life – Page 18 – If we had a Marriage, These Would be its Thoughts

The Very Long Trip: June 1-7

August 21, 2014 9:06 pm

June 1 – 7:

Jess and Heather spent this week (as most of the month) hanging out with family. Heather was able to meet grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins. She had a blast with all of them after having a little time to warm up.

Kyle picked up his rental car and drove down to College Station. The Lab invited me to participate in what they call the National Security Leadership Program. It’s a joint program with Texas A&M. Each year the Lab selects ~7 employees to participate in the program. During June, those employees go to Texas A&M to take two graduate courses in national security at the Bush School of Government and Public Service. Then we take another course during each of Fall and Winter via video conference.

The two classes during June covered nuclear deterrence and coercion theory, international relations theory, military strategy, history of U.S. intelligence programs, intelligence agency organization and tradecraft, and counter-intelligence operations. The intelligence/counter-intelligence course was taught by a retired Director of Counter-Intelligence at the CIA who spent his life under cover as a case officer working operations around the world. So he knew his material. Both classes were fascinating and enjoyable.

They were a lot of work though. The deterrence course had 4 books to read plus 100-250 pages of reading per night and two papers. The intelligence course had 3 books, but luckily minimal additional reading, as well as a paper and two exams. So I was very busy the entire month.

I was, however, able to drive back up to Frisco for the weekends to hang out with everyone and have a little fun.

The first weekend we went to the Perot Science Museum and celebrated my birthday.

Playing Monopoly with Christopher, Chance, and Cameron (Left to right)

In which we go for a hike

July 26, 2014 9:03 pm

Heather’s been asking to go camping for a few weeks now (I had mentioned the possibility at some point, which she latched on to. She knows all about camping from an episode of Bubble Guppies. She’ll talk about having a tent and sleeping bags and a campfire and roasting marshmallows…). We are planning on going camping in a couple of weeks, but I mentioned to her we could go hiking sometime too. And we talked about her riding in the child-carrier backpack.

So last weekend I got it out and we went walking around the neighborhood for a while. Then she became slightly obsessed with going hiking. So I said we’d go hiking this weekend. Sadly, that promise was made before we knew it was going to be over 100 degrees this weekend. Regardless, she was super excited to go hiking today, so I looked for some place shady that might be a little cooler. We ended up at Redwood Regional Park on the edge of Oakland. It was probably about 10 degrees cooler than Livermore, which was at least something and there was a lot of shade for most of the trail.

We picked up some sandwiches and headed off for adventure. At the parking lot for the trail-head (which was packed) we ate our lunch. Jess, not being one for hiking what with her knees not being in very good shape, opted for sitting in the shade at the trail-head reading. Heather and I packed up and began our trek.

We hiked just about 2.5 miles. Heather was in the backpack somewhere from 1/2 to 2/3 of the hiking. She loved it, though she was pretty worn out by the end (and so was I). I had her on my back and the CamelBak on my front full of water and snacks.

On the way home we went to Chick-fil-A since none of us had enough energy left to think about making dinner. Hopefully the next time we go hiking it won’t be quite so hot.

Easter 2014

April 20, 2014 5:24 pm

Here’s the photographic summary of our day:

Wisteria 2014

March 24, 2014 12:19 pm

Perhaps it has something to do with the amount of dead material I cut out of the trellis last Fall, or maybe it’s something else entirely, but the wisteria filled in really well this Spring. This is what it’s looked like for the last couple of weeks (and probably will for another week or two):
And it smells nice too! Just watch out for the bees and wasps….

Breaking California’s Drought (or, Mom & Dad visited)

March 1, 2014 5:49 pm

We decided it was time to make Mom & Dad’s travel calamities work for us. So they came to visit in the middle of a major drought. It hadn’t rained any appreciable amount in 14 months. But, it started raining the day after they arrived and has been continuing to rain fairly regularly since then.

Heather was enamored of Grandpa.

We tried going up to the Redwood Valley Railroad again. It seemed like Heather was going to be okay with it, but the moment Jess tried to lift Heather into the car Heather lost it. With every shred of vocabulary she could muster she demanded that she didn’t want to ride the train and that Jess get off the train. I wasn’t allowed on the train either. So Grandma and Grandpa took a train ride while the rest of us tried to calm Heather down.

We also visited Duarte’s Garage which seemed like the kind of thing Mom & Dad do (it’s an old garage along the original Lincoln Highway that runs through Livermore). They have restored, old-timey fire engines and various related relics.

If you look closely you can see the sparks being generated by the hand-crank starter. The spark plugs are at the top of the metal brackets on the right-hand side of the contraption.