Relevant History

Dive!

My son is a penguin

It's a pleasantly cool day here ho Silicon Valley, but my son insisted that he wanted to swim. He'll probably do polar research one day.

Interesting day

This morning, I was at Castilleja, listening to a symposium on power. It was a pretty good time, and a pretty high-powered crowd. Unlike the Tom Friedman talk, this one was for alumni, so the current students were next door in the chapel, listening to the proceedings on closed-circuit TV (like a pay-per-view sports event).

L to R: Laura Tyson, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Pamela Matson, Jimmy Wales, Marissa Meyer, Kavita Ramdas, John Doerr. Not shown: Mark Hurd and Condoleezza Rice. Via flickr

In the afternoon, I watched my daughter play baseball. She got a couple base hits, and did a pretty good job as catcher.

Then we all went to Maker Faire.

via flickr

Tomorrow is the Peninsula Spring Fair. I'm going to miss part of it, as I'm going back to Maker Faire, but I should be able to get there in time to take some pictures.

[To the tune of U2, "Sometimes You Can't Make It On Your Own," from the album "How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb".]

Technorati Tags: Little League, Maker Faire, Palo Alto, Peninsula School

When did I turn into Ward Cleaver?

Today I took off a little early from work to take my son to his Little League game. As someone who played soccer in high school as an act of defiance against football-addled Southern culture, I find my children's participation in organized sports slightly mystifying. It's not particularly mysterious, though: it's completely my wife's fault, as she's the big baseball fan in the family.

The local league is a typical Silicon Valley reinvention of an American institution. Almost all the teams are sponsored by dot-coms, financial services companies, or French restaurants. A couple weeks ago, my son's team, the Astros (sponsored by visual search engine SearchMe.com) played against the Yankees (eHealth.com); last week, they went up against the As (sponsored by Interwoven).

Today, they played the Orioles (sponsored by Left Bank).

After the game, we went back to Peninsula, to the annual student rock concert. The concert is a fun time, as much (or maybe just a tiny bit more) for the atmosphere as for the music. And as one of my fellow parents put it, it's nice for the kids to spend time on campus without all the high-pressure academic stress weighing them down....

Though it can be entertaining to hear the kids.

My daughter is already talking about what songs she wants to sing when she's old enough to perform next year.

So my afternoon and evening were taken up with Little League and a student concert. I truly have been domesticated....

[To the tune of Lucrezio de Seta & His Scurvy Brothers, "Century's End," from the album "The Nightfly Live Show".]

Technorati Tags: children, Little League, Peninsula School

My children are insane

Yes it is hot today, but the pool is 68 degrees!

Single dad for the week

My wife left this evening on a school trip, so I'm playing single dad this week. Logistically, it's not going to be much fun: the Institute has a conference this week, and 24 hours after my wife returns I head off for a research trip to Malaysia and Singapore, which of course is going to absorb the rest of my mental energy this week. Plus I've got a project that's supposed to be finished this Friday.

However, the one thing I don't particularly worry about are the children. They're now pretty accustomed to having one or the other parent gone for a few days, and though they have to deal with me being gone more often, Heather's school trip is an annual thing, so they know about it months in advance. No, if I was going to worry about anyone, it would be myself. Fortunately, I'll be too busy to really think about such things.

[To the tune of Genesis, "Duke's Travels," from the album "Duke".]

Technorati Tags: children

Son + flashlight + darkness = fun

At Peninsula School this evening; photo via flickr

[To the tune of Goran Ivanovic, "Macedonian Girl," from the album "2005-09-09".]

Technorati Tags: children, night, Peninsula School

Obama and the "new dialogue on mixed race"

Good New York Times article on the impact Barack Obama's candidacy is raising issues about being multiracial, and how we describe racial categories:

Being accepted. Proving loyalty. Navigating the tight space between racial divides. Americans of mixed race say these are issues they have long confronted, and when Senator Barack Obama recently delivered a speech about race in Philadelphia, it rang with a special significance in their ears. They saw parallels between the path trod by Mr. Obama and their own....

Americans of mixed race say that questions about whether Mr. Obama, with a white mother from Kansas and a black father from Kenya, is “too black” or “not black enough,” as the candidate himself brought up in his speech on March 18, show the extent to which the nation is still fixated on old categories....

The old categories are weakening, however, as immigration and the advancing age of marriage in the United States fuel a steady rise in the number of interracial marriages. The 2000 Census counted 3.1 million interracial couples, or about 6 percent of married couples. For the first time, the Census that year allowed respondents to identify themselves as being two or more races, a category that now includes 7.3 million Americans, or about 3 percent of the population.

Of course, part of the appeal of California is that the Bay Area is ahead of this particular curve. The fact that everyone is from somewhere else-- and even many of us who are "natives" can tell how many generations it's been since their ancestors arrived here-- tends to make interracial relationships less notable than in some other places. Indeed, after years of having classmates who speak with Australian or Hong Kong accents, who have parents who graduated from IIT or Oxbridge, or whose parents are of different ethnicities, my kids assume that everyone is at least partly from somewhere else. And even though they're both native Californians (sixth or second generation, depending on whether you count from my wife's side or mine), growing up within a couple miles of the house their mother was raised in, they see themselves that way, too.

[To the tune of Dan Fogelberg, "Tell Me to My Face," from the album "Twin Sons of Different Mothers".]

Peninsula this afternoon

Saturday afternoon

My son and a friend of his are having a playdate at my house this afternoon.

I'm taking this as an occasion to try out the new USB headset that just arrived, and to do some work on my article on paper spaces. I'm not quite as negligent as, say, Homer Simpson in "Treehouse of Horror," and I figure that so long as no one is crying and nothing is breaking, I probably don't need to involve or concern myself with what's going on.

[Blogged with Flock]

Technorati Tags: work, parenting