his team from 4th place to 3rd. The team finished in 3rd place once; the anchor got passed in the other. In the third relay race, he was anchor, but the team managed only 3rd place because they were so far behind when he got the baton. Still, he closed the distance quite a bit to the 2nd place runner. At the first two meets, the Head of School remarked on how strong a runner W is. I didn’t see him at the third meet.
J, his car, his trophy, and his second place ribbon.
J won 2nd place in the Cub Scouts Pinewood Derby for his Pack and Den this year. Last year he won first place in his den, and apparently, it spooked the family that has won first place every year in the past, so they brought Grandpa back in action to help build their car. I helped J again this year — W, as a Boy Scout, didn’t participate — and we used the same tricks we used last year. During the run-off races, J actually came in first in two out of three races, but he came in third during the last race. Times were added up, and his car was, according to the timekeepers, two milliseconds slower in total than the other kid. Oh, well, at least we gave them a scare this year. I’ll have to refine our technique again next year.
Finally, two weekends ago, the boys played in the two-day Super States Chess Tournament. Because of their past performances (but not including very recent tournaments), they both played in the same division: K-8 U800, that is K-8 aged, under 800 rating. Since there’s a K-7 U600 division, that means that W and J played in a relatively tough division. Also, most of their schoolmates played in the easier divisions, though two played in the next tougher division up. Out of 10 games (10 points), W scored 6.5, and J scored 4. (A win was worth 1 point, a draw 0.5 points, and a loss 0.) So, J got a participation medal, but after tie-breaks (via computer), W took home the 9th place trophy in his division.
Okay, I think I’m caught up on major events. I have work to write about — my work on Solar Probe, the Super-TIGER proposal, a database, and so on. But I’ll leave that for later entries.