The Blog

Austin accompanied a small group of students to complete a demonstration and teach a Tae Kwon Do class to a local summer camp on Friday. On Saturday morning, Mister Cooper, his instructor, approached Keith: “I gotta tell you something. Yesterday, I was approached by a woman at the camp that Austin was helping at and she complimented me on the maturity of my students and how great they were – and they were. They were awesome. By the end, every kid was bowing, saying thank you in Korean, and they each broke a board. It was awesome. – So anyway, she was complimenting me on the students and she pointed at Austin and asks for his name, and I tell her, ‘That’s Austin,’ and she tells me how great he was working with a boy there who was autistic and how he was so empathetic. At one point, the boy […]

Austin is pet-sitting this week, riding his bike to a friend’s house to tend to their dog and cat. Last night, Austin sent Keith the following video, with a message that read: “Is this normal for an old cat? Please listen to this with the volume up.” If you turn the volume up you’ll hear a cat purring. Austin lived with a cat for the first 10 years of his life, yet he had not heard what purring sounded like until yesterday. Says a bit about Moxy, huh?

There was a time when we would go for walks as a family. Almost every weekend we would go to Green Lakes and walk the trails, until Victoria outgrew her stroller. Then she had to walk, and her walking meant that we were going to hear her complain, and it has been a while since we revisited that family activity. Nowadays, we’re busy. The kids are at swimming lessons on Mondays and taekwondo on Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturday mornings. Christine is triathlon training. Keith is … well … he’s working on doing something. But there isn’t a lot that we do together. The kids do their things, the parents do theirs. This summer that will change … hopefully. This week, we purchased Austin his first road cycle. Victoria has now inherited his mountain bike. Until now and for the last 5 years, Austin and Victoria have been riding to the […]

My favorite hobby from the early‭ ‬1990s through the late aughts was fishing.‭ ‬Through my college years,‭ ‬I used to go out on the powerboat with my family and fish for smallmouth bass‭ (‬and the occasional walleye‭) ‬on Lake Ontario.‭ ‬When I moved to New Jersey,‭ ‬I would go out with my friend Dave and later had my own rowboat on the Muscoot Reservoir.‭ ‬When I moved back to New York,‭ ‬after Austin was born,‭ ‬I had plans to continue to fish,‭ ‬and there is an inflatable boat in my crawl space,‭ ‬still in the box.‭ ‬I was going to get a small electric motor for it and fish the local ponds and waterways‭ … ‬it never happened. . . . . For each of the last‭ ‬6‭ ‬years,‭ ‬the children have participated in the fishing derby at the open house at taekwondo.‭ ‬No‭ – ‬fishing and taekwondo have little […]

On Easter Sunday, on the way to Waterville to spend the day at Kevin/Peggy’s house, I stopped at the roadside to take a few portraits of the kids, dressed up in their Easter-attire. The images that I was able to capture were unremarkable at best. She likes to dress-up, yet she doesn’t look comfortable. The eyes are squinting, despite the overcast day. The posture isn’t right. Her smile is … well … it is forced. Keith was behind the camera and cracking jokes to bring about an expression worthy of framing somewhere in the house (as if we he have a lot of up-to-date pics of the kids after their infancy, which we don’t). But try as he might he was unsuccessful. Fast forward 4 days: Victoria is getting ready for school and asking if she can bring her binder to school. The binder – it is a parental strategy […]

A few months ago, the Apple store announced that they were going to offer a coding class to kids who were on spring break and Christine took the opportunity to sign up both kids for the event, scheduled on Wednesday at 4pm. When making plans to take the kids, Keith elected to avoid a loud room filled with kids and stay home. Christine packed up her laptop to complete documentation for work. For the next hour they had the devoted attention of an Apple store employee/instructor as they designed a course for the sphere-shaped robot and then proceeded to program the vectors and velocities that their robots needed to successfully navigate their course. And then, after their class was complete, Austin had a chance to slowly walk through the Apple store and peruse the shelves of tech, telling anyone who would listen about the wonderful tech featured in each device, […]

On the Monday before last – Victoria’s typical day to go to Darlene’s for breakfast – Keith had to go into work early and wasn’t able to keep their date, so they elected to go to the diner on Tuesday. They don’t usually go on Tuesdays, because that is one of Darlene’s days off (and Victoria insists on seeing Darlene), but Keith was going to be busy most other mornings and Tuesday was the easiest, most sure-thing day of the week. When Victoria walked in, she took her usual path to her usual seat walking along the counter, passing about 10 people seated to her right, made a right turn and continued along the counter to her seat in front of the griddle. She didn’t even notice that the first person that she passed, seated at the counter, was Darlene. Keith had to talk her into walking back to the […]

I was finishing cleaning out the basement – my section of it, anyway – when I came across my old laptop. I bought it from Dell 13 years ago for only $450. I had purchased it so that I had something ‘portable’ to take around with me while I was studying for my doctorate. It had a 15-inch monitor and must have weighed 4 pounds. It was slow by 2006 standards and I was already running a lite-version of Linux by the 2010, because Windows was too cumbersome. Soon enough, it had become a fixture in the basement, waiting for me to take out the hard drive and drill a few holes in it. When I rediscovered it on Sunday, I called up to Austin and asked him to come downstairs. He came down the stairs briskly, “Yeah, Dad?” I held out the laptop with 3 small screwdrivers resting on […]