Category: Family
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“My Fellow Americans…”
When I first moved to the United States, it was to work as a consultant on a new SAP project. One of the other consultants was a Cuban called Gil (the name stuck with me…), and during my first week there, he gained his U.S. Citizenship. The team organized a big hoopla to celebrate, decorating his office with the Stars and Stripes, getting in a cake, and so on. During the festivities, the consultant’s supervisor described how Gil had originally come over on a boat without a cent to his name x years ago, and now here he was, “living the American… Read more
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Gimme a T for Texas, a T for Trampoline
Last weekend Freya continued her path to Olympic Gold by competing in the Texas State Trampolining and Tumbling championships. For reasons best known to the organizers, this was in Lubbock, which is on the far North edge of Texas, so not really a convenient location for anyone apart from people who live in Lubbock – although if they live in Lubbock they have my sympathy and deserve every break they can get. Anyway, owing to my general aversion to air travel (and a $250 per person flight cost because I didn’t get round to booking anything up until the week of… Read more
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Who’s gonna ‘drive your home?
Just before Christmas my eldest managed to frag the hard drive on his laptop. I’m not sure how he managed it (probably deliberately, to get out of doing his homework), but when you tried booting it up you’d just get an “Operating System not found” message. Freya has an identical laptop (to avoid sibling rivalry) so I swapped her drive into Finn’s laptop and confirmed that everything else was fine – just a blank hard drive. It could have been that he’d just deleted everything, but that’s pretty hard to do by accident, so I’m guessing he dropped the laptop and crashed… Read more
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I’ll make you one in woodwork
I finally finished the desk I’ve been building all Summer. I started it not long after the kids broke up for summer recess, and I promised myself I’d get it done in time for Finn starting the 4th grade. As it turns out I over-ran by a couple of weeks, but a career in SAP has taught me that this is close enough to be called on-time. I started on this uncharacteristically-ambitious project because Finn needed a new desk so he can knuckle down to some serious schoolwork (hey, a father can dream, can’t he??). Most of the desks in… Read more
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More Rolling Than Coasting
I’m currently in Florida, on the second leg of a two-week family vacation. We arranged this quite some time ago, and decided that we’d drive across as it would work out cheaper than flying. Obviously I hadn’t counted for the rampant rise in gas prices, or the fact that the Explorer only gets around 17 miles to the gallon when I made this decision. But even so it was still cheaper to make the 2,000 mile round trip by car, especially as there were seven of us (the in-laws are also over). Plus, my loathing of air travel would see… Read more