Category Archives: Home & Family

My daughter Jessica participated in “JV” league wrestling finals last night.
Harker
has a mixed boy and girl folk-style wrestling team, as do most of the Bay
Area High Schools in the Santa Clara
Valley Athletic League (SCVAL). Wrestling, unlike most sports, does
not segregate on gender or public/private school lines.

The Junior Varsity wrestling season is now over
(although Varsity continues for two more weeks). Jessi lost her
first two matches but won her final fight, ending this year well.
Her elbow and toe hurt and she is blooming with little bruises but
she is happy with her performance.

To celebrate Jessi no longer having to keep her weight within 2 pounds
of her weight class target, we went out to dinner last night and she ate
pizza and two desserts. We celebrated at Mio Vicino on Lincoln Avenue in
Willow Glen which has an amazing apple and raisin bread pudding and
good chocolate cake. We even bought Jessica a bunch of purple roses from
the little Grandma who walks around the restaurant with a bucket of
flowers to sell.

Jessi is now furthering her celebrations by cooking German apple pancakes
and date raisin bread for Saturday breakfast. The entire family is very
appreciative that she relaxes by learning to bake something new. Jessi
is the only kid I know who carries

Baking Illustrated around with her for light reading.

My son Paul is sleeping in. The celebration last night was for him too
since he was awarded
Jordan’s “Student of the Month” again. As soon as Paul is out of bed
and we have devoured Jessi’s latest kitchen experiments, we start to take
out our swimming pool. We will reuse the deck boards on the caboose so we
need to take them out carefully.

My daughter Jessi is about half way through her Junior year in High School
so we are deeply into college considerations. She is studying for her

SAT or college board exams (to be in April and May).
She is all signed up for her Senior classes
(after much debate between the relative merits of Honors and Advanced
Placement), she is meeting weekly with a college counsellor, and we are
scheduling school visits. She will go on the
Harker tour of East Coast USA schools next month, plus we are figuring
out dates to visit local schools like U.C. Berkeley, Stanford, and Santa Clara
University.

Jessi has won her last three wrestling matches at the JV (Junior Varsity) level
so we hope she will be on the Varsity team next year. The last match of the
season is this Friday. We are in great discussions over how she will spend
her last High School summer. We are considering the relative merits of
an intense Spanish Immersion program versus an internship versus cooking school
versus going back to Westminster
Choir College.
My daughter of the many interests!

I am in meetings all day today with potential SEED mentoring
program participants as well as with site managers and executives.
Tomorrow, John and I get to do some sightseeing around St. Petersburg.

Last night, we went to a very good Russian style dinner at Senat
Restaurant. When the driver
took us home, we saw the Neva river sending up huge sheets of steam
into the frozen air. We also went by the heroic bronze statue
of Peter the Great on horseback. He does not have any spotlights on
him so the big wedge-shaped white rock he is riding up looms out of the
dark. We drove by the statue of
Catherine the Great standing tall on her pedestal in the middle of
the park in front of her palace.

It is a very strange
feeling to have the inside of my nose freeze as soon as
I step out of a car. Everyone walks very fast on the street and
they wrap up in coats and furs and scarves so only their noses
show. Monday, we fly to Tel Aviv where it will be at least 20 degrees
warmer.

Jessi had mid-term exams this week. She thinks she did well. She
has also started seriously working on her college plans.
Harker
has an excellent college counselling program – as you might expect
from a Silicon Valley college prep school.

Today, Jessi started
researching what scholarships are available. We will not know about
academic scholarships until Jessi has her Junior year grades and test
scores – probably next summer. However, there are many dozens
of scholarships which target social, political, racial, professional,
and national groups. Others are awarded to winners of a competitive
essay contest. Most of the essays have bland set topics but others
are stranger. One essay Jessi is thinking about writing is about the
effect of food allergies on her life (caffein makes her heart race
so no spiked sodas and minimal chocolate).
We also ordered two study books to help Jessi prepare for her SAT
tests in April.

My favorite recent quote about local government:

“For connoisseurs of government, the most attractive
thing about bureaucratic warfare is that it’s like a
sporting event. You may feel passion for your team.
You may root hard. But the world as we know it won’t
end if the other guys triumph.”

Scott Herhold “In My Opinion” San Jose Mercury News,
p. B-1, 5 January 2006

Of course, having your own time and money and future plans at
stake greatly increases your focus on the game.

We just successfully bid to buy

GGRM WP 668 (Golden Gate Railroad Museum, Western Pacific –
Feather River Railroad, Caboose number 668). GGRM has until

15 February 2006 to clear out of San Francisco’s Hunter’s Point.
We have until 15 February to move our caboose. We are in negotiations with
the San Jose City Planning Department to get a permit to replace our
dead swimming pool with a new office and library in a caboose. See
my husband John’s blog
for the details of this discussion. We don’t need the permit to move
the caboose from GGRM into the storage location but I shudder to think
of what we are going to do with many tens of tons of caboose if the city
does not allow the permit.

Before Monday, when we fly to Russia and Israel for a 2 week business
trip, we are busily making arrangements for the crane, truck, soils engineer
inspection of the existing pool, and lots of other activities which we will
kick off as soon as we return. Packing, did I mention we were also
packing?

After several nervous days of us waiting for a response, the
Golden Gate Railroad Museum just
accepted our bid to buy
GGRM WP 668 (Golden Gate Railroad Museum, Western Pacific – Feather
River Railroad, Caboose number 668). This is a historic piece of train
equipment, already listed on
The Western Pacific Caboose List. It was built in 1916 as a boxcar
and converted into a bay window caboose in the 1930s. It is a wooden shell
just a few bits of the original furnishings like a built-in wooden bunk bed.
It looks very much like the caboose in these photos.

We are now arranging with the crane and trucking company to get it from
the GGRM in San Francisco to San Jose where we live. We will start working
on the move as soon as we get back from our work trip to Russia and Israel.