10 posts tagged “family”
We found out today... we'll be bringing a baby boy into the world. The nurses were marveling over his striking profile in his ultrasound pics and want to add him to the Hot Babies of Portland calendar the last week of July, when he's scheduled to arrive. We're very excited and very thankful.
Hilarious party last night for nephew Will who just turned three. He wore his Halloween chicken outfit for fun. (My other Nephew Jake in the left corner wore his Halloween dragon costume).
We've been having lots of fun with our two nephews (the kids of my sister Melissa and brother in law Mark). Several days ago we we enjoyed a picnic dinner in the park and watched a swarm of rare "vaux swift" birds make exotic funnel patterns in the sky. There were hundreds of families out there with us--it's the Portland version of a Nascar race.
We also watched the VP debate over dinner the other night and chuckled as their boys went up to the TV with their measuring tapes and measured out Palin and Biden's heads.
We babysat them on Friday night and Will cracks us up because his favorite color is pink (he is two) and he loves his pink toothbrush.
On Sat afternoon, Ivy and I went to see an imax movie in downtown San Jose (at the Tech Museum) called "Mystic India." It was a beautifully-photographed forty-minute overview of Indian geography, history and culture. One thing that stood out was how communal the Indians are, and that that like many non-Western societies, people genuinely take care of each other; specifically, in families, the young look after the old and vice-versa. (You'll see how this thought ties in with other things in a second...)
Yesterday, Ivy and I woke up (kind of painfully) at 5.30am and drove over to Dodge Ridge near Yosemite for a day of skiing. Ivy is an excellent skier and better than me (she's skied a lot in Austria and Slovakia) but now that she is learning how to snowboard, our pace has been perfect and about even.
Driving home last night we stopped for dinner and were touched with how a father and his grown-up daughter made a point of taking their elderly (in his late 80's) grandfather out for dinner as well. The grandfather moved slowly but was having a great time and definitely appreciated being out and about and with his family. You got the sense that this family had their priorities right and that all three generations were very kind to each other.
Later on, Ivy and I had a good discussion regarding how unfortunate it is that Western countries are so bad at spending time with their families and taking care of each other. Yes, the U.S. and Europe are "wealthy" in terms of our ability to produce and consume material goods, but we are poor and lacking in terms of the amount of time we spend on each other. The India movie we had seen on Sat reinforces that poorer countries are richer than Western ones in many ways and you won't see many Indian or Asian families (even if money was no object) carting off their grandparents to old folks homes.
Also, although we don't have a good idea of what an Indian funeral would be like, Ivy and I suspect that many countries would spend much more time grieving and celebrating and honoring one's family members than what happens in the U.S. and Europe. For example, a co-worker of Ivy's dad died and her co-worker took a day or two off but was then back to work, plugging away. A longer period of time to celebrate and honor your parents would seem appropriate if we stopped to think about it.
This past weekend Ivy and I had a great time visiting my parents up near Sacramento. It was filled up with ping-pong in the afternoon (my dad is an amazing player and great athlete and he kept crushing my brother Matthew and me), poker in the evening and then we watched a few episodes of 24. (Ivy and I have become addicted to it--we just started the first season with Netflix and will find a way to continue it for sure when in Hungary).
Matthew burnt me a c.d. of a band he likes a lot and I've become a big fan myself of several of their songs: the German group Rammstein. Our German-flavored drive home back to the bay area will forever be ingrained in my head--it was very memorable: cruising along in our German Audi A4 (I love this car; we bought a used '98 version a year ago in place of our Honda accord and it will hard to go back to anything else; the quattro all-wheel drive is fantastic, the stereo is superb and the handling is amazing). So in addition to cruising in our German car we rocked out to Du Hast and other songs by Rammstein. It was exhilarating. As happens with most songs, I'll get tired of their stuff if I overdo it--but this song really pumps me up. http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewAlbum?playlistId=59698809&s=143441&i=59698811
Thanks to my lovely wife for throwing a Surprise Bday Party this past Sat! I was truly surprised and it was fabulous seeing a bunch of friends show up at City Beach in the evening. A number of people drove a ways to be there--including my wonderful family from Sacramento and Yardu from Santa Cruz. The MDT award (Most Distance Travelled) definitely goes to Cameron F who came up from Fresno. The man is the epitome of commitment and dedication.
After some skiing in Tahoe (Ivy actually took snowboarding lessons for those three days we were there--I stayed w/ normal skiing) we cruised back over to my parents' place just outside of El Dorado Hills. My sister Melissa's kids are looking great: Jacob (almost 2) and Will (10 months I believe...). They were the center of the action and fun w/ everyone. Some good presents were exchanged: Ivy got me the superb Beatles "Love" c.d. (based on the excellent Cirque de Soleil show featuring the Beatles--we saw it this past 4th of July in Vegas); Ivy also hand-crafted and painted two corkboards made out of wine corks in a wooden frame (I helped with the hole drilling, which impressed Ivy as she always likes to see me do anything "handy") and gave one to my parents and the other to Laurel. My mom gave Ivy and me two more classy leather-bound books from the Narnia series and we're looking forward to reading those with some kids some day!
Ivy had to go back to work this past Wednesday, but I got to hang out with Melissa, Mark and their kids and--amazingly enough-- all five of us fit pretty well in our little one-bedroom apartment w/ one bathroom. I just reminded everyone that this is how families live together in much of the world outside the U.S. (e.g. we saw about 10 people living together in one room in Thailand) and so it's no big deal. But they decided to leave anyway after 2 days with us for some reason!
I finished the John Adams biography yesterday. It was phenomenal. I loved nearly every page and have concluded biographies are my favorite books. It's always so moving to see the highs and lows of a person's life and how they dealt with adversity. I'm also always very sad at the end when the person inevitably dies, but inspired too to live life purposefully because time is clearly limited. In another post I'm going to add a bunch of great quotes from the Adams book.
This past December 5th, my lovely sister Melissa turned 32 (this is the one month out of the year we're just a year apart) and good amigo Cameron F turned 33! At my company's Christmas ("Holiday") party, on Friday, Lovely Ivy spoke with one of the many Dutch guys who work with me. He described how the Dutch celebrate Christmas differently than the Americans (and presumably the British) do. I think the Dutch model has a lot of advantages for good reasons. Over there in The Netherlands, their Santa Claus equivalent comes and brings gifts for the family and friends sometime during the first week of December. Then, on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, no presents are exchanged because that's all been taken care of already. What is great about this is that you don't focus on the materialistic aspects of what should be a family-centered spiritual holiday and so instead a family can better emphasize what's truly important--very similar to how Thanksgiving works in the U.S. Ivy and I both like their approach much better. We suspect that the retailers might have pushed for the gift exchange to happen as late in the year as possible to pump up annual sales results!?... Anyway, we may go the Dutch Christmas route with our own kids someday. (An added benefit of the Dutch approach is that everyone gets to open their presents earlier than everyone else!... Or--to rid Christmas of its materialism as much as possible--maybe we should ban all gift-giving entirely in our family? Nah--all in all, we should just go Dutch.)
On Sunday afternoon, Ivy and I met up with my sister Laurel (often called Yardu--this is the name my little brother Matthew gave her when he was very young and couldn't pronounce tricky names like her's). We met Laurel and her relatively new Boyfriend--oww!-- David up in Santa Cruz. This area really is gorgeous. All the big, green pine trees, mountains and ocean are a beautiful combination. It's expensive to live there too but if you could get a nice set-up (as David does) right in Mount Herman or Mission Springs, you are set!
We went out to the Johnson Family Christmas tree farm and enjoyed the festive atmosphere, took a lot of pictures (will post some soon) and liked seeing all the kids run around excitedly, petting the goats, and riding the tractor around the farm. It must be incredibly hard work, but I can see the appeal of farm living. (Growing up, my Mom did have a goat, some chickens and horses at our home in Cupertino. Perhaps it was a mini-farm?). I have fond memories of throwing farm apples at my sisters when we had to clean the horse stall.
The most-emailed article this past week in the International Herald Tribune was written by a Univ of Chicago professor entitled "The Anxiety of the Atheists--Religion and Reason." He notes that there have been a number of new books out recently that are attempting to show why all religion is harmful and false. He wonders whether this particularly aggressive attack from both academics and mass media (how often do you have priest, for example, portrayed in a positive light on tv or in the movies...) might have a lot to do with the insecurity secularists feel over the failure of the Enlightenment and "modern" society to create a good world to live in. Here's the last half of the article:
"A deeper and far more unsettling answer, however, is that the popularity of the current counterattack on religion cloaks a renewed and intense anxiety within secular society that it is not the story of religion but rather the story of the Enlightenment that may be more illusory than real.
The Enlightenment story has its own version of Genesis, and the themes are well known: The world woke up from the slumber of the "dark ages," finally got in touch with the truth and became good about 300 years ago in Northern and Western Europe.
As people opened their eyes, religion (equated with ignorance and superstition) gave way to science (equated with fact and reason). Parochialism and tribal allegiances gave way to ecumenism, cosmopolitanism and individualism. Top-down command systems gave way to the separation of church from state, of politics from science. The story provides a blueprint for how to remake and better the world in the image and interests of the West's secular elites.
Unfortunately, as a theory of history, that story has had a predictive utility of approximately zero. At the turn of the millennium it was pretty hard not to notice that the 20th century was probably the worst one yet, and that the big causes of all the death and destruction had little to do with religion. Much to everyone's surprise, that great dance on the Berlin Wall back in 1989 turned out not to be the apotheosis of the Enlightenment.
Science has not replaced religion; group loyalties have intensified, not eroded. The collapse of the Cold War's balance of power has not resulted in the end of collective faiths or a rush to democracy and individualism. In Iraq, the "West is best" default (and its discourse about universal human rights) has provided a foundation for chaos.
Even some children within the enclave are retreating from the Enlightenment in their quest for a spiritual revival; one discovers perfectly rational and devout Jews or Hindus in one's own family, or living down the block. If religion is a delusion, it is a delusion with a future, which it may be hazardous for us to deny. A shared conception of the soul, the sacred and transcendental values may be a prerequisite for any viable society.
John Locke, who was almost everyone's favorite political philosopher at the time of the founding of the United States, was a very tolerant man. In his 1689 "Letter Concerning Toleration," he advocated a policy of live and let live for believers in many faiths, even heretics. But he drew the line at atheists. He wrote: "Lastly, those are not at all to be tolerated who deny the being of God. Promises, covenants and oaths, which are the bonds of human societies, can have no hold upon an atheist. The taking away of God, though but even in thought, dissolves all."
Instead of waging intellectual battles over the existence of god(s), those of us who live in secular society might profit by being slower to judge others and by trying very hard to understand how it is possible for John Locke and our many atheist friends to continue to gaze at each other in such a state of mutual misunderstanding."
