Age 6

As I mentioned when I started this series of posts, my son turned 6 last week.  After the fairly big and elaborate celebration of last year, we decided to keep everything very low key this year.  We even decided to limit the birthday celebrations to just the immediate family, although that really had more to do with logistics and scheduling than anything  else.

As our son’s main birthday treat, we decided to make a trip down to Disneyland on the Saturday before.  We have an ownership interest in the Disney’s Vacation Club timeshare and looked into the possibility of getting a reservation at the recently opened Villas at the Grand Californian, but there wasn’t any availability that night so we decided to simply make it a day trip.

We live only about an hour away from Disneyland and have passes for admission, so we do make reasonably frequent visits down there, although not nearly as often as my wife and I did when we were younger and childless.  Our last visit had been only about a month before, but was primarily for the celebration of an adult friend’s birthday.  Since that day had a bit more of a scheduled agenda, we decided to make this visit an “Andy’s choice” day, where he would pretty much get his pick of rides and activities.  For this reason, we also chose not to try and meet up with any other friends, but instead just make it a family day.

One special activity we included that day was lunch at Goofy’s Kitchen, the character dining location at the Disneyland Hotel.  Andy is still a huge fan of the Disney characters and gets a bit kick out of these meals where some of his favorites come around and visit the table.  During our meal, we had visits with Goofy, Chip & Dale, Mulan, Jasmine, Baloo (from The Jungle Book) and Brer Fox.  We also got to visit with Pluto for a couple photos before we went to our table.

The restaurant also has occasional kid participation activities and Andy had the chance to get up and do The Twist with the characters as well as to help Goofy with baking of a cake (which mostly involved kids playing noisemakers and pretending to help clean up). 

Toward the end of our visit to the restaurant, the waiter brought Andy a cupcake with a birthday candle on it and Chip plus a few of the restaurant staff members all gathered for a short birthday celebration.  It wasn’t anything overly fancy, but Andy definitely got a big kick out of it.

After lunch, we headed back into the park to visit attractions.  This included a visit to see Mickey Mouse at his house in Toontown, where everyone did give Andy a bit of extra attention for his birthday.  The birthday visit was during the first weekend that Disneyland had all of their Christmas activities up and running, so we took that opportunity to see the Christmas parade and fireworks show.  Overall, it was a fun day and Andy seemed to really enjoy himself.

For the evening of Andy’s actual birthday, he picked pork chops and mashed potatoes for his birthday dinner, a bit of a surprise since we had never really thought that pork chops was one of his favorites.  We then had the traditional ice cream cake for dessert and then let him open presents.

While he got a lot of really nice gifts, it was kind of funny that possibly the biggest hit of the bunch was the birthday card that I had picked up for him the night before.  The card is the type that has a chip in it that plays sounds when the card is opened.  It features the characters from the Disney/Pixar movie Cars and plays the song “Life is a Highway” from the movie, which has been Andy’s favorite song for quite a while.  Even though my wife had already bought another card for him, I couldn’t resist buying this one when I spotted it while shopping for a couple other items at the local Walgreens store the night before.

The main gifts this year included a couple Thomas the Tank Engine toys from my wife and me and a shirt and Mickey Mouse wristwatch from one of his sets of grandparents.  The watch was a pretty exciting gift for him as it is his first and he was pretty proud about getting a big kid’s gift like that. 

Andy’s other set of grandparents were a bit late in shipping out his gift from them (a Mr. Potato Head and full set of parts), so he had a little extra gift opening event later in the week.  That turned out to be a bit of a nice opportunity to prolong his birthday celebration a bit longer.

There was also a little celebration of his birthday in his class at school, but I don’t have any photos as neither my wife nor I were there for it.  My wife brought along a couple packages of mini-cupcakes that were distributed around to the class and the teacher gave him a small gift as well.

While this was probably a much more low key birthday than many of his past ones (particularly the year before), it still was a fun time.  Happy birthday, Andy!

Age 5

By Andy’s 5th birthday, he had completed his first full year of pre-school, as well as a couple years in a weekly Gymboree program.  Between the two, he had made a lot of friends and had also had the opportunity to attend quite a few of his friends’ birthday parties.  This led us to think that it was a good idea to celebrate his 5th birthday (something of a milestone) with his first real birthday party with other kids.

We live in a townhouse that doesn’t have a yard or an overall design that would really be suited to having a large group of kids over.  While there is a party room available for rent in our condominium complex, it isn’t really overly kid-friendly either.  We realized that we really needed to find a kid-appropriate venue for the party.

Our first thought (and Andy’s first suggestion) was Farrell’s, having spent his birthday there the two previous years.  We looked into it and found that the price wasn’t too out of line, but we had major reservations about whether or not it would really work all that well for a big group of pre-school aged kids.  Other than the little merry-go-round, Mountasia really doesn’t offer much for kids that age and we were picturing a party that was little more than the kids all sitting around a big table eating ice cream and pizza. 

Andy was still kind of pushing for having the party there, but we were able to placate him by promising a family visit there not too long after his birthday.  We ended up going up there the weekend after his birthday for dinner and ice cream, inviting a few of our adult friends to meet up with us there as well.  Of course, Andy again got in a bunch of rides on the little merry-go-round.

Having recently been to another kid’s birthday party that was held at a local play gym, we realized that it would be vastly preferable to go somewhere that the kids could run around and play.  As I mentioned, we had been taking Andy to classes at a local Gymboree Play & Music location since he was really young. 

We checked into it and found that their prices for birthday parties were within our budget and that they had availability on Andy’s actual birthday (which was on a Sunday that year).  During his weekly class, we mentioned that we were considering having his birthday party there to his teacher, who is an outstanding teacher that Andy, and we, adored.  The teacher responded by offering to host and run the party if we booked it, which pretty much instantly sealed the deal for us.

The majority of the kids from his pre-school class as well as a few of the Gymboree students attended the party, resulting in a turn-out of around 20 kids.  The Gymboree teacher and an assistant did an excellent job running the event, which had a great mix of organized play activities and free play.  The kids all seemed to have a great time and the parents seemed to enjoy watching them! 

The package we bought did not include refreshments, so we ordered a sheet cake from a local supermarket and also bought various chips and juice for the event.  We were able to get a cake that was decorated with a picture of Mickey Mouse and his friends, which was a very good fit for our son’s interests.  We also were able to find Mickey Mouse paper plates, napkins, and cups to go with it.

After the party, we went home and let him open his gifts.  He ended up with a pretty large selection of items thanks to the reasonably large turnout at the birthday party.  Fortunately, so far he doesn’t seem to be expecting that every year.  I think we did a good job of explaining to him that the 5th birthday was kind of a special one.

In addition to the big party, he had a couple smaller celebrations as well.  This was his second year at his pre-school, so he once again had the little felt cake celebration there, similar to what they did the previous year. 

His pre-school was a primarily outdoor facility and it happened to be raining on the day that they celebrated his birthday.  On that day, school was actually held at someone’s house instead of at the usual school.

A couple weeks before his birthday, my wife’s parents came out to visit and we did a small party with them as well.  We picked up a small cake and let him open the presents that they had brought him.  We couldn’t help but feel that maybe he was a tad spoiled with all these separate celebrations that year, but we also wanted to accommodate everyone that wanted to celebrate with him.

Coming soon, I’ll conclude this series with reports from this year’s birthday!

Continuing my look back at my son’s previous birthdays in celebration of him turning 6 this week, here are my memories of his 4th birthday.  As he has gotten older, I have found that I had a tendency to take more photos, so the remaining posts will cover just one year at a time.

Age 4 (2007)

Andy’s 3rd birthday was the first that he still remembered pretty well a year later.  Because of that, he decided that he wanted to do pretty much the same thing as the year before, returning once again to Farrell’s.  This time, we decided to forgo the formal birthday package and instead just let everyone order whatever they wanted off of the menu.

As with the previous year’s visit, we included some play time in the game area at Mountasia.  Once again, Andy used the majority of the game/ride credits that we got for him to ride on the little merry-go-round.  During this visit, he did also give skee-ball a try for the first time, although I really was doing most of the work.

A couple months before his 4th birthday, Andy started his first year of pre-school.  For birthday kids, the teacher had a short celebration where the child was given a birthday crown and allowed to put candles onto a felt birthday cake. 

Finally, we did also do the now-traditional cake and gift-opening at home on his actual birthday.  Once again, the cake was an ice cream cake.

He had received most of his major gifts during the party at Farrell’s, but we gave him a toy fire truck that I had found at a really good sale price between the two parties and he also had gifts from his grandparents to open.

To Be Continued with Memories of Age 5.

Age 1 (2004)

To celebrate his first birthday, we attended the Disneyland Birthday Celebration that they offer a couple times a day at the Plaza Inn restaurant on Main Street.  At this event, everyone gets an undecorated cupcake along with small cups containing frosting and sprinkles to use to decorate them.  A character named Pat E. Cake hosts the event and Mickey and Minnie Mouse also pay a visit.  Quite a few of our friends were able to join us at the park for the party as well.

The first birthday also started our now usual tradition of going out somewhere for a bigger party, but also having a little family-only party at home with cake and the opening of his presents from us and various relatives.

This was also the one time that we attempted to make his birthday cake instead of buying one from the store, but we found that we generally lacked much cake decorating talent.

Age 2 (2005)

Andy’s 2nd birthday was probably his most low key birthday celebration to date.  Originally, his grandparents (my wife’s parents) were planning to come out and visit during his birthday.  Pretty close to the last minute, the trip was postponed until early December.  This led us to do a small party at home with just us.  A trip to Disneyland the following weekend gave us an opportunity to get together with some of our friends, but that wasn’t really treated as a birthday party.

For this birthday, we bought an ice cream cake from the grocery store, which he enjoyed very much.  In fact, the ice cream cake has now become something of a birthday tradition for the family.  Generally, Andy wants us to get one for his birthday each year and also strongly encourages my wife and me to have them for our birthdays as well.  It looks like I somehow didn’t get any pictures of the cake that year, but I did get several of him eating it and the aftermath.

Of course, he also had quite a bit of fun opening his birthday presents, which were mostly toys that year.  This was, I think, really the first time that he was very aware that the packages all contained fun things for him.  I find it pretty funny that the photos generally show him with such a serious expression of concentration.  Opening gifts is serious business!

Age 3 (2006)

For Andy’s 3rd birthday, we decided to take him to Farrell’s Ice Cream Parlour in Santa Clarita.  Farrell’s was a very popular, party-oriented chain of restaurants when I was a kid, but it pretty much went out of business in the 1980s.  In recent years, new owners have been working to revive the chain and the Santa Clarita location (which is located inside the Mountasia Fun Center) was the first location they opened.  Remembering the fun we had there as kids, it seemed like a perfect place to take our son.

We decided to go ahead and buy one of their formal birthday packages, which included pizza, small ice cream sundaes, drinks, and a number of Mountasia game/ride tokens.  Andy ended up using the majority of the game tokens for repeated rides on a little coin-operated merry-go-round.  For some reason, he has a kind of sad-looking expression in all the photos that I took of him riding the merry-go-round, but I promise that he really did seem to be having lots of fun on it!

This was the first year that my wife and I decided to try and get Andy the hottest toy of the year as his birthday present, which was the special 10th anniversary “TMX” edition of Tickle-Me-Elmo.  This toy was difficult to find, having been very much in demand following a generally impressive demonstration on Good Morning America on TV.  After several weeks on a waiting list, but were able to get it from a local toy store in time for his birthday.  While we found the toy pretty amusing, it actually was never really all that popular with Andy.  In fact, he found it kind of scary at the birthday party and he never warmed to it entirely.

The Farrell’s party was actually the second of two birthday parties that we had for Andy that year.  My wife’s parents visited a couple weeks before and we had a pre-birthday party where we served another ice cream cake and let him open his presents from that set of grandparents.

To Be Continued…

I’m sure it is normal for us as parents to have quite a bit of apprehension and uncertainty as our son starts school.  We have a lot of awareness of both his strengths and weaknesses and can’t help but wonder how each will affect his experience.  We do know that our son is quite smart, even already having some pretty decent reading skills.  He has known basics like his alphabet and counting since not too long after he learned to talk and he has even learned some simple math.

On the other hand, he also has some definite problems with listening and following directions, which are going to take some work to overcome.  After his very first day of school, the teacher already noted that he wasn’t listening as well as he should and moved him to a desk closer to the front of the room.  We’ve also recently learned that his eyesight is not very good.  While he got his first set of eyeglasses yesterday, he is still nearly blind in one eye even with the lenses.  Obviously, that is going to be a bit of a challenge to overcome and probably also explains why his motor skills haven’t been as strong as his intellectual talents.

Our son has been through 2 years of pre-school as well as a few months at a drop-off school-skills class, so we didn’t experience as much separation anxiety as some families do.  Even when he first started pre-school, there really wasn’t any major problem when my wife left him for the first time, something that surprised us a bit since he had always had a really difficult time with babysitters.  My wife, who is a stay-at-home mom, has probably had more of a difficult time with the adjustment than my son has.

The shift from pre-school to Kindergarten is still a big adjustment.  His pre-school was only 4 days a week, 3-hours per day.  The elementary school he is going to has a full day Kindergarten, which means 5 days a week, 6 1/2 hours per day.  This includes lunch at school, which is also a pretty big change.  The pre-school was a cooperative type, which meant that my wife stayed to assist with the class one day a week.  It also had pretty much an open-door policy where parents were pretty free to stick around if there was something going on that they wanted to observe.  Not surprisingly, Kindergarten has much more of a closed atmosphere.

We definitely do still intend to be very involved in our son’s school experience wherever we can.  My wife has already made certain that the teacher and the parent’s organization are aware that she is available to volunteer as needed and we expect that there will be many opportunities.  The class has 24 students and there are no teaching assistants, so the teacher did indicate that parents should have opportunities to stick around and assist in the classroom periodically.

While my work schedule limits my availability, I certainly hope to be able to take part whenever I can as well.  I did take the day off of work this week so that I could go along to the parent orientation on Tuesday, which gave me the opportunity to meet his teacher and see the classroom.  I expect to attend parent activities and meetings whenever my schedule allows.  I also definitely plan to continue to spend lots of time working with my son directly to help reinforce and practice the lessons he is learning in school.

I was impressed by the teacher and the classroom during the orientation on Tuesday.  The classroom immediately made a very good first impression due to the teacher’s decision to heavily feature “The Cat in the Hat” as a central theme to the decoration.  That was one of the very first books that we bought for my son and we have read it (and its sequels) together numerous times over the years.  My son’s reading skills have been improving rapidly and, just last weekend, I helped to guide my son through his first time reading “The Cat in the Hat” himself. 

The teacher herself definitely seemed very kind and skilled to me, based on my first impression.  She has quite a bit of teaching experience and seemed to have a good handle on how to work with kids this age.  After the first 2 days, my son’s impression of her is very positive and he still seems excited about going back again tomorrow.

While it is not always easy to watch my child gain independence and move forward, he is also my greatest pride and the most important part of my wife’s and my lives.  I look forward to continuing to share this adventure with my family!

My first computer experience was with a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model III that my father purchased in 1980 (when I was 10 years old).  Around that same time, Radio Shack made a deal with CompuServe to package and promote their service.  Under branding that Radio Shack called “Videotex”, they packaged CompuServe either with a dumb terminal or with terminal software sold for the TRS-80s.  My father bought a 300-baud modem and the Videotex package for the Model III, giving us our first look at connected computing.

My exposure to the features of CompuServe during this time was really just a taste as the service came with a pretty high hourly fee for use.  I mainly recall spending a little time watching over my father’s shoulder as he used it to access various news, weather, and information like that, although I recall that he generally preferred a competing service called The Source, which CompuServe eventually bought out and absorbed.  I also recall having a couple rare opportunities to spend an hour playing some of CompuServe’s primitive early online games.

Due to the hourly fees, I never spent any time in discussion boards or chat, instead getting early exposure to these via privately-run Bulletin Board Systems (BBSs) and, a few years later, with General Electric’s GEnie service, which was one of the first to offer discussion boards and a few other services at a fixed monthly fee instead of charging by the hour.  CompuServe was actually one of the last services to drop the hourly charges, which probably played a big role in their eventual decline.

After I graduated from college in 1991 with a degree in Computer Science and Engineering, CompuServe was one of the many technology companies to which I applied.  I ended up accepting a job with them as a junior engineer in their Entertainment Technology group, which focused on game products and the CB Simulator, which was their name for online chat.  I worked there for around 4 1/2 years, before I decided to move to California to pursue other opportunities in mid-1996.

The CompuServe headquarters was a campus in an industrial park located in the Columbus, Ohio suburb of Upper Arlington.  It consisted of two major buildings, the larger one (where I worked) housing the corporate business offices and the operations managing the consumer service.  The other building mainly housed their very lucrative network services division.  There was a nice employee cafeteria (The Oak Room), which was run by Marriot and an employee fitness center.
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The Oak Room had pretty decent food and I generally ate there a couple times a week.  They had a selection of standard grill items (burgers, chicken strips, etc.) that were available every day as well as a featured entree.  They would occasionally do prepared to order stir-fry or pasta that were immensely popular and would result in long lines during lunch hour.  I’d typically eat there on days that the entree sounded particularly good or when my schedule made it tough to leave the office for lunch.  When I did leave, there was a Wendy’s, a Pizza Hut, and a sandwich place across the street as well as numerous other restaurants that were a fairly easy drive.  The Oak Room also served as a location for larger meetings and employee gatherings.  I even remember just about everyone in the building gathering in there to watch the OJ Simpson verdict on a big-screen TV.

A couple years into my employment, the company started construction on a large new office building in nearby Hilliard, Ohio.  Much of the operation was eventually to move there and it also included a new state-of-the-art data center.  I did visit the new building a couple times (mainly tours and the occasional meeting), but my department never moved over there.

After the complicated deal where AOL purchased the consumer service and MCI/Worldcom bought the network division (which eventually ended up at Verizon), it appears that the CompuServe headquarters remained in Upper Arlington while the new building went to MCI/Worldcom.  Looking up both locations on Google Maps, it appears to me that AOL still has offices in Upper Arlington and Verizon still uses the Hilliard building.

During the time that I worked at CompuServe, the company was owned by H&R Block, which had bought it in an attempt to establish a strong year-round business to keep a revenue stream going outside of tax season.  It wasn’t an extremely obvious fit for them, though, and I’m not sure that Block ever became overly comfortable with the product.  As employees, we did get some pretty nice discounts on tax services, though.  H&R Block’s sale of the company to AOL and Worldcom came about a year after I left.

The overall business culture was fairly traditional, particularly compared to the Silicon Valley technology companies that were starting to rise at the time.  The employees tended to be somewhat older and experienced.  Being fresh out of college, I definitely felt pretty junior there and was also in a minority being single and childless.  Weekend and evening hours were very rare at the company as well, with most people working pretty traditional 8-5 work hours.  The dress code tended to be “business casual”.  Jeans and t-shirts were not really acceptable, but at least I didn’t have to wear a tie to work.

One part of working at CompuServe that I particularly enjoyed was my involvement as one of the adult leaders of a company-sponsored Explorer Post, which focused on computer technology.  Explorers is a vocation-based, coed program run by the Boy Scouts of America, targeted towards teenagers.  Our weekly meetings typically featured presentations by various CompuServe employees, covering different areas of computer technology.  I think my favorite was probably the meeting where the head of security came in and talked to the kids about the various efforts to thwart hackers that were trying to subvert CompuServe’s systems.  Several of the kids weren’t entirely innocent in this area themselves, which made this lecture hit home.

I also accompanied the kids as one of the chaperones on one ski trip (where I stayed in the lodge reading and drinking cocoa, since skiing has no appeal to me) as well as putting in a lot of work on a booth that the kids manned at an annual scouting show.  Those of us that worked as the adult leaders of this group did develop pretty good friendships, including very enjoyable dinners out together after the meetings.  Two of my fellow leaders even eventually started dating and ended up getting married to each other.

Reflecting CompuServe’s pioneering position in the online services business, the corporate culture was somewhat ahead of its time in a few ways.  Already in the early 1990s, email was already the dominant form of internal communications at CompuServe, not too surprising considering that it was one of their key products.  I remember undergoing a bit of a culture shock when I left the company in 1996 for a new company that did not yet have an email system in place.

Via the same phone numbers that customers used to access CompuServe’s services, employees could access all the various servers that were used for developing, testing, and configuring applications.  That meant that we had access to the vast majority of our work from home, if needed.  My department even included one employee that had switched to primarily working from home after the birth of her child.  This was at a time when I don’t think the term “telecommuting” had even been coined yet.

While my department officially handled all games and entertainment products, the truth is that there really wasn’t a lot of internal development of games going on at the time that I was there.  With access still pretty strictly dial-up and the service still largely text based, online games just weren’t that big a business yet.  As I mentioned earlier, the CB Simulator (chat) was officially classified as a “game” product and it really was our team’s primary focus.  As the junior engineer on the team, I was the one that tended to be assigned secondary tasks, which means I probably did more that wasn’t chat related than anyone else on the team.

One story that was pretty widely circulated among the employees at CompuServe, although I admit I don’t have verification that it was entirely accurate, was that the classification of CB Simulator as a “game” was the single biggest mistake that CompuServe made.  The product was the first online chat room made available to consumers and the widely told story was that CompuServe had considered taking out a patent on it, but decided that it wasn’t worth the time and cost of going through that process for something that was “just a game”.  As a result, online chat never was patented by anybody.  Assuming this is true, it certainly seems very likely that owning the patent on chat could easily have resulted in a pretty dramatically different fate for CompuServe.  Even today, some of the CB radio inspired terminology is still often used for online chats, including calling individual chat rooms “channels” and referring to the user nicknames as “handles”.

Before delving into the specific projects that I worked on, it would be helpful to give a little overview of the primary technologies used at CompuServe, which did tend to reflect the age of the product.  The primary infrastructure was built around Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) PDP-10 mini-computers, which the employees pretty much always simply called “tens”.  While the operating system running on the servers was derived from DEC’s standard TOPS-10, it was very heavily customized by CompuServe’s engineers.   CompuServe was so dependent on the PDP-10 technology, that they licensed the architecture from DEC so that they could continue to manufacture them for years after DEC officially discontinued them in the early 1980s.

Those that used the original CompuServe service likely recall the difficult to remember numeric user IDs, which were generally in the form 7xxxx,xxxx, although they eventually expanded to 10xxxx,xxxx once they ran out of the lower numbers.  This was a reflection of the PDP architecture, matching its typical format for user accounts.  The numbers were octal (base-8), which meant that none included 8 or 9 among the digits.  Employee accounts were those where the first number was less than 71000.  I was issued two user accounts, one for use in official work-related tasks (this account had administration rights in some services) and a second free account for my personal use.  The work account had the very easy to remember ID of 70000,1111 and the personal account was 70004,1065.

The various CompuServe applications covered a range of technologies.  Many of the older applications were written in the Fortran programming language and quite a few were written in a now largely forgotten, language called Bliss, which had been pretty widely used in the early days of the PDP systems.  There were also a few applications that were in Pascal, while most new development was done in C or C++, including re-writes of some of the key systems and services.  Many of these newer and upgraded systems were being built on Intel-based servers, typically running BSD UNIX.

For much of the time I was working there, much of the focus of the company was on modernizing the existing systems. While CompuServe had long been the industry leader for online services, AOL, and to a lesser degree Prodigy, were experiencing dramatic growth with much more graphical and user-friendly systems.  While CompuServe never really had a plan to completely abandon its text-based user interface, they did create the CompuServe Information Manager (CIM) software, which was available for MS-DOS, Windows, and Macintosh, that enabled a graphical user interface (windows, pull-down menus, mouse-control, etc.) on some of the core services.

The graphical interface in the CIM software was based around a proprietary protocol called HMI, which stood for “Host-Micro Interface”.  In order to provide the graphical interface on services, their application had to be modified (and often re-written) to use the HMI protocol.  This could be somewhat complex coding, since there was generally a strong desire to keep the text-based interfaces around as well for those users that still preferred to use some other terminal software to access the service.

For the Entertainment Technology department, I was the engineer that was assigned the job of investigating and learning the HMI protocol.  As a test case, I used CompuServe’s existing Biorhythm charting game.  Other than the mathematical formulas for the actual calculations (which I never really understood), this was one of the simplest games on the service, making it a good choice for conversion.  I started off by converting the entire application from Fortran to C, re-organizing as I went to separate the user interface portion from the calculation and chart-generation.  I then put in some detection to determine whether a user was coming in via CIM or some other software and then branch them either to my re-designed HMI interface or to the original text version.  I suspect that some CIM users who stumbled on this game probably found themselves wondering why in the world we had gone to all this trouble to make a fancy user-interface for Biorhythms.

The largest individual project that I did for CompuServe was the development of a pretty complex package that allowed for creation of quizzes and surveys.  The project had started off as a fairly replacement for an existing multiple-choice quiz game.  As I started working on it, I quickly realized that it wouldn’t take that much effort to expand it to also allow fill-in-the-blank answers as well.  I don’t really recall for sure how extensive the survey capabilities were, although I’m pretty sure the data storage was pretty primitive.  The whole package was completely HMI enabled (while also working in text mode) and very customizable to fit different uses.  I designed and coded pretty much the entire product and it ended up being pretty widely used across the service.

I’m having a little bit of difficulty remembering the specific features set of the quiz/survey package.  A large part of the reason for this is that my current job has included some work on a very similar package and I have trouble remembering which features I implemented in which version.  I currently work for the web division of a large media company and have found that quite a bit of the experience that I gained at CompuServe very directly related to the work at my current employer.

As I mentioned before, the CB Simulator was the top focus in our department.  Much of the time I was there, most of my teammates were pretty focused on a complete re-write of the software in C++ running under UNIX.  I did very little in the way of actual coding or design work on this, but was involved in some engineering related to testing and reporting, work that ended up being very similar to some of the key initiatives that I have put into place at my current job.

I had the responsibility of doing load testing of the CB Simulator in order to ensure that it would work properly when large numbers of users were hitting it all at once.  This type of testing involves creating automated scripts that try to simulate some or all of the ways that real users would interact with the product.  I learned a lot about the value of this kind of testing and the techniques involved with implementation doing this work.  I was able to apply that knowledge in my current job by designing a load test lab and the surrounding procedures and policy and selling them to management in order to get them implemented.

The load testing work that I did at CompuServe was kind of primitive compared to the tools and resources available today.  Currently, there are a lot of commercial and open source tools available for scripting load tests and gathering and reporting test results, but at CompuServe I had to program the test scripts manually using the fairly low-level network protocols.  The CompuServe network didn’t really fully match any industry standard, but it was at least mostly based on the X25 protocol.  I had to learn the basics of that protocol and write programs that would open multiple connections to the network and then construct properly formatted packets to log a user in, go to the CB Simulator, and do some basic chat operations.  It was pretty complicated programming and most of the data gathering was largely focused on human observation, but it did provide a lot of useful information and uncover a number of bugs.

The other major task that I had for the CB Simulator was the very first project I was assigned.  In many ways, it was as interesting a lesson in human nature as it was a learning experience technically.  The CB Simulator was completely human moderated, with each active channel always monitored by someone designated by CompuServe.  The moderators were often trusted members of the online community who had been offered a contract by CompuServe.  These moderators had access to commands that allowed them to send private warning messages to users for inappropriate language or an inappropriate handle as well as to kick people out of the channel.

Whenever the moderators used any of these commands, an entry was written to a log file indicating the time, warning given, reason, and the user ID of the person receiving the warning.  For handle warnings, it would also log the handle that prompted it.  My project was to create scripts that would parse through these log files to generate reports that could be easily read and reviewed by the customer service team.  These reports also included some basic data about the frequency of each type of warning on each channel for any given day.  As you might expect, the log entries for the handle warnings could be especially fascinating and, within our department, we would often get some laughs out of the most interesting ones.  I wish I could still remember some examples, although even if I could I’m not sure that including them wouldn’t be less family-friendly than I usually strive for on this blog.

The last really major project that I was involved in at CompuServe was probably the beginning of the end of the company’s independence.  In light of AOL’s ever growing market share, the decision was made that CompuServe needed a separate service that would attempt to more directly compete.  The product that they came up with was “CompuServe WOW!”, which was designed to strictly use a graphical interface (based around an enhanced version of HMI) and to also include extensive family-friendly features, including very strict parental controls.

Our team’s involvement with WOW! was, as you might expect, to adopt the chat application to meet the needs of the new product.  The biggest requirement that didn’t previously exist was the need to allow users to create their own self-named channels and the necessary moderation features surrounding that.  The family-friendly goal of the site and related parental controls also required that we build in much stricter controls for limiting access.  As with the previous CB Simulator projects, the vast majority of the coding and design work was left to the more senior engineers while I was more involved in the testing and troubleshooting work.

The WOW! product was not a success and the product only survived for less than a year.  The big problem was that it didn’t really offer much that wasn’t already available from AOL, which provided little motivation for users to sign up for it instead of the more popular and better established service.  The product had very little appeal to existing CompuServe customers either, since most were looking for something much more business and/or technology oriented.

It was during the WOW! project that I started to see the writing on the wall and realized that CompuServe was a company in decline.  When that was combined with my continued position as the low man on the totem pole in our department, my thoughts definitely started to focus on finding new opportunities.  A vacation to Southern California in late 1995 kind of clinched the decision for me as I had always thought I probably would be happier living out there, a feeling that was pretty much solidified by that trip.  Not long after I got home from that vacation, I updated my resume and started sending out applications.  I left CompuServe to take a job with a small Los Angeles based game developer in May of 1996.

As I mentioned earlier, employees received a free personal account on CompuServe and I did put it to pretty heavy use.  I particularly became a very active participant on the Showbiz Forum, which was a discussion board focused on movies and television (the TV stuff was eventually spun-off to a separate forum, where I also participated).  At the time, I was an extremely frequent moviegoer, typically seeing 1-2 movies in the theater every week as well as being an avid collector of Laserdiscs.  I had already been an active participant on similar boards on the GEnie service and it was great having another place to discuss these topics.

CompuServe had made a deal with Roger Ebert to offer his reviews on the service.  As part of that deal, Ebert was given his own section on the Showbiz Forum, where he was a very active, direct participant.  During those years, it was great fun being able to discuss movies directly with Ebert and he often used the forum as a source for some of his articles, especially his “Movie Answer Man” column.  At one point, he published a book of those columns and I was amused to find my name in the book’s index.  I even had more page citations than Martin Scorsese!

I did meet a few people from the forums in person over the years as well.  One participant on Showbiz was local to Columbus and wrote movie reviews for one of the smaller area newspapers.  On a number of occasions, he invited me to come along to some of the press screenings for new movies, which was pretty cool.  In particular, I remember seeing Steven Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List” at a screening that was held a couple months before it finally opened in Columbus.  During the Southern California vacation in 1995, I met up with a pretty large group of forum regulars for dinner and also met up with various forum members a few times after I moved out here.

I signed up for a paying account and continued to participate on the forums for a while after leaving the company, but eventually drifted away from them as my interests changed.  In particular, Disneyland became more of a leisure-time focus for me instead of movies and I generally found more active discussions about that on Usenet newsgroups and, eventually, on web-based forums.  Of course, the CompuServe forums generally declined greatly in activity as the web came into prominence anyway.

AOL is still keeping the CompuServe name around both for a web portal (essentially the old Netscape portal now carries the CompuServe name) and for the “CompuServe 2000” product, which is essentially a re-skinned version of AOL itself.  These products are really just CompuServe in name only, though.  The CompuServe that I knew and have written about in this post no longer exists.

As this very long post probably illustrates, CompuServe played a very important role in my life and I can’t help but feel a bit sad as the original service has finally passed into history.  I’m honestly a bit surprised that it lasted as long as it did, and I haven’t really used it myself for several years, but I still am sorry to see it end.

For the past several years, my family has been going to Disneyland on the 4th of July to see their special fireworks show.  We have learned how best to manage the crowds on that very busy day, making it a pretty easy experience.  We also get a hotel room close-by in order to avoid having to deal with the night-time traffic.

When I was growing up, more often than not we spent 4th of July at home instead of trying to go out to see a professional fireworks show or some other public event.  Generally, we were pretty satisfied simply enjoying the day at home as a family.  This would usually include watching the Boston Pops’ 4th of July concert on TV or other similar patriotic shows.  We would often have a BBQ dinner at home.  There were a few years that we did go out to municipal fireworks displays, though, so I did at least have that experience a few times as a kid. 

The most memorable trip out to see a 4th of July fireworks show was in 1977.  That summer, my father had just taken a new job that required our family to move from Florida to Flint, Michigan.  For the first couple months, we had to find an alternative place to live while we were waiting for the house my family had purchased to be vacant and ready for us.  We had a Starcraft pop-up style camper that we used on vacations, so we spent that time staying at the Holly Hills Campground (based on an online search, I think it is a KOA now) in nearby Holly, which was just a short distance outside of Flint.

On that 4th, we decided to drive into Flint for their big municipal fireworks show downtown, but it ended up being Mother Nature that put on the more memorable performance that night.  There was a huge rainstorm and I honestly can’t remember for certain whether or not the fireworks display actually took place, although I think it did.  The most memorable part was returning that evening to learn that a tornado had touched down in the campground while we were gone!  We were lucky that the actual touchdown (and most of the damage) was on the opposite end from where our campsite was located, which meant that our camper was ok.  It was definitely a bit of a fright and still is the closest call with a tornado that I ever experienced.

I don’t remember completely for certain, but I don’t think we ever went out to public events on the 4th of July in any of the other years that we lived in Flint, instead opting for celebration at home.  In the late 70s and early 80s, Michigan had pretty loose restrictions on the sale of fireworks for home use, which meant that every supermarket had big display tables with a big selection of firecrackers, sparklers, roman candles, bottle rockets, and other similar items.  My parents were appropriately nervous about these types of things, though, and would only allow us to get some sparklers, which we would only use with close supervision.

Many of the neighbors did buy and use the other kinds of home fireworks, which meant that there was always a sort of second-hand display that we were able to watch a bit on the evening of the 4th.  On the 5th, the neighborhood streets would be very littered with the spent casings from many of the fireworks and firecrackers that had been set off the night before. 

My best friend and I had a tradition, which we obviously never told our parents about (this post may end up as a confession…), walking through the neighborhood on the 5th examining the litter from the night before searching for accidentally discarded fireworks and firecrackers that had not yet been fired.  Each year, we found and gathered up quite a bit of stuff that was still live.  I remember one year we even found an unexploded cherry bomb, which was a particularly exciting find for a couple pre-teen boys.  I don’t remember exactly what we did, but I remember that it was never much of a problem finding a spot outside of eye and earshot of parents in order to light off everything we found.

Regardless of whether I just stayed at home with family or went out to do something special for the holiday, my memories of the 4th of July are pretty much all positive.  Here’s hoping for another great 4th of July holiday tomorrow.  Happy Birthday, USA!

The Candlelight Processional is a long running holiday tradition at Disneyland.  It is a concert program that they typically run around the first week of December, which is a musical celebration of the religious aspect of the Christmas holiday, featuring a professional orchestra and a large massed choir formed from numerous church and school choirs as well as some Disney employees.  The show also features a celebrity narrator, who tells the Biblical Christmas story in between the songs.  This show has been a favorite Christmas season tradition for me for as long as I have lived out here in Southern California.  It is something I really look forward to every year.

Traditionally, this concert is performed on a stage set up in the Town Square area of Main Street, with the Railroad Station used as the backdrop.  In most years, there are just 4 evening performances of the show, two each on Saturday and Sunday.  The majority of the Town Square area is blocked off for the stage as well as for a large seating area.  Tickets for viewing the show in the seating area are mainly distributed to Disney’s corporate partners and other VIPs while regular park guests start staking out seats early to the sides and further back in order to get even an obstructed view of the show.

This can result in a lot of logistics problems and major bottlenecks in that part of the park on those days.  Because of this, Disney a fairly short-lived (5 years) experiment starting in 1998 of moving the show to the Fantasyland Theater, an outdoor performance venue located across from "It’s a Small World".  Walt Disney World had moved their version of the show from Town Square in the Magic Kingdom to a similar theater in Epcot a few years earlier and had eventually managed to expand it multiple shows a night throughout the holiday season, with reserved seating tickets being sold through popular dining packages.  There was a lot of speculation that this experiment with a change of venue at Disneyland was also hoped to eventually lead to a similar expansion of the program, although that never materialized and the show was finally moved back to Main Street starting in 2003.

Since the vast majority of the tickets to the show were still distributed to VIPs, the move to the Fantasyland Theater had an effect of pretty substantially reducing the availability of the show to the general public.  Unlike the Main Street location, guests that were outside of the theater would not really be able to see or hear much, if any, of the show.  The only options were really to either figure out a way to obtain tickets or to wait in a stand-by line outside the theater and hope to get the opportunity to fill-in leftover space (mostly due to no-shows) available right before the show started.

A few days ahead of time, Disney publicly announced that there would be a very limited number of tickets available to the general public the morning of each of the two show days.  The announcement stated that the tickets would be available on a first-come, first-served basis at the entrance to the theater immediately after park opening and that each guest arriving would be able to request a maximum of 6 tickets.  With the expected very limited availability, it quickly became evident that they would all be distributed very quickly and that it would be necessary to rush to the theater as quickly as possible after park opening to get a chance at them. 

Back in 1998, I was a very active participant on the old alt.disney.disneyland Usenet discussion group.  The local participants on that board had established a weekly meet at the park every Sunday at noon, which I attended just about every week.  Quite a few of the regulars there were interested in seeing the show, although a lot of people didn’t have the ability to easily get down to the park right at opening on a Sunday morning.  Since I was still fairly young and unattached at the time, I decided that I did want to try for tickets and I volunteered to pick up the full 6 ticket maximum so that I could share with some of the other members of the group.

The Saturday morning ticket distribution went pretty much as everyone (except, apparently, those at Disney that came up with this plan) would probably expect.  Locals that wanted tickets arrived as early as possible and got into position as far in as possible during the pre-opening period where only Main Street is usually available.  There was a mad, not particularly safe dash from the "rope drop" location at the end of Main Street to the theater right after park opening and the available tickets were all distributed within about 10 minutes or so.  This was widely reported in the online forums available at the time (mostly the newsgroups) and the story even got picked up by the Orange County Register newspaper.  I think Disney was between a rock and a hard place for Sunday, as Saturday’s distribution had shown them the problems but they couldn’t really change the announced procedures at the last moment.

On Sunday morning, I headed down to the park as early as I could and arrived a little over an hour before the announced park opening time.  After parking and taking the tram over to the entrance area, I quickly ran into another friend from the newsgroup and joined him in line at the turnstiles.  Once the park opened, we quickly made our way to the end of Main Street and positioned ourselves right by the rope.  It was pretty obvious that just about everyone waiting right by the rope was there for Candlelight tickets. 

While we were waiting at the rope, my friend recognized the sister of one of the other regulars from the newsgroup.  I hadn’t met her before, but knew her brother fairly well.  He had even mentioned to me a few weeks before that his sister was going to be moving down from Northern California and would probably start showing up at some of the park meets.  She was there for the Candlelight tickets as well, hoping to get tickets for her and her brother.  The three of us spent some time chatting while waiting for rope drop at the park’s official opening time.

For those of us trying for tickets, rope drop was much like the start of a marathon.  As soon as the park was opened, everyone headed to the Fantasyland Theater in as fast a sprint as they could manage.  Disney did post some employees along the route to the theater who made a few futile attempts to call for people to slow down, but who were clearly really there mainly to keep the pathway open and to be ready to attend to anyone that fell or otherwise became injured.  I really hated running through the park like that, but I knew it was the only possible way to get tickets.

My friend and I managed to pretty much stick together during the run and ended up in roughly the same position in line.  There were a fair number of people that made it into line ahead of us, but we were close enough to the front to get tickets.  Unfortunately, the girl had fallen behind by quite a bit and was considerably further back in line.  They did run out before she got to the front of the line, so my friend and I each quickly gave her one of our extra tickets for her and and her brother to use. 

In order to get to the entrance faster, my friend had parked at the Millie’s Restaurant on Harbor Blvd. and walked over instead of dealing with the extra time involved with the toll booths and trams for the Disneyland parking lot.  He needed to go back over to move his car and suggested the three of us all go over and get breakfast at Millie’s.  We all agreed that was a good idea and enjoyed sitting down for a leisurely table service meal after the morning’s excitement.  It was also a nice opportunity to get to know the newcomer to our group a bit.

After breakfast, my friend headed off to move his car to the Disneyland lot while the girl and I walked back to the park.  By the time we got back, it was still an hour and a half or so until the noon meet.  While it probably would have been logical for the two of us to have spent that time riding rides together or something like that, we both were pretty introverted and shy and instead just went off our separate ways.

At this point, I’m sure that anyone that knows me and my family at all well knows where this is going, regardless of having heard this story before or not.  Over the next few weeks, I did get to know the girl, her name is Ilene, better and started spending more time hanging out with her at the Sunday meets as well as a few other group gatherings that were scheduled that month.  I even had Christmas dinner with her and her brother (as well as the other friend from the Candlelight stampede) at one of the Disney hotel restaurants.  We hung around together quite a bit on New Years Eve at the park as well.

We finally got around to exchanging email addresses and IM screennames in early January and finally went on our first official date towards the end of that month.  Ilene and I were married a little under 2 years later and recently celebrated our 8th wedding anniversary.  While that Sunday morning in early December 1998 is probably one that Disneyland would generally rather be forgotten, it is definitely one that worked out extremely well for us.  Although the logistics still sometimes can be very difficult, although not as bad as in 1998, we still look forward to seeing the show every year (sometimes in Florida, including this year) as it holds very special meaning for us.

At long last, the series of dental procedures to replace my baby tooth have completed.  Last Wednesday, I went in for the final appointment where the dentist set the crown (the artificial tooth) onto the implant. 

About 3 weeks before, I went in to get fitted for the crown.  Unexpectedly, this turned out to be one of the more unpleasant parts of the process.  The main part of this process was taking wax impressions of my teeth that a lab would then be able to manufacture a properly fitting crown.  To do this, they stuck a fairly large wad of the wax impression material into my mouth, had me bite down, and then I had to keep it in place for about 10 minutes or so until it set.

They started off by taking the impression of my upper teeth (the implant is on the bottom).  This was kind of uncomfortable, but not too exceptionally bad.  The worst part was that the wax had a very slight, strangely spicy flavor to it and I found that it kind of burned my lip a bit while it was in place.  While waiting for the impression to set, the staff left me alone in the room and went off to gather supplies and/or tend to other patients.  For some reason, I kind of felt oddly self-conscious during that time.

After the upper impression was completed, they next took a couple X-rays to verify the exact angle and positioning of the implant.  I thought it was interesting, and encouraging, that while reviewing the X-ray, the dentist spontaneously exclaimed that the oral surgeon is “a master”.  Apparently, the implant was very precisely and cleanly positioned, creating a pretty ideal situation for the placement of the crown.

Next, the dentist removed the “healing cap” that had been placed into the implant.  This was actually the first that I had realized that the metal disk-shaped piece that had been in place was actually temporary.  It made a lot of sense, but it was something that I had somehow simply overlooked or misunderstood during the previous appointments.  This cleared up something I had really been wondering about, which was how the crown was going to fit over this disk, which seemed to extend a bit too far past the edge of my other teeth.

Once the healing cap was removed, he placed a fairly large metal piece into the implant that was used as part of the measurement process for the impression of the lower teeth.  I’m not really entirely sure what this actually was, but it was the part that was especially unpleasant.  The reason for this is that the big metal piece prevented me from fully closing my mouth or from putting my teeth together.  This had to remain in place until they completed the impression, which was done in a fairly similar manner to the upper one.

The lower impression was especially rough as it had the same basic problems as the upper one, plus the added discomfort from the metal piece.  At the end of the waiting period while the wax set, the hygienist came in and removed the impression, having to do some maneuvering to pull it out around the metal part that was in the implant.  The dentist then came in and immediately asked her how she got it out without removing the other part first.  He then examined the impression and confirmed that it had been ruined and would have to be redone!  As much as I disliked having to repeat that part of the process, I admit that I actually felt kind of sorry for the hygienist, who both seemed to feel really guilty about the whole thing and also had to endure a pretty strong scolding from the dentist.

Fortunately, for that replacement impression, the dentist came in and removed the impression material himself (after taking out the other instrument) and this one was fine.  The healing cap was put back in after that to keep something in place until the actual crown came back from the lab.  The dentist then pulled out a set of color samples that he matched up to my existing teeth in order to determine the correct shade.  It was actually a tad troubling to discover how yellow my teeth actually are when viewing the color outside my mouth that way, but I guess that comes with age.  The dentist did ask if I had any intention of ever getting my teeth bleached as a factor in deciding whether to go with a somewhat lighter shade.  I decided that wasn’t something I was probably going to ever do, so I went with the exact match.

They told me that it would take about 2 weeks for the crown to come back from the lab and made an appropriate follow-up appointment.  A few days later, they called and told me that the lab had called and said that they would need another week.  Coincidentally, I already had a long-standing appointment scheduled for that week for my six-month cleaning.  They were able to go ahead and schedule me for the appointment slot right after that one to put the crown on.  This worked out well from a scheduling/convenience standpoint, although it resulted in about 2 1/2 hours spent in the dentist’s chair, which is something of an endurance test.

They did the cleaning first, which was very routine, and then moved me to a different examination/procedure room for the crown placement.  The dentist came in and explained that they are usually able to do these without any anesthetic, but he did warn that there can sometimes be some discomfort as the shunt is screwed into the implant.  The reason for this is that the shunt is somewhat thicker than the healing cap, which can cause a bit of pressure due to the compression of the gum tissue.  He said that some anesthetic could be used if I started having enough discomfort to indicate a need, but it never bothered me enough to be necessary.

The process was never especially uncomfortable, but it was fairly time consuming.  The dentist fairly repeatedly had to place the crown on, take various measurements of how the bite lined up, and then remove it and trim it down a bit before trying again.  The measurements were done using small strips of marking paper that would leave guide marks on the crown. The trimming of the crown was done using a dental drill, but thankfully it was all done on the counter and not in my mouth. 

Once he had the sizing correct, he took the crown into another room to polish it up.  I presume this was basically to take away any roughness that was left behind from the trimming process.  He then came in and mixed up some special dental cement that would be used to hold the crown in place.  Once the crown had been cemented in, I then had to bite down on a small Styrofoam cylinder for a few minutes to let the cement harden.  The dentist then gave me a few instructions about how to properly clean the area around the implant/crown and also warned me to be particularly careful during the first 24-hours until the cement fully set.

After about 8 months without a tooth in that spot, having one there again is taking some getting used to.  Initially, I was feeling a bit of pressure against the adjacent teeth and the gums, almost as if I had something stuck between my teeth. That feeling pretty much went away by the next day, probably as the gums and teeth adjusted to having a tooth there again.  The other part that I really have to get used to is that the new tooth is full-sized.  I’ve always had the smaller baby tooth in that spot, so the bigger tooth is a definite change.  Finally, the crown is pretty much completely smooth without the ridges that are typical across the top of a real tooth.  Over the last few days, I’ve had to keep periodically reminding myself that this is normal and doesn’t mean that I have something stuck to my tooth.

The only thing that still is really unresolved at this point is how much all of this is going to cost.  Despite the fact that several months have passed since the implant was done, I still haven’t heard back a final determination of how much the insurance is going to pay and how much I’m going to owe.  It seems that the oral surgeon’s office is being exceptionally patient about that, although I suppose that they are probably used to this process taking a long time.  After the crown was put on, the dentist indicated that they were still waiting for a response from the insurance company on that work as well and that they would bill me once they new the correct amount.

Obviously, this has been a pretty long and difficult ordeal, but I do think I am way better off with this implant than I would have been going with something more routine like a bridge.  Aesthetically, the implant and crown looks pretty much just like a real tooth and, once I get used to the few quirks, I think it will pretty much feel like one as well.

Yesterday was my son Andy’s 5th birthday!  This was an event that leaves me with some fairly paradoxical feelings.  I can’t believe that it has already been 5 years since he was born as the time does seem to fly quickly.  On the other hand, he has become such an integrated and vital part of our family that the time before he was there now feels a lot like a part of a different life.

Becoming a parent is unquestionably the best thing that I have ever done, with only the decision to marry my wonderful wife even coming close.  I’m well aware that I run the risk of becoming potentially intolerably sappy and sentimental in this post, but I simply don’t know how to accurately express my feelings towards my family without sounding that way.  For any readers of this blog that are turned off by an excess of sentiment, I’ll try to post a review of the new James Bond movie in the next day or two.

After 5 years, a bit of reflection pretty much comes automatically.  One thing that I’ve often heard repeated, both before and after becoming a father, is that parenthood involves a lot of sacrifice.  While I definitely understand the meaning behind such statements, I’m not so inclined to agree that “sacrifice” is really the right word.  Unquestionably, there are a lot of things that my wife and I did before Andy’s arrival that are much less common, if they still occur at all.  Reductions range from such small-scale activities as TV and movie viewing or nights out with friends, all the way up to substantial changes in vacation planning, major purchases and pretty much every other major life decision.

I tend to look at these as trade-offs rather than sacrifices, though, as the pleasures and benefits of being a father push way into the background any significant thoughts about what I might be missing.  While such activities as visiting a theme park or going to the movies have become more complicated (and in some ways restrictive), and often more tiring, I also find them to be rewarding in a whole new way.  Andy is mostly in a constant state of discovery and I find it tremendously rewarding to share with him many of the things that have brought a lot of joy to my own life.

The day to day routine is also full of moments that I treasure.  I absolutely love hearing Andy tell me about his day when I get home from work.  When I ask him about what he did at school, his answer always starts excitedly with "I played!", but it doesn’t usually take too much effort to coax longer and more detailed stories out of him.  His stories can be rather hard to follow and don’t always make a lot of sense, but they are told with a compellingly breathless enthusiasm that is usually a delight.

Andy has a tremendous imagination, so his stories of the days activities are often filled with rather colorful stories about pretending games involving such favorite things as cars, airplanes, fire trucks, and hotels.  Like many kids his age, he has an imaginary friend, but in his case that friend is an airplane who goes on all kinds of interesting adventures, although a lot of them seem to be more focused on the hotels where it stays rather than on the actual exotic (or not so exotic) destinations. 

Another favorite pretending game of Andy’s is bringing people imaginary food items.  During phone calls with his grandparents (via speakerphone), he likes to occasionally run off and then come back and announce that he is delivering some food item to them.  They get a big kick out of that.  He was similarly providing imaginary appetizers to our friends while we were waiting at a restaurant for our table during a dinner party a few weeks ago.  After finishing his cake at his birthday party last night, he also had to go around and serve other pretend food to many of the party-goers.

As I just mentioned, we did have a big birthday party yesterday afternoon.  We have been taking Andy to a class at the local Gymboree facility for a couple years.  For his party yesterday, we rented the facility for a couple hours and had a party for Andy and 19 other kids from his pre-school and Gymboree classes.  We were fortunate enough to be able to arrange for his usual Gymboree teacher to host and run the event, which ended up being a huge success.  The teacher did an outstanding job of providing a pretty much perfect mix of organized activities and free play time and really kept the kids all highly entertained for two hours.  It was a lot of fun and an event that I think will be pretty memorable both for Andy and for us.

Yesterday’s party brings me full circle back to the trade-offs that come from being a parent, but my hesitance to call them sacrifices.  Yesterday, many of our long time friends (most are not parents) spent what sounds like an exceptionally fun day at Disneyland.  I’ve thoroughly enjoyed reading the various reports from and about their day.  Six years ago, I’m pretty sure my wife and I would have been there as well and it sounds like we would have had a great time.  Andy’s birthday party is absolutely where I wanted to be yesterday, though.