Refugees

Please, if you haven't already, watch this speech about helping refugees: Elder Kearon. I am very thankful Katie and the kids could spend time this week assisting in an effort at our church to assemble kits for refugees.

And this morning, Maddie and her friend are selling more items at a yard sale and donating all proceeds to a refugee shelter.

When we were evacuated from Egypt, we had to register the kids for school in Virginia as refugees. We had few financial worries as we received a generous evacuation allowance from the government. Nevertheless, it was an unsettling time for the kids. So they have found it easy to feel compassion for refugees who have nothing, with little hope of returning home.

Athens Travel Guide

We stayed at an Airbnb apartment. An aside about Airbnb: I love it. It has my non-business-travel business until hotels stop hating children. However, over the four years that we have been using Airbnb, the experience has gotten less charming each time as it has evolved from staying in someone's house, where it is clear they live there the rest of the time, to staying in someone's rental unit that they invested in for the purpose of Airbnb and it is clear no one has ever lived there because while all necessaries are present, they are arranged in an unlivable way. For example, this apartment had an unplugged TV in a room with no outlets. Not that we were there to watch TV, but it was kind of funny.

Plaka neighborhood is awesome. The street adjacent to the Acropolis Museum has great restaurants and ice cream shops.

Our apartment was around the corner from this great pedestrian area.

The Acropolis Museum is best viewed from the outside in the evening. Pretty boring affair aside from the excellent Lego recreation of the Acropolis. An aside about the word acropolis: It is easy and fun to mess with your kids' heads by persisting in saying apocalypse instead. Such as, "It's better to experience the apocalypse at night." After a two second pause, they all give you this great twisted face look.

The Acropolis itself is awesome and is best viewed at night (but my night photos came out terrible so you don't get any), though you can't go to the top after 3 pm. 

On top of the apocalypse.

Our apartment was southeast but the northwest (looking southeast) is the best view. There is a bar on Apostolou Pavlou street where you will want to go around 8 pm to get a bite to eat with the best view in Athens, Thissio or something like that.

View of my receding hairline (sigh), and Acropolis from near our apartment.

View from Lofos Arios Pagos (a big rock northwest/looking southeast)

Across the street at Temple of Zeus.

Then you'll want to send shoppers to Monastiraki area, Pandrossou street specifically. Non shoppers will want to be doing something else when the shoppers find this street, because it could take, you know, forever.

What we did instead of shopping. Katie and Madeline were in the shoe store in the background.

We rented a car and drove a lovely 70 kilometers to Sounio to see the Temple of Poseidon. An aside about Greek culture: The way Germans are about being naked in public, that's how Greeks are about going on strike. They love it. So they went on strike and the temple site was closed.

As close as we could get to Poseidon

Also, they stayed on strike and a bunch of stuff was closed the next day as well. Not to be deprived of maximum fun, we stopped at the beach and found a bouncy house.

Caleb Wins Monopoly

This post is dictated by Caleb, typed by Tim.

Caleb always wins Monopoly. Here's how.

1. Do anything you can to get the railroads.
2. If another player is about to get a monopoly, or close to getting a monopoly, get the land they really need and make a trade to get the railroads.
3. Always hide your expression.
4. There is no step four.
5. There is no step five without step four.
6. Get your mom on your side to thwart dad's trading efforts.

Due Date: October

Number 4 is on the way. In case you missed my Facebook post, this video describes how Katie is feeling. Also, unrelated, the same comedy troop gets it mostly right in this skit (FYE).

We told the kids of their new sibling a few weeks ago. It took us about two minutes to convince them we weren't kidding. Maddie cried with happiness. Henry seems especially nervous about losing his place as the baby. Caleb, meanwhile, reasonably concluded that since no one pays attention to him anyway (middle child) nothing is going to change, so he's not worried. I'm pretty sure, from a birth order psychology standpoint, the 8-year gap is sufficient for Henry to always be the baby of the family and for Number 4 to be an only child.

Madeline has entered the babysitting phase of tweenagehood, even getting paid for it by the downstairs neighbors. So I see myself as more of a parenting contractor at this point.

We arrive in Manila in August, after a summer in which Katie gets to be six months pregnant at Disney World. That sounds super awesome. With luck, she might join us for the evening fireworks. Anyway, barring the appearance of unexpected risk factors, Number 4 will be born in Manila. In Manila we will have a housekeeper and a nanny. Trust me, Katie made an informed decision about getting pregnant.

Caleb Turned 10

An event consistent with the title of this blog post occurred. Photos:

Not All Bad

Despite my ski frustrations (see earlier post), the week in Garmisch was a great vacation and skiing is a wonderful family tradition. Here are the pics.

Calvinist Skiing

It is ski week in Germany. So, naturally, we are skiing. And I love it. At least that's what I keep telling myself, like a mantra, as I observe with considerable cognitive dissonance the happy faces all around me as we suffer through this odd ritualistic self mutilation called skiing.

But it becomes clear when one considers where skiing is popular: Puritan New England, Mormon Utah, Calvinist Northern Europe. These locations have two important things in common. First, a religious cultural inheritance that is skeptical of too much enjoyment and full of guilt. Second, current and long standing relative economic comfort. Put these two things together and you get societies desperate for self-torture opportunities to ease the guilt of so much comfort. Enter skiing.

The equipment and lift tickets are so expensive as to give one the impression that purveyors are deliberately trying to price literally everyone out of the market. There is no cost-benefit analysis that justifies the price. Until you realize it is a cost-suffering analysis. All these users of new Atomic parabolic skis and Oakley goggles and Spyder snow pants are really making a public declaration that they were willing to inflict more economic suffering upon themselves than I was, as evidenced by my selfish insistence on using 12-year old black ski pants that are too big and that I have rigged with the plastic strap removed from my kid's swim goggles as a make-shift suspender to prevent them falling down to my knees. You see, I'm just not willing to suffer that much. I'm not a good Calvinist like these other folks.

Then there is the process of getting to the mountain. Packing everything into the car and driving to the mountain. Driving back to the hotel because someone forgot their gloves. Returning to the mountain and checking in at the locker room. Again, being a not-quite-pious  zealot, I have purchased tokens for only two lockers even though we really need four. So when I open our lockers, helmets and poles and boots come tumbling out in a heaping mess. I remove the skis and place them against the adjacent lockers. The skis fall over. I place them again and remove remaining items from the locker. The skis fall over. I place them again. I call for the kids to come get their boots. The skis fall over. I place them again. The kids get their boots. The skis fall over. They have the wrong boots. I place the skis.  They get the right boots but have the wrong socks. How did that even happen? The skis fall over.

You know, I could handle the stinky, claustrophobic locker room if they could just design skis that don't fall over when you lean them against a wall. That's always the thing that bursts my bubble of feigned self-loathing Puritanism and causes me to openly express that I am unhappy with the ski experience. Such an expression, of course, is highly inappropriate as it reminds others of their own discomfort and tempts them to similarly express their true feelings.

At length, we are fitted with too many layers, and are on our way to the lift line. The "walking to the lift line while carrying skis over your shoulder" is another bit of ski suffering that forces me to conclude that the whole thing must be designed, on purpose, to suck. Walking in ski boots (which even when you buy the "comfortable" ones never feel like they were designed for human feet) is already terrible. But you have to do it with these ill-balanced sticks on your back. Truly we are reenacting the Via Dolorosa.

The lift line, once there, is a mad scrum characterized by being cut off by 6-year-olds who you just know are way better skiers than you. The lift ride itself is a serene reward amidst the insanity. A calm before the storm. It's almost worth all the hassle just to feel the pleasant contrast of riding in the gondola. The peace is short-lived, however, for once on the mountain, you are faced with a hill too steep and intense psychological pressure from individuals who only moments earlier were pretending to be your friends but who are now yelling at you to "Do it! Just do it! Don't be a loser!" This thing that causes me so much stress and anxiety (because I am equally likely to descend on my face as on my skis) is now the thing that I must do lest I be inadequate in the eyes of those who, allegedly, love me. But then I remember, it is not to be enjoyed. This is not supposed to be fun. This is penance for all the joy and comfort I have in life. And so I ski.

Valentine's Day 2016 Playlist

Songs that remind me of Katie or of fun moments since last Valentine's Day.

1. Give Me One Reason, Tracy Chapman
2. Budapest, George Ezra
3. 99 Luftballons, Nena
4. Barcelona, George Ezra
5. Hurricane, Bridgit Mendler
6. Wonderland, Taylor Swift
7. Love Her for a While, Sam Outlaw
8. Stand by You, Rachel Plattens
9. Masterpiece, Andy Grammer
10. God Made Girls, RaeLynn

Lucky 13

Officially two days away, but the anniversary gift I ordered, which would have been awesome, never arrived. Luckily, I already paid for it in full, so now I get to have a huge battle about that with customer service.

When we were engaged, I made some promises that were a bit overly optimistic. I submit the following evidence that I have done my best to make good on giving my girlfriend the world (and that she has succeeded in giving it to me):

The Quantum Mechanics of Family Council

I've been listening to a biography of Albert Einstein for the past few weeks as I walk to work. It is interesting to me that after introducing the theories that gave rise to quantum physics, Mr. Einstein distanced himself from the implications as the uncertainty at the heart of it made him uneasy. He called it "spooky" and frequently commented that "God would not play dice with the universe."

I'm no physicist, obviously, but as I understand it, at the core of his concern is the Uncertainty Principle which is (more or less) that we cannot know the precise attributes of sub-atomic particles at any particular moment. All we know are the probabilities. A particle is likely to be here or there. That is all we can know.

But it actually goes even deeper. You see, at least as far as I've understood the discussion as presented in the book, the reason we can't know is that the particles aren't actually anywhere until we observe them. There is no objective reality until we observe it. Einstein rejected this, based on logic, but contrary to evidence.

I kind of love it. I find it beautiful and, in a way, empowering. I can create reality. As a man of religion, I wonder about the meaning of faith in light of a universe in which our will apparently can interact dynamically with the reality around us.

When asked whether he was religious, Einstein said he believed in an impersonal God that organized the universe. Despite his reservations about quantum physics, he rested this believe, in part, on the field's implied requirement that something must observe the universe in order to give it form. He called that observer God. Well, so do I. I also believe that He is personal.

Then I got thinking about family council. Our family life has become much happier since we started consistent family councils on Sunday afternoons. The events that happen in our families have no meaning. They are formless. They are like unobserved electrons. Then we come together and discuss the events. We observe them formally which gives them shape and meaning. And we get to choose the shape and the meaning by how we observe them.

No, we don't reinvent. It is more subtle. We can shape the meaning of events by formally discussing them and by proactively assigning positive meaning. This is also the value of journal writing. This is also the value of goal setting. We create the shape of our reality. We invent the future. We take the infinite quantum probabilities and make them finite realities by exercising our free will. 

But when we are passive, when we haven't any goals, we are but random electrons in no particular place at no particular time, reacting randomly to the universe.

Maddie the Fish

Madeline is on the swim team. They practice at 7 am and it is a 30 minute drive from the house. So we get up early. I drive her to swimming at 6:30 am. It is a special bonding time...during which we sit in utter silence. One time I tried to talk to her and we were both a little startled at the sound of my voice. I had broken the code of pre-dawn silence.

She is the youngest and smallest to have made the team. She is not winning any races at the meets.

When she returned from a recent meet in Munich, she informed us she achieved personal best times, by a wide margin, but nevertheless failed to qualify for the final meet in Warsaw. She was disappointed. Then she made me very proud.

She said she didn't want to be disappointed like that again, so she committed to attending every practice with the team and working harder than ever for the next two weeks even though she is not swimming in the meet. She committed to doing whatever it would take to make the swim team, and eventually win some races, in Manila. She said she does not want to play softball this spring or soccer next fall, only swimming, always.

A few days later, she was informed she could attend the meet in Warsaw because another swimmer had to drop out!

And a pic, because snow.