Kokochi

Saturday morning in Hayes Valley

This morning we went to Hayes Valley to have breakfast at La Boulangerie. Love that place (note to self: take parents there when they visit next month).

After breakfast, Dav headed to build a boat for Tesla for next week's Camp Tipsy. Tesla and I then headed to the park across the street for some fun. It was quite cool that us parents there spoke either Italian, German, English, or Japanese. Nice mixed group we had, which is one of the reasons I love this city.

Dinner of raw oysters

I forgot to note that yesterday evening, I shared close to 3 dozens of beautiful raw oysters with Vicki. That made our dinner. That and a few glasses of lovely white wine. A rather ideal dinner in my mind, but Dav doesn't like oysters. So, thank you Vicki, for creating an evening full of oysters. Was such a treat! In addition to plenty of girl talk : )

Manufactured Landscapes

If you buy stuff, throw away stuff, drive a car, use a computer, or just live in a developed society, you should see this movie.

It's stunning and scary, and makes you think hard.

Below is a good intro to the movie and the photographer showcased in it. The photographer also spoke at TED. Seriously, you should see this.

Owl Does Not Like Being in Box

via i.imgur.com

via www.cutesexyfunnyawful.com

I've been attracted to owls lately, and love these expressions by the owl here.

I keep looking at this fellow and his glaring, then so-not-amused eyes.

Good Notes for Work/Family Balance

Below are good points to keep in mind, and I'm posting here so I can come back to it from time to time.

I do think Dav and I are pretty good with most of these, but maintaining the balance overtime will be key. Dav gets home early, we share meals with T, and he reads/tucks her in most of the time at night. We do love our vacations together, and reserve time for date nights too. Dav is ramping up several work projects, but when T is around, he is fully with her.

We like the point about documenting T at the same spot every week. I document T via Kokochi, but the time lapse idea is cool. Dav did one with iPhoto's face recognition feature.

So here, from Steve Blank's blog     (via veroniquep.typepad.com):

• We would have a family dinner at home most nights of the week.  Regardless of what I was doing I had to be home by 7pm.  (My kids still remember mom secretly feeding them when they were hungry at 5pm, but eating again with dad at 7pm.)  But we would use dinner time to talk about what they did at school, have family meetings etc.
• Put the kids to bed. Since I was already home for dinner it was fun to help give them their baths, read them stories and put them to bed.  I never understood how important the continuity of time between dinner through bedtime was until my kids mentioned it as teenagers.
• Act and be engaged. My kids and wife had better antenna than I thought.  If I was home but my head was elsewhere and not mentally engaged they would call me on it.  So I figured out how to spit the flow of the day in half.  I would work 10 hours a day in the office, come home and then…
• Back to work after the kids were in bed. What my kids never saw is that as soon as they were in bed I was back on the computer and back at work for another 4 or 5 hours until the wee hours of the morning.
• Weekends were with and for my kids. There was always some adventure on the weekends. I think we must have went to the zoo, beach, museum, picnic, amusement park, etc. a 100 times. 
• Half a day work on Saturday.  While weekends were for my kids I did go to work on Saturday morning.  But my kids would come with me.  This had two unexpected consequences; my kids still remember that work was very cool.  They liked going in with me and they said it helped them understand what dad did at “work.”  Second, it set a cultural norm at my startups, first at Supermac as the VP of Marketing, then at Rocket Science as the CEO and at E.piphany as President. (Most Silicon Valley startups have great policies for having your dog at work but not your kids.)
• Long vacations. We would take at least a 3-week vacation every summer.  Since my wife and I liked to hike we’d explore national parks around the U.S. (Alaska, Wyoming, Colorado, Washington, Oregon, Maine.) When the kids got older our adventures took us to Mexico, Ecuador, India, Africa and Europe. The trips gave them a sense that the rest of the country and the world was not Silicon Valley and that their lives were not the norm.
• Never miss an event. As my kids got older there were class plays, soccer games, piano and dance performances, birthdays, etc.  I never missed one if I was in town, sometimes even if it was in the middle of the day. (And I made sure I was in town for the major events.) 
• Engage your spouse. I asked my wife to read and critique every major presentation and document I wrote. Everything she touched was much better for it.  What my investors never knew is that they were getting two of us for the price of one.  (And one of us actually went to business school.)  It helped her understand what I was working on and what I was trying to accomplish.
• Have a Date-Night. We tried hard to set aside one evening a week when just the two of us went out to dinner and/or a movie.
• Get your spouse help. Early on in our marriage we didn’t have much money but we invested in childcare to help my wife.  While it didn’t make up for my absences it offloaded a lot.
• Traditions matter. Holidays, both religious and secular, weekly and yearly, were important to us.  The kids looked forward to them and we made them special.
• Travel only if it needed me. As an executive it was easy to think I had to get on a plane for every deal. But after I had kids I definitely thought long and hard before I would jump on a plane.  When I ran Rocket Science our corporate partners were in Japan (Sega), Germany (Bertelsmann) and Italy (Mondadori) and some travel was unavoidable.  But I probably traveled 20% of what I did when I was single.
• Document every step. Like most dads I took thousands of photos.  But I also filmed the girls once a week on the same couch, sitting in the same spot, for a few minutes – for 16 years.  When my oldest graduated high school I gave her a timelapse movie of her life.

date night

Simple dinner and a movie, but since it's just the 2 of us, it's special!

Thanks to T's preschool Respite Day -  they take care of the kids until 10:30pm so parents can go out. Usually when we get a babysitter, we make big plans with friends to make the cost of a sitter worth it. Tonight will be a rare just us night, and I'm practically giddy.

This is the 1st time we're taking advantage of Respite Day since all the times in the past, we already had plans with a sitter, and plans that went way past 10:30pm ; )

I'm curious if T will stay up until 10:30. I think 9pm is her max, even if she's sitting at a dinner table, she will rest her head and fall asleep.

"Cat" in Japanese is...

  Last night I was reading a book to Tesla that had a bunch of animals. I pointed them out to teach her the Japanese words. She knew "cat" and said neko.

But then, as I taught her other animals (she also knew pig, but not cow, dog and duck), she forgot neko. When I asked her several times later in the book, she hesitated, and tried her best with  "Wakame!" or "Katsuo!"  even though she initially knew neko on her own. She retained all the other new animals names though.

It was like my cats were crowding out neko in her brain suddenly. We went over it several times, and she consistently forgot neko, and kept trying my cats' names.

Today, in the bath, I asked her, what is cat in Japanese. She started to say "Wa..." then corrected herself neko so it stuck, but boy, language is fluid.

I do understand this as I forgot a lot of English at age 9 when I stopped using it. At some point, I think we'll live in Japan so Tesla can really soak in Japanese as my dream is to banter and joke with her in Japanese. がんばってTesla!

NomaDrive

   

My good friend Kenji is a VJ & photographer, and has some really nice video imagery, very ephemeral and dreamy. We have a few tapes (back in the day when they were vhs tapes!). At my favorite parties in Tokyo, his work playing on a screen in the background created the perfect ambiance.

He has now set up a website, so I want to give him a big shout-out. Check it out

dithers PV from nomaDrive on Vimeo.

Tetsuya Ishida Portraits

"The late Japanese painter Tetsuya Ishida (1973-2005) created self-portraits that depict our modern trappings as both sterile and grotesque. In his art, lobstermen ride the subway, giants are trapped in apartment buildings, and urinals are unlucky cyborgs. Chilling yet gorgeous."

via www.io9.com

And thanks to Andy.

When I'm 78...

When I'm 78,

I want to be elegant like my mom (she's not even close to 78, but is my role model for growing older),

and

I want to have spunk like these ladies of the Japan Pom Pom group.