Word post, a year or so not in pictures ;-)

I know that blogs are really for getting high resolution pictures out to family members who live far away, but I feel some level of obligation to nonetheless do words.  We don't do the holiday letter ritual, after all.

The last year has been intense and filled with change for much of my family.  Mom and Henry's move to the new house, mom's hip replacement, and Henry's staggering physical decline due to his Alzheimer's being the most extreme.  (Pause to send break-through wishes to all the researchers working on Alzheimer's.)  On the exciting side, my sister Eva's boys, Tor and Björn, are launching themselves into their adult lives in real estate and welding, with jobs even!!  It's so exciting to see them enthusiastically embarking on the next phase of their lives.

Here, don't think I mentioned, 2 years ago I got yet more tendinitis issues in my shoulders, and embarked on a 17 month saga of physical therapy towards restructuring my upper body so that the tendinitis doesn't get triggered much.  At this point I'm out of structured PT, but still very dependent on doing my exercises and stretches, along with regular chiropractic visits to shove my stupid spine back into alignment so the muscles don't get mad and trigger the tendinitis.  I'm hoping that over the next school year I can make some progress in solidifying the structure so I can stop doing chiropractic visits, at least.  That would be nice.  Generally, though, my shoulders/neck/back are doing much much better.  For a while there PT was my life.

Iain's foray into the world of high school has been smooth and issue-free.  He gets everything done, on his own, transporting his own self everywhere (by bike).  The emergence over the last few years of this new level of independence has been astounding, and exciting.  His grades are exceptional, and he's kind and thoughtful.  What else could a parent hope for?   He's sitting next to me right now programming in a D&D dungeon generator in Java for funzies.  Can you guess what his eventual major will be in college?

Ria's last few years have also been filled with growth and change.  Sometime in 4th grade she started caring about (what we call in the social skills world) the "group plan."  Instead of spending swim class just enjoying the water and only barely doing the lessons, she takes the lessons seriously and has thus finally progressed to lessons in the deep pool.  In school she's working harder even in subjects she doesn't care for.  The focus of her classroom aide has been able to adjust from incentivizing her to participate fully in the class "group plan", to instead helping her retain focus on the classwork, express herself fully, and participate effectively.  This turn of maturity has really lightened up our concerns about her future, although there remains a lot of uncertainty.  This January (in addition to all the other crazy of January) she had a big triennial IEP (special education school plan) evaluation as well as external testing to create a better snapshot of her developmental differences.  Testing at this older age, after that burst of maturity, has given us a clearer image of precisely where her difficulties lie so that we, and the school district, can more precisely focus our interventions.  It seems she has ADHD (inattentive type) in addition to her autism.  Difficulties maintaining focus are ADD-based for her, not autism based, so that changes how we should approach the focus problems.  Her brain's processing speed is probably the biggest troublemaker, so we're investigating new therapies that might be able to speed that up.  In the physical realm, her eyes have become pretty stable.  The prescription has stopped changing so much and her eye-cross is holding steady-- nice to have that holding steady.  It was only 3 years ago when they were asking us to consider surgery for her eye-cross!  Thanks to daily atropine eye drops, computerized 3D vision exercises, and the school district's vision therapist, that's not needed!  We're taking action to work on her gut issues as well.  Progress there is glacially slow, but that's what the GI specialist told us to expect.  The new GI doctor has drilled down to find root causes to her pernicious constipation, which we are working to fix.  We figure all the gut healing work done in the past was likely ineffective due to the constipation - a full gut can't heal.  Long term goal is to re-evaluate her need for a gluten-free diet once we have a truly healthy, non-constipated gut.  That girl is a trooper!  For fun, she's continuing to adore karate, going 2x/week, has a regular D&D group run by some friends from school, and is attempting to read all things ever written.  She still hopes to be the first immortal human, but nowadays she admits that's unlikely to occur.

William is practically an ocean of calm in our familial chaos of change.  Google is still doing good by him, and he's pretty happy with his work.  A few years ago he transitioned into the "Geo for Good" portion of Google, which has been a very good match, as he really values writing code that makes people's lives better.  He did lots of work with "Google Sunroof", which takes all that nifty Google Earth image data and figures out if your own personal roof (and your own personal finances) would be well-met with solar panels.  He is still working some with Sunroof, but is also working on "Earth Engine", helping researchers access the data/info in those fun Google Earth images to better understand things like how much forest coverage we have, and ice coverage, and how they have changed over the last decade.  Work is work, of course, but he's pretty happy with it.

Cats are good, even.  They're napping right now.
bye!

April 2018 - Road Trip!!!

April featured our first road trip in the new car!  6 days down the west coast of California.  It was fun.  Just driving down past Monterey and Carmel is lovely.

We started with a few days in Big Sur, where we stayed in a cabin in Pfeiffer Big Sur State Park.  It was a wonderfully central location to base ourselves in.  Start with redwoods:

At the cabins there were some wild turkeys, the 2 toms were posturing gorgeously.  At this point, the hens had given up on the 2 males and were on the other end of the campground ignoring them, but the guys were still going strong.  The toms start good-looking and trim....

And then they get BIG!!!

William tried to get big, but I think the turkey did a better job. Loom, William, loom!

In addition to redwoods, of course, there were ocean views.

Ocean views blocked by silly people

And our official roadtrip pic with our trusty steed!

One of many lizard pictures, I'm a complete sucker for those little guys.

We stopped by the Henry Miller Library, which was kinda cool and funky.

In addition to redwoods and stunning ocean cliffs, there's hikes in coast live oak (a.k.a. California live oak) landscapes, which I just adore for the cool angles in the trees and, of course, the lizards.

In addition to trees and lizards, there were even humans!

And humans with cool angle-y trees!

The live oak landscapes tend to have wildflowers,

and hawks.

After Big Sur we tootled down to Santa Barbara to see some friends and check out the campus of USCB (not that Iain is yet at the age to pick a university, but its not that far....).  By far our favorite feature of the campus was the section of beach beyond the bluffs.

 

A little playing with the new camera features

The campus proper did have a particularly cool row of trees.  Angle-y!!

In 4th grade in California the kids all do a unit in California history about the Spanish missions.  They also, in 4th, read the book Island of the Blue Dolphins, which is a fictionalized account of a native woman left behind when the natives on that island were "evacuated."  Both are rolled up in one in a visit to the Santa Barbara mission, which is still an active community church.

Its even got lizards!

 Finally, we hit the boardwalk, and had dinner with Amanda and Richard Payatt.

Stop the next, Hearst Castle!!!  Egads, what a paean to extravagance and capitalism!!  My mom was right, definitely add in the upstairs/bedrooms tour on the first visit, don't just do the basic tour.  Now you know.

A lot of the ceilings were being restored, the ceilings were definitely a highlight!

Cool tree with mansion behind

Nifty little door to the 2nd floor / guest bedroom zone:

mmmmmm.....library!

I can't recall what this room was called, but it was for meetings, and had lovely story-book illustrations along the ceiling, erm, ?buttresses?.

The Celestial Suites have been closed for renovation for years, but they are open again now, and lovely.

And, of course, the famous indoor pool.

After that, we did a quick tour of Cal Poly, but we didn't have it in us to take more pictures.  Totally pictured out.  I really thought the campus was lovely, though.  Very attractive, even during the chaos of open house weekend.  And I do mean chaos!  Then, homeward ho!