The Astronaut, The Social Studies Teacher, and Me

Hey, remember that building with the green neon that I posted a picture of last night?



We were on the top floor of it tonight.

So why were we on the top floor of one of the biggest buildings in Dallas? We were there for a reception honoring Dr. Mae Jemison, the first woman of color to go into space. She's the keynote speaker at the conference we're up here for, but the banquet tonight was for the school where the conference is being held, a Catholic high school here in Dallas.

Dr. Jemison was very cool to listen to and to talk to. She grew up on the south side of Chicago and read a few passages from her book tonight. I got a chance to talk with her for a bit, and we joked about how the oldest siblings always pick on the youngest. She was the youngest in her family. I am the oldest in mine.



Another highlight of the night was the "small world" event that happened. When we were at dinner last night, we were talking with Anita and Roger (our gracious hosts, and the GIS gurus) about funny town names. I happened to mention that I was from Normal, Illinois, and Anita said, "That's where Fred Walk is from...he'll be here tomorrow."


Anita and Roger, our gracious hosts

I did one of those double takes, and asked her "Who?"

"Fred Walk," she said again.

"He was a social studies teacher at my high school," I said, still a little bewildered by this turn of events. I can't remember now if I ever had Mr. Walk as a teacher, but I knew him, and most of my friends had him for class. We had a nice conversation when he got there, and yes, Sarah, he even remembered you.



Overall, it was a pretty entertaining night. I got to meet an astronaut, ran into someone who knows that Ironmen isn't just a Black Sabbath song, and got to eat good food.

Oh yeah, since all of this stuff we're doing is taking place at a Catholic high school, I was a very good Catholic today...actually I didn't have much of a choice. The lunches we had today were either veggie or tuna, and none of the food tonight had meat in it. Still really tasty, though!

Tomorrow, Eric and I present a couple of things at the conference and head home late tomorrow afternoon. It's been fun here, and I've learned a lot, but I can't wait to get home to my beautiful wife and sleep in my own bed.

Big "D"

My colleague Eric and I are in Dallas until Saturday for a GIS conference. GIS stands for Geographical Information Systems, and it's the "next big thing." It's basically using maps to analyze data and it's very cool, if not a bit complicated. I got the "fire hose" treatment of info today, and my brain hurts.

Eric and I got into town last night and went down the to West End for dinner. While we were down there, I had my first celebrity sighting in quite a while. We were finishing up dinner, and saw some action across the street. When we looked more closely to see what was going on, we realized that Howie Long was leaving the resturant and getting into an SUV driven by Terry Bradshaw. Evidently they do hang out after the season is over. Unfortunately I didn't have ma camera with me, but I took it tonight, just in case we had another celebrity sighting.

Unfortunately we didn't, and I didn't have a tripod to hold my camera steady for the cool night shots.



But I'll bet you didn't know I was a lucrative business owner in the Big D.



And here comes the obligatory big building shot...



And finally, a cool picture and an artsy picture. The last one is the building we're staying in.

In San Antonio, a live truck in your neighborhood is never a good sign...

Our quiet little neighborhood has been in the news twice today.

Twice. In one day.

This morning, there was a story on the news about some crazy-ass who locked himself in an ex-girlfriend's garage and slashed himself with a knife. The style of the house looked like the ones in our neighborhood, so I Google Mapped the street name and found out it was the street that's behind our house. Not exactly in our neighborhood, but close enough.

This evening, on my way home, I passed a KENS 5 live truck coming out of our neighborhood, and when I turned on the street to get to our house, a WOAI live truck was sitting at the corner...1/2 a block down from our house (and screwing up traffic, I might add...not that I'd expect any less from WOAI).

Turns out a girl that lives down the street from us was attacked by a home invader earlier today. She had stayed home sick from school, and had awakened to the man standing in her living room. She fought him off, but got slashed by a knife in the process.

This does not make me feel comfortable about going to Dallas and leaving Monica here for 3 days.

If this is wrong, I don't wanna be right...

Just a sample of a photo from my new camera, which I love, by the way...



Yes, that's right...the snapdragons are in bloom. In February. Have I mentioned how much I love living in Texas?

OK, ok, here's one of the puppy for you all too...

Belly!

Early January:


Today:


What a difference a month and a half makes. By the way, I LOVE my new camera!

A new camera

We must have at least 5 cameras of various types laying around the house, almost none of which get used on a regular basis.

Don't get me wrong, I love my cameras, but it's hard enough for me to remember to take my lunch to work with me in the morning. Remembering to take film to the grocery store, and then go pick up the picture a few days later...that's asking way too much.

I loved my digital camera because everything was instant. I could see the pictures as soon as I took them, I could play with the settings to get the shot I wanted, and not have to wait a week to find out if it came out OK or not, and the best part...I wasn't spending any money on a whole role of film to get 3-4 pictures that I really liked. If I didn't like it, I deleted it.

When my digital stopped working a couple of weeks ago, I didn't think much about it because it had stopped working before, but had always started working again at some point and time.

I have finally given up hope.

Two and a half years, and almost 4000 picutres later, I have decided it's time for a new camera.

Monica said she wanted to get me another camera for my birthday, but hasn't yet. I decided that I wanted to move up because, while I loved my little point-and-shoot Canon that I could change all the settings on, there were some things that drove me crazy. Shutter lag, picture size, the time it took to change settings on manual. I really missed having a fully manual, really good camera like the one I learned on in high school. The prices of digital versions of these film cameras had been way too much for me to get one, though.

Until this week.

Best Buy just happened to be having a sale on digital cameras, and Pentax had just released a very affordable model. Pentax. The kind of camera my mother owned, which I learned to take really good pictures on when I was in high school. It was a sign. I had to buy it. It arrives Monday.

What will my first picture be of? My beautiful, pregnant wife, of course. I'll post it here.

Bonus: the camera I purchased can use old Pentax lenses with an adapter. Hopefully Mom still has those lenses tucked away somewhere.

SNOW! It's gonna snow, and we're gonna have a snow day, and go sledding, and, and....

What? No snow? It'll be in the 60's today? Crap.

Thus begins the "March of the Babies"

We received a phone call from our friend Roger, in the Great White North, last night that his wife Bianca had her baby boy on Thursday. So now it's time for the rest of the dominoes to fall.

Our friends Mandi and Ed have a baby girl due in April, Pete and Carol's (brother and sister-in-law) baby boy is due in May, and we're bringing up the rear in June. All we need is some friends who are having a baby in March. Anyone want to sign up?

It's actually pretty cool, because since I'm so old (as Monica loves to remind me), I figured most of my friends were done having babies, and I figured we'd be one of those couples with no friends that had kids the same age as our kids. I'm glad I was wrong.

This morning, while we were lying in bed, I looked over at Monica's tummy and saw that it looked oddly deformed. One side of her belly was sticking up way farther than the other side.

It's the first time we've seen Rachel this way, and it was pretty cool...in an "Alien" sort of way.

Busy, busy, busy

My camera broke last weekend, so I didn't get any really good pictures at the rodeo this past weekend. Monica and I took our nieces Rebecca and Claudia to the carnival part of the rodeo on Saturday. We also took them through almost all of the animal barns, which was cool because these city kids don't get to see a lot of livestock up close and personal-like.

This week is hectic. In addition to starting another pilot program at one of my schools (this time with email), and teaching a 6-week online class, and trying to clean out the spare room, I'm also preparing for my presentation at TCEA on Thursday. I'm actually going to Austin Wednesday and spending the night. I'm really finished with my presentation, but I need to rehearse, because I'm taking a new approach to powerpoint. After watching Lawrence Lessig's talk on Free Culture, I decided to adopt his style of presentation, which one of my colleagues called "minimalist powerpoint."

I'm really going to have to get my timings down, though, so I don't look like a bumbling idiot in front of a room full of people.

Wish me luck!

It's like Chicago, but without the cold, snow, or murders...

It just took me 90 minutes to go 20 miles.

Why?

Because in San Antonio, there are no alternate routes, so when there's a wreck on one of the expressways that blocks 2 out of 3 lanes, you either sit in traffic on the expressway, or try to wind your way through the maze of southeast-to-northwest and southwest-to-northeast streets (like I did). Either way, you're going to waste away a big chunk of your day. Next time, I'll sit on the expressway...at least that way I don't have to worry about stoplights and turns.

Have I mentioned lately how much I love living in south Texas?

This is what we did yesterday. 'Nuff said.

It was 20 years ago today...

And this doesn't have anything to do with Sgt. Pepper.

I was sitting in my fourth period social studies class on that Tuesday morning, when the principal came over the intercom and told the entire school that there had been a problem during the launch of the Space Shuttle Challenger. After lunch, I had a study hall. I signed out and went to the library, and watched Tom Brokaw show the footage over and over again of the Challenger, 73 seconds into its flight, disappear in a ball of smoke and flames.

I knew as soon as I saw it that those astronauts weren't coming home. Despite what everyone on the news was saying, that they didn't know if there were any survivors, that they didn't know what exactly had happened, I knew. This was going to be one of those days that changed the course of history.

It was a very sad day for me, personally. I was your typical geeky 8th grader. OK, more than your typical geek. I knew just about everything an 8th grader could know about the space program. I wanted to go to Space Camp, and I wanted to be an astronaut, so the Challenger disaster was a great personal loss for me.

It was my Kennedy assassination, it was a day that changed not only my life, but the life of so many peole in America. It's just a shame that NASA didn't change.

On a Saturday morning in February, just 3 years ago, Monica and I got off a plane in Orlando, Florida. I was no longer that geeky 8th grader, but a Technology Director of a school district working on a Master's Degree. When we entered the concourse from the jetway, I started looking around for the baggage claim signs. I saw some people gathered around a TV near the gate and saw what appeared to be falling stars streaking across the screen.

I was immediately taken back to that junior high library, and that feeling of loss. I turned to Monica, trying to hide the emotion in my voice, and said, "They lost another shuttle."

Cowboy up

It's rodeo time in San Antonio again, and today was the kick-off Cowboy Breakfast. In the simplest terms, this is a free breakfast for the entire city of San Antonio.

You can imagine the kind of traffic headaches this might cause.

People get up really early to go stand in line to get breakfast tacos, biscuits and gravy and coffee. It's ain't the greatest food in the world, but hey, it's free, and there's entertainment, so why not?

Last year, I took a personal day to attend and then came home to sleep. Sure, sure, I could have gotten up at 5 AM, gone to the Cowboy Breakfast and still made it to work, but that takes all the fun out of it.

When I was younger, and the breakfast was at Central Park Mall (it's now at Crossroads Mall), I would take the day off because I knew that they country bar opened at 8 AM on the day of the Cowboy Breakfast. Last year, we found out that Dave & Busters was opening at 8 so folks could drink (it's 12:00 somewhere, right?).

This year, though, Monica and I decided to skip it. I actually took back roads to work so that I could avoid the traffic.

Skipping the party and worrying about traffic. My God, am I getting old.

And by the way, I know when you're from up north, you don't exactly think of February as being a month for rodeos, but it works. The rodeo here is a lot like the county fair--lots of animal judging and the like. Imagine all the wonderful smells, and then imagine them in the heat of a San Antonio summer, and you understand why February is the perfect month for the rodeo.

It's a....

Blurry alien being.

OK, ok...here she is.



Of course, there's always that margin of error. And since the tech said, "I'd have to say it's a girl," instead of "You're having a girl...no doubt," or "Look at the johnson on that kid! It's a boy for sure!" it was kind of a let down. I guess we were both expecting a drum roll and a much clearer picture of what this kid's anatomy would be.

So it's a girl, and her name will be Rachel.

Dumbing down America...

ABC's show, "Stupid in America" should have been about NBC's television schedule.

It's a sad day when a smart, timely show like "The West Wing" is cancelled, but "My Name is Earl" and "Joey" are still on the air (sorry, Mom and Dad...I just don't find the humor in "Earl"). And don't try to tell me that "Law & Order" is a smart show, either. In real life, nothing gets solved in an hour. Those shows are just modern day versions of "Perry Mason."

I guess it's official...we have no reason to watch NBC anymore. Tom Brokaw is gone, the local news sucks, "Today" has become more celebrity gossip than real news, and they have canceled or lost all of their good shows.

Winter has arrived

After weeks and weeks of endless sunshine and spring-like temperatures, it has finally turned rainy and chilly in south Texas. I still refuse to say that it's cold, because, honestly, these people down here don't know cold. However, that doesn't mean that I'm not breaking out the ski jacket to head outside.

It's an interesting thing that happens when you live where it's warm (OK, freakin' hot) for most of the year. Your blood thins out, and you become a cold wuss, and this next paragraph will exemplify that:

Yesterday, we took puppy and peanut to the dog park (of course, we have to take peanut everywhere, since it's living inside Monica), and it was in the mid 50's, which isn't bad, but the wind! My God, you'd have thought we were in Chicago the way the wind was howling. I was wearing a sweatshirt and fleece and I was freezing. I was so ready to go home after 15 minutes, but Sparky was having such a good time playing with the dogs of the 5 other insane people that were there, we decided to tough it out.

See? Cold wuss. I know those of you that live north of the Mason-Dixon line are going, "It was in the 50's! Do you know what we'd give to have a day in January in the 50's?!"

We actually cancelled our planned trip to the coast because it was just too cold, and walking along the beach when it's 50 and windy just didn't sound like that much fun.

Have I mentinoed lately how much I don't miss the winters up north?

Thank God this will be over in a week or two.

I guess I'll have to lay on the bunny

Monica uses one pillow to sleep with. I sleep with two. I developed a habit a long time ago of sleeping on one pillow and hugging another. Monica is very particular about her pillows, and will even go so far as to bring her own pillow when we sleep in a different bed, such as at a hotel or at mom and dad's house.

Tonight, I walked into the bedroom, and there were no pillows on my side of the bed. She had two under her head, and one on her belly because "I don't want to expose Peanut to the magnetism in my computer."

I'm digging the other pillows out of the closet tomorrow.

Birthday blues

Because my sister is totally kicking my ass with blog posting in the past week, and because my wife is giving me shit about not updating my blog (although she already knows everything I write here), I have decided to take a few moments to say "hello."

Hello.

The past week has been pretty hectic. Between dealing with incompetence (again) at work, and being in the classroom 3 days this week, I haven't had much time to think, let alone sit down and write a post (sorry Mom and Dad).

So this weekend I turn 34. It's funny, really, because when I think back on my youth, which to me doesn't seem like that long ago, I thought about how old people were when they were in their thirties.

I mean, when I was 12, back in 1984 (remember? Reagan, Mary Lou Retton, Cubs win the NL East...OK, so I'm dating myself), people in their 30's had grown up watching black and white TVs, not having cable, heck, not having computers!

It makes me wonder what kids who are 12 think about people in their 30's now. I guess they can marvel at how primitive our video games were, but, really, we had them. It seems to me that we had a lot of the things kids have today when I was growing up. Maybe I'm just old, and not hip anymore, so I don't have any clue, but it doesn't seem like the world has changed all that drastically in the last 20 or so years.

So why is it that I feel so old around all of these kids today?

We're having some people over on Saturday night for game night and burgers...oh yeah, and beer too. I'm looking forward to spending the remainder of the 3-day weekend relaxing with my wife, our dog, and our unborn child.

My turn

Yesterday, while we were getting ready to go to work, Monica felt the baby moving around again. I ran over and said "Let me feel!" She put my hand low on her tummy and after a few seconds, I felt a little bump against my thumb. My eyes got really big, as did my smile. Monica started to laugh, and as she did, I felt a twinge of disappointment because I thought what I had felt we just her abs flexing. When she stopped laughing, though, I felt it again. I asked her, "Is that it?" and she said that it was, indeed, our child beating against my thumb.

Friday, January 6, 2006...the day I first felt my child.

flutterbies

Monica felt the baby today.

She was sitting on the couch, surfing the net and laughing because it was tickling her on the inside. It made me smile really big.