Mexico Thanksgiving 2009
November 27th, 2009Nice editing of the Flip camera, nice 5-minute summary of a week’s vacation in Mexico over Thanksgiving 2009.
Note: If for any reason you don’t see the video, click here for the YouTube original.
Nice editing of the Flip camera, nice 5-minute summary of a week’s vacation in Mexico over Thanksgiving 2009.
Note: If for any reason you don’t see the video, click here for the YouTube original.
Oct. 2, 2009. Dad turns 90. We celebrated the next day, Oct. 3, a Saturday. Martha arranged it, and gave a very nice speech. Then Jay pulled out his haikus. I hope to post the video on YouTube, but I’m also going to try to recreate some of his commentary, aside from the actual haikus themselves. Where I don’t have commentary it’s because I don’t remember.
Thia first one is very familiar to the three of us, me and Chip and Jay, who grew up watching football with dad.
Grass is greener
Things not great on the field
What the heck is goin on?
Put in that freshman.
Unholy Thing
Dad drinks his vodka
he likes it mixed with milk. Yuk.
I want to throw up.
Everybody in our family knows that dad has always liked his licorice more than any other sweets. Not unlike me. Here’s Jay’s tribute:
Black Goddess
Dad turning ninety!
Think of all the licorice
This man has eaten.
Good, True, and Beautiful
He comes from the Church
Virgin Mary watches him
St. Michael protects
His Lucky Day
After tragic loss
He sure did strike it lucky
When he found liz
First, we learned that wonderful Irish grandfather Jack O’Neill was actually mom’s stepfather, not real DNA for us. At least we were 100% Irish on Dad’s side — until the discovery, 10 or so years ago, that the Dudley in dad’s background was actually Dudelein, and we was French.
Le Crushing Truth (Family Tree Shockeroo!)
Presumed all Irish
Til shocking revelation
Dudley’s Dudler
Jay pointed out how quick dad was to warn us about “ballooning up” and other familiar “don’t get fat” phrases. And that he had eaten 39 its-it (an ice cream treat popular in the San Francisco area) in a single weekend.
Dad’s World Record
Ya gotta, gotta
push yourself away from that
thirty ninth It’s it.
It turned out later that Uncle Cal had secretly bought a ping pong table and had been practicing for months when he, with pretended nonchalance, challenged dad to ping pong.
Ping Pong Apocalypse
Uncle Cal ready.
Dad plays with gin on table.
Dad whips Cal’s butt bad.
Jay wasn’t sure this actually happened and suggested he dreamt it because of something that had been said. Martha thought it did in fact happen (he is an ophthalmologist).
Weird Day Job
He removes eye balls,
Brings them home to show his kids.
They gleam on the shelf.
Controversy broke out in the neighborhood as the Knights planted trees that threatened the view. There was a discussion but Mr. Knight was unmoved and unsympathetic.
Bad Night for Mr. Knight
Tiptoe to Knight’s yard
One strange and moonless evening;
Too bad for that tree.
For many years in a row, Gram sent dad balloon seat pajamas for Christmas. We all laughed.
The Gift She Keeps on Giving
Each Berry Christmas,
The gift of hysteria,
Balloon Seat Classic.
Mushy But True
Language is useless.
Words don’t capture the feeling.
We love Dad so much.
If you don’t see the video here, you can click this link to go to the youtube source.
(Note: I took the liberty of picking this up from MommyCEO and posting it here. Tim)
My kids and I travel. A Lot. Both my kids are United Premier members due to the number of miles they have flown with me and my husband in the past year. We live in Eugene, Oregon and have flown with our kids to London (3 times), Barcelona, Istanbul, all over Mexico ( a lot of my family is there), Boston (my husband’s family lives there), NYC (my brother lives there), Miami, Denver, New Orleans, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Portland Maine, and the list goes on. I am very proud to say that I have never gotten off a flight without other passengers commenting, surprised, on what good travelers the kids are. In our most recent plane flight back from London (via San Francisco, a hellish 12 hour plane ride) a flight attendant said I should write tips and tricks for other parents. She said she had never in her 20 years of flying seen kids who behaved as well as mine on a long flight. The kids were 2 and 4 at the time of the flights.
Now lets be serious. I wish I could tell you in that smug parent way that my kids are always well behaved. I like to think that my husband and i are good parents– but our kids are by no means perfect. They have their meltdowns. They have their “fits” (tantrums as described by my four year old). They fight with each other, they don’t always listen. Just like any normal 2 and 4 year old. But so far we have been able to avoid having any major meltdowns on a plane or in an airport (OK now I feel like I may jinx our next trip!!!). So I thought I might heed the flight attendants request and give you some do’s and don’ts for plane travel with kids. None of these are guarantees, but they have worked for our family. Let’s start with the DONT’S:
So maybe you think I am crazy. Maybe you think I shouldn’t drag my kids all over the place. But I love traveling with my kids, and I love exposing them to dofferent places. I travel a lot for business and have been lucky enough to take along my mom to help out – or my husband (who runs the business with me) will also come, so we bring the kids. The more we travel the more miles we build up, which we now use almost exclusively to bring along family members for help when we travel with the kids for business. Last year our kids clocked 50,000 miles apiece. They love to travel and still get excited about trips. I like to think we are doing something right … but I am always open to suggestions and feedback!
Chris Brogan writes Want to Know the Real Reason Why You Write on his copyblogger blog. He’s one of the best, and one of the best known, bloggers. He has hundreds of thousands of subscribers.
I got to thinking about it when a commenter on a previous post said that most people would love to write because there’s some kind of natural pull towards writing. I was also intrigued when I saw that established and well known bloggers Holly Hoffman and Jamie Harrop both started up brand new blogs last week, with subjects close to their hearts.
“Why?” He asks. Because what they were doing, the blogs they’d built, helped them discover their real voices. But they weren’t their real voices.
That’s a lot of what blogging could be about. Chris continues…
Think about it for a moment. What are you speaking with before you find your voice? What are you saying and what message are you delivering? And just who are you being before you find your voice?
Before that happens your writing will be more constructed, abstracted, intellectualized. It’ll probably feel more of a struggle to get the words onto the page for the simple reason that you’re missing something fundamental.
You.
Both Holly and Jamie mentioned this very thing when explaining their need to start a new blog – that they needed to write about what they really wanted to write about, and to get a better fit by moving away from the constraints of their previous blog.
My main blogging is about business. I work to build traffic. This blog is for us. I wish we used it more.
This is just the first of many. Picture by Noah. Walking down from their house to the bakery on a sunny afternoon.
Dad and Liz took a river trip out of Portland, then came down to Eugene with me to spend the weekend. This was carving pumpkins on the patio.
This was taken Oct. 3, 2008, one day after his 89th birthday. Standing outside the vineyard on a sunny Saturday morning. I had a great visit that weekend, dinner with Dad and Liz and Megan Friday night in a really good Indian restaurant, Mantra, then a nice Saturday afternoon with Megan too.
Rain, rain, rain. A beautiful view from the 53rd floor. The first day was just cloudy, the second day rained all day, and we had work to do at the ASBDC. I was told that Leo especially loved the Science and Art museum, which was full of trains.
Then I went home and they went to Maine.


Strange weather for Chicago in the first week of September.