Category Archives: Home & Family

December 28, 2013 · 11:08 am

After Christmas

Only a few Christmas presents are left to be distributed. We sadly bid farewell to Jessica and Matthew, who have traveled back to their jobs. John and Paul and I are still happily investigating our own presents here at home. For me, this means watching the Joss Whedon’s “Much Ado About Nothing” and the four movie set of The Hollow Crown (Shakespeare’s “Richard II”, “Henry IV” i and ii, and “Henry V”). Yesterday, John posted his code and instructions on how to program a Christmas tree, on: http://www.spcoast.com/wiki/index.php/Christmas2013. Paul is enjoying post-final-exams, pre-quarter-start downtime. John and I went out on a movie date to see “Ender’s Game”, which was a good representation of that disturbing and superb book. It is pleasant to have some quiet days together.

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Filed under Church, Home & Family

Tagged as Eleanor, Jessica, John, Matthew, Paul, Shakespeare, St. Andrew's Episcopal Church

December 23, 2013 · 11:33 am

Dickens Christmas Fair, 25th Birthday

Twelve of us gathered at the Dickens Christmas Fair at the San Francisco Cow Palace yesterday to celebrate the holiday with music, high tea, and shopping. John spent the day quietly at home, happily programming our Christmas tree lights with an Arduino.* After the fair, we met Jessica’s lifelong buddies (“The Uns”) in Mountain View to celebrate her 25th birthday.

* 12/27/2013: John posted how to program a Christmas tree on his website: http://www.spcoast.com/wiki/index.php/Christmas2013.

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Filed under Home & Family

Tagged as Charles Dickens, Eleanor, Jessica, John, Matthew, Paul, San Francisco

December 13, 2013 · 2:52 pm

Silicon Valley Lines Holiday Party

John Plocher and I again hosted the Silicon Valley Lines Model Railroad Club holiday party at our home in Willow Glen last weekend. Highlights included visits to John’s N-scale layout (in our former garage), tours of WP668 (our backyard caboose), assembling a G-scale train route in the house, a potluck feast, playing with this year’s Conductor Duck party favor, and other delights of the season.

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Filed under Caboose Project and Other Trains, Home & Family

Tagged as garden, John, San Jose, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley Lines, Willow Glen, WP668

December 10, 2013 · 4:53 pm

Caboose Clinic: The Adventures of WP668

I presented a “Caboose Clinic” to the Coast Division of the National Model Railroad Association on 8 December 2013 in San Leandro, California. The title of my talk was “The Adventures of WP668 1916-2013: Buying and Restoring a Western Pacific Caboose”. You can see additional information about the backyard caboose in which I have my office on WP668’s web page: http://wp668.org. About forty guys and one woman attended my clinic. I was glad that they asked so many questions and seemed to have a good time.

As always, my thanks and appreciation to all who have made WP668’s long adventures possible, especially:

My family (“the crew”): John Plocher, Jessica Dickinson Goodman, Paul D. Goodman, Matthew Holmes, Eleanor Dickinson
Silicon Valley Lines Model Railroad Club and South Bay Historical Railroad Society members for ongoing support and crew backup
Railfans and photographers who have recorded WP668’s long travels, especially: Peter Arnold, E. Chambers, Danek Duvall, Sam Fineberg, Don Marenzi, Jacqueline Ramsayer, Ken Rattenne, John Ryczkowski, Jim Shackleton, Stephen Sloan, Dave Stanley, Vicki Thompson…
Don Marenzi who patiently searched his archives and located so many old WP668 photos for this presentation.

WP668 today:

WP668 in active service, 1971:
Used with permission of Don Marenzi

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Filed under Caboose Project and Other Trains, Home & Family, News & Reviews

Tagged as Eleanor, John, Matthew, Mentoring, Paul, teaching, WP668

November 30, 2013 · 3:15 pm

Thanksgiving in Southern CA

For the first time in 15 years, our John and I were guests for Thanksgiving. Usually, we host the annual feast at our house in San Jose but my brother Pete and his wife Julie volunteered. After work on Wednesday, Paul and John and I drove from the San Francisco Bay Area to La Crescenta in the mountains overlooking Los Angeles, arriving at about 1 am after 335 miles of heavy traffic. We enjoyed a lovely Thanksgiving Thursday with family, then John and Paul drove home yesterday. Paul has homework and John’s storage software project is in its final test phases, so they had to go back.

I am staying the weekend for more family visit time. Last night, we enjoyed a special tour of the excellent Huntington exhibit “Face to Face: Flanders, Florence, and Renaissance Painting” . The Co-Curator Catherine Hess gave us a tour of the project she worked for five years to create. She explained how the rich of early Renaissance Florence who wanted portraits and opulent religious images sought them from Flemish painters such as Jan van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden, and Hans Memling, who were developing a new naturalistic style of oil painting. Florentine painters such as Domenico Ghirlandaio (and his student Michelangelo) were inspired to develop the style even further. The small image “Christ Blessing” (dated 1481) by Hans Memling was for me the best of a remarkably-fine show: the direct gaze combined with left hand casually resting on the painting’s edge made the portrait seem alive.

Today, after my nephew Daniel cooked breakfast, I was a Soccer Aunt, driving my niece Lynda to the fifth game of her AYSO Turkey Tournament weekend. Tonight, Pete and Julie have a Charades game night planned. Busy weekend!

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Filed under Home & Family

Tagged as Eleanor, John, Paul, Pete, San Jose

November 21, 2013 · 6:30 pm

Paul Applying to San Jose State University

I am delighted to write that my son Paul is finishing up his last year at Foothill College and applying to transfer to San Jose State University (SJSU) in 2014. In addition to studying Studio Art, Paul is interested in becoming a credentialed art teacher for children with disabilities. Samples of his art are below – with more in his online portfolio: Paul’s Element.

Raising a kid with disabilities is a challenge and I am proud of Paul and of our whole family for his successful progress. Paul has been blessed with some remarkable and excellent teachers – to whom I am forever grateful:

Carol Zepecki, Linda Herreshoff and her remarkable and dedicated C-9 (Social Cognitive Class) team at Jordan Middle School
Justin Cronin and the patient support team at Palo Alto High School
The outstanding Foothill College professors and Disability Resource Center staff, especially: Andy Ruble (Ceramics), Joe Ragey (Painting), Simon Pennington (Art History), and Dr. Andrew Fraknoi (Astronomy)

Paul also had more than his share of poor teachers but we survived them. I only ask that they and…

…the teachers who did not want disabled kids like Paul in their class:
…the administrators who told us that Paul would be lucky to get to college:
…the head of school who kicked Paul out because his disabilities were bringing down her scores:
…the career counsellors who took Paul and the other disabled kids on a tour of the sewer plant:

Please consider this…

Jane Goodall went in the back door to become an ethologist. That’s something I’ve thought about a lot, because people with autism usually have to go in the back door. We have a lot of trouble following the normal paths. We don’t do very well in interviews, which are a big problem for us, and a lot of autistic people also have extremely “uneven” academic skills. An autistic person can test at the bottom of the IQ range on one subscale and at the very top on another. For example, I had great difficulty with algebra because there’s no way to visualize it. I couldn’t be doing what I’m doing if there weren’t any back doors.

– Dr. Temple Grandin, 2009
In 2010, Dr. Temple Grandin was listed in the Time 100 list of the 100 most influential people in the world in the “Heroes” category.

Wish Paul luck in being accepted! We will hear back from SJSU by March 2014.

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Filed under Home & Family, News & Reviews

Tagged as Disabilities, Foothill College, Paul, San Jose, San Jose State University, teaching

November 20, 2013 · 12:15 pm

Blimp Copter Flying High in SOMA

The 100,000+ Salesforce.com Dreamforce conference attendees are creating traffic gridlock in the South of Market (SOMA) area of San Francisco this week. I was there on Monday, visiting the Everwise mentoring company at Impact HUB (in the old Chronicle Building at 5th and Mission). Everwise was busy that day converting a shipment of Mentos candies into MENTORS freebies for distribution to the Smurf-blue hordes of conference goers.

I also visited eVault (at 3rd and Howard) where my husband John Plocher is the Principle Architect for Open Storage. Over the Dreamforce installation, the large Engajer blimp copter flew freely, sometimes coming very close to the eVault windows overlooking the Moscone Center. Blimp copters are a fun development since I last wrote about quadricopters in 2010.