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.
Images Copyright 2013 by Katy Dickinson
Filed under Caboose Project and Other Trains, Home & Family
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!
Images Copyright 2013 by Katy Dickinson
Filed under Home & Family
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:
Paul also had more than his share of poor teachers but we survived them. I only ask that they and…
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.
Images Copyright Katy Dickinson and Paul D. Goodman 2011-2013
Filed under Home & Family, News & Reviews
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.
Images Copyright 2013 by Katy Dickinson
Filed under Home & Family, Mentoring & Other Business, News & Reviews
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Walking through Willow Glen yesterday, I enjoyed seeing real and imagined Halloween in close proximity. The yard in front of a house carefully draped with plastic cobwebs featured a real spiderweb as wide as my outstretched arms, with a huge spider in the center – much creepier-looking than the fake one tied to the gutter. The inflated hellcat menacing the sidewalk was not so interesting as the green-eyed pet hanging out with a jack-o-lantern on the front step.
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Images Copyright 2013 by Katy Dickinson
Filed under News & Reviews
In my role as a 2013 TechWomen cultural mentor, this month Imen and I have gone to places and events of my choosing, but also of hers. Two of the events that Imen picked were a Women in Technology International (WITI) sales workshop last week, and a San Jose Jazz music evening featuring Moy Eng and the Steve Nakano Quartet – at the San Jose Fairmont Hotel. Very different but interesting!
The WITI “Five Factors of Sales Success!” content by Judy Frank was a surprise to Imen. The focus was on “Operating Principles – the 5 Cs”: Communication, Collaboration, Commitment, Competence, and Creativity. I think Imen was expecting less about personality styles and more on how to “Ask for the Sale”. Last night’s jazz event was elegantly presented and fun. Imen says she learned to enjoy jazz at home in Algeria.
Images copyright 2013 by Katy Dickinson
Filed under Mentoring & Other Business, News & Reviews
I am signed up to give a “Caboose Clinic” to the Coast Division of the National Model Railroad Association on 8 December 2013 in San Leandro, California. More event details are on the Pacific Coast Region Master Calendar. Check out the website of WP668, our San Jose backyard caboose for more about our family project.
Last Friday, I joined my husband John Plocher’s model train lunch group to interview the target market for my clinic. Here are the questions the train lunch guys want answered:
They also asked me to show many many pictures and to include the following:
Please add more to this list of questions and topics – and come to the event if you are available.
Images Copyright 2013 by Katy Dickinson
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