Sunday turned out to be a fairly busy day. In the morning Anna and I walked to the nearby McCormick-Stillman Railroad Park. For $1 a ride, we went on the carousel, then the 5/12 scale train, then the carousel, then Jen stopped by to take Anna on the carousel, then the train, then the carousel. Anna likes rides. The park is pretty impressive, with very nice picnic areas, several playgrounds, a museum, and nearby parking. The only problem with it is that it’s located in Arizona, which is (have I mentioned?) 105 degrees.

After we got home and ate lunch, Anna and Jen took a short dip in the pool before Jen had to get ready for her game. After Jen left, I decided that we would not miss the game again, so I got the girls going early enough that we got to the game in plenty of time to see most of the game (though we missed Jen’s goal, which came in the first couple minutes). Anna proved to be a rabid fan, and although she didn’t fully grasp the offsides rule, she did heckle the opposing team (”I’m going to take off your hat and throw it in the trashcan!”). Jen’s team eventually lost 2-5, finished the tournament with a 1-2 record. After the game we picked up KFC for dinner and got everyone in bed for a better night of sleep (though still lousy by normal standards).

Monday morning I was anxious to get on the road. We packed up the car and ate breakfast, and were driving by around 9:30. Like on the way out, Anna and Tara were pretty well behaved; Anna mostly watching videos and Tara mostly sleeping. We ran into hardly any traffic at all; most of the time I was cruising at 80-90 mph, and occasionally getting passed. At home, we indulged in some carry-out sushi from Shien’s. Anna, who had subsisted on Cheez-its and juice all day, wolfed down a couple California rolls, gyoza, edamame, and a bowl of miso soup.

Despite the upheaval of the road trip, both girls slept like champs. Anna didn’t make a peep all night long, and even Tara slept nine hours. For the first time in forever, Jen actually sleep nearly eight hours in a row. If not for the long night of sleep, I might be feeling like I need another weekend, but everything’s looking pretty rosy this morning.

Anna and I spent pretty much the whole morning in the pool, taking a short break between shifts to re-up the sunscreen. Jen had a rotten night of sleep, as Tara was up three times (not counting the time Anna cried and woke her up before Jen got back from her game). Of course, the weather was hot long before we were out of the room, so the pool was quite nice.

We ate lunch in our room from the plentiful spread Jen had packed; shortly after, Jen had to go to her game, and I tried to get the two girls to sleep. Anna would not sleep because her knee kept waking her up because it wanted to go to Mom’s hockey game. Or so she says, I’m somewhat skeptical. She seemed like she was itchy, and hadn’t bathed since coming back from the pool, so I put her in the bath before waking up Tara and gathering up both girls and their gear in the car to go see Mom’s game. Anna cried all the way there that she was going to be badly sunburned (keep in mind, this girl is half Mexican). Twenty minutes later we were at the rink. I gathered the bags, a weeping Anna, a wiggling Tara, and made it to the stands just in time to see the final NINE SECONDS tick off the clock in the third period. Bzzzt. Game over.

We watched the players shake hands and leave the ice, then waited for Jen to get changed so that we could give her a ride home. You win some, you lose some, and some you miss entirely.

We are finally set up in our hotel room, complete with high speed wireless access. My cow-orker A. gave me the bright idea of bringing one of my wireless routers to complement the hotel’s high-speed internet. On top of this, I can tunnel NFS over the connection, so I can access my home network drives from the comfort of my lap, anywhere in the room. Excellent.

Anna and I went to the pool after dinner, while Jen fed Tara. I added a photo to the first travel post, and will be doing that for most of the time on this trip; if you’re reading these posts on Blogines or some other RSS reader, you should probably go back later and see the photos, as some of the posts I will do on my camera-less phone, adding in the photos later.

Anna had a terrific time at the pool–really better than I have ever seen her in the water. She went right in and showed very little fear. With a little coaxing, she even swam around by herself while holding on to a couple of noodles. The pool water seems pretty warm, oh I’m guessing SOMEWHERE BETWEEN 104 AND 106 DEGREES. Actually it was more like 88-90 degrees, so that you can jump right in with no adjustment at all.

The hotel is pretty much dominated by the hockey tournament; all the suites are reserved for the tournament, and there’s another hotel involved as well. Jen’s first game is at 10:30 tonight, so we definitely won’t be bringing the family to see it; but at some point in the weekend, I’ll take the girls along to see one of the games. I wonder if there’s any restriction prohibiting players from nursing between shifts.

We finally made it after one more stop. It is really hot here. Our stop for feeding was at a place which is called by the state of Arizona a “park.” It’s a lot like what the rest of the world calls a park, only with gravel instead of grass and it’s 105 degrees outside.

Our room is spacious and accomodating, and the only faults are that there’s only one bathroom and that the outside of the room is surrounded by 105 degree air.

We’re now sitting by the 105 degree pool waiting for our 105 degree dinner. Anna and Mom are dipping their toes while Tara and I sit at the table, waiting for our food.

Yes, we packed up the land barge for a road trip to Phoenix for a hockey tournament. This is a trip which mapquest says will take six hours, which translates into approximately 300 married-with-children hours. The first hour or so of the trip was very scenic, and we are now in the midst of the Boring Valley, which is comprised mostly of dirt, asphalt, and border patrol officers.

Tara decided to wait until we passed the nice rest area to start fussing, so we’re in El Centro (spanish for “the Centro”) for a pit stop. only 298 more hours to go!

Tara still looks mostly like Anna did at the same age. Same big, almond-shaped eyes, same ears, same fuzzy head.

Last night Jennifer orchestrated a terrific evening to celebrate our tenth wedding anniversary. But wait, I have to back up a bit.

Anna has been waking up at night for about the last week, and each night it has been getting progressively worse. Jennifer is a light sleeper to begin with, so she has been getting progressively more tired as a result. In the old days, when Anna would have a problem sleeping, we would have to start ignoring her cries at night; after one or two nights she would stop waking up, because she knew she’d get no attention. As a result, she’d sleep better and be happier around the clock. This strategy is complicated by the fact that Anna’s night waking now means that Tara will wake up as well, and Tara is too young to have her cries ignored. This is a problem.

So, we’ve been getting up to settle Anna back down, and this has resulted in habitual night waking, leading to the entire family being tired and cranky around the clock, with no resolution in sight. Since we have a standing reward for Anna for sleeping through the night¹ (choice of video, stickers, book, other trinkets), we chose to have consequences for not sleeping, namely losing Bear for the night and having her door closed. Didn’t work. Saturday was especially rotten in the morning, as Anna was having epic bad behavior, and as the two of us battled with Anna over her behavior, I could not remember a time where I felt less competent as a parent. Such is life with children. At least I did manage to handle both girls at nap time so that Jennifer could take an hour nap; she was just exhausted. I was too, but I usually sleep pretty hard and I knew that Jennifer would probably be up before I would if one of the girls started making noise. In the afternoon, we had a zero-tolerance policy on Anna’s whining, and she behaved much better as a result.

Jen had C. and her sister C. come over to watch the girls² while the two of us went out to Donovan’s for a very nice dinner, then we scooted up to Del Mar to walk along the coast. We reflected on our ten years of marriage, and fifteen years together. It was wonderful.

When we arrived home, the girls were asleep. Anna had gone to bed early, and Tara had gone very late. This is fine for us, because Anna sleeps better when she’s not overtired, and Tara sleeps better when she is. Our nighttime strategy was to ignore Anna’s waking for the night, so Jen slept in my office wearing earplugs, while Tara and I slept in the master bedroom. As Jen was putting Tara to bed, Anna was awake enough for Jen to explain the rules for the night. The result was that Anna didn’t wake up at all, Tara slept eight hours, and I slept so well that I was wide awake at 5am–I’m just not used to getting that much sleep lately. Hopefully everyone will be rested and happy today, as we have two birthday parties to attend today, and Anna will not have a chance to nap in between.

We often talk about how little we knew about ourselves, each other, and marriage ten years ago. We talk about how fifteen years ago we wouldn’t have guessed that we’d be married (to each other) with children at this point. We certainly wouldn’t have guessed that on the occasion of our tenth anniversary we’d be sleeping in separate beds and thinking it was a good thing.

¹ When you’ve lost as much sleep as we have, a full night’s rest is a bargain at twice the price.

² When Tara gets older, C. should be able to handle them both by herself.

I haven’t had a soft drink yet this year. For me this is a big accomplishment, as I used to drink 2-3 cans of Diet Pepsi per day. My motivation was that I recognized that soda is just a big can o’ chemicals that wasn’t doing me any good. Now I drink water pretty much everywhere I go. Beer? All-natural goodness.

Just recently, I finally saw the movie “Super Size Me,” which I thought was very well done. I didn’t think it was particularly surprising or enlightening, but it’s kind of a confirmation of stuff I already knew, and inspired me to try to remove even more unnatural food from my diet. After being low-carb for several years, I really don’t have any problem avoiding snack food if it’s not within reach; that is to say, I can walk right by it in the grocery store. It’s much harder to avoid when my wife is eating it right in front of me. I’m not that strong. But I will try.

“Super Size Me,” and later, the viral-marketing movie Store Wars led me to seek out and sign up with a local organic farm that delivers organic fruits and vegetables on a weekly subscription basis. We’ll see how it goes when it starts up in a couple weeks. In general, I will cook and eat healthful vegetables if they’re in the house, and this veggies-by-mail subscription will ensure that we have them on a regular basis.

So from now on, I’m going to try to eat my vegetables, eliminate processed snack foods, and continue my 4-5 hrs of volleyball each week, and add in some cycling when I have a chance. The exercise picture will have to change once I take my “sabbatical” in July and August, but that’s another post.

This is a really geeky post. It’s sort of like listening to me in person, only you don’t feel obligated to stand there with your eyes glazed over and trying to yawn through your nose.

Since Anna was born, I’m on my fifth digital camera (not counting my wife’s or daughter’s cameras), and am up to almost 30,000 images taken. With each camera, the quality and megapixel count has gone up, and my current store of images amounts to 39 GB–and that just the “keepers” of family photos, and does not include my professional work.

Currently, I use a Canon EOS 20D, which is an 8-megapixel digital SLR. I shoot in RAW+JPEG mode. The JPEG is a small, ready-to-use image file which uses the standard image settings out of the camera. The RAW file preserves all the information directly from the camera sensor and lets me fix it up later on with whatever settings I see fit, adjusting exposure and color in ways that I could not adjust the JPEG file.

The more pictures I have taken, the more I have learned about what makes a good photo, and I’m trying to apply what I’ve learned to my day-to-day shooting. It’s hard to actually try to take well-composed and well-exposed images at the same time you’re trying to capture fleeting moments that will help preserve memories later on. I find that postprocessing is crucial to turn great moments into great photos, and for this I have evolved from straight image-editing pictures to a program called Bibble. The first picture of a train is one that I took on sunny day while I was out with Anna. I really like the picture, but because I had Anna to keep an eye on, I didn’t really think about how the picture was going to be exposed. In particular, there’s a very bright sky, and the train itself is black, which means there’s a heck of a lot of dynamic range in the picture. The first picture is as the camera saved the JPEG file, and although the train is nicely exposed, the sky is completely blown out. Luckily, I was taking the picture in RAW+JPEG mode. The RAW file preserves a lot more of the dynamic range than is represented in the JPEG file, and when I open it in Bibble, I can turn down the exposure by 1.5 stops, and poof, the clouds in the sky are visible. Unfortunately, the train is a big mass of black.

The solution is to produce two images–one exposed for the sky and one for the train, then combine them into a single image in Gimp. Thankfully, most images don’t require this amount of work (even though it only took about five minutes), and Bibble makes short work of adjusting exposure, white balance, and cropping.

Here are a few relevant links:

• Bibble Labs, makers of the Bibble software
• The Raw Truth, a good article about shooting RAW image files.
• Digital Blending, an article about expanding dynamic range with multiple exposures.

Tara is starting to imitate. On our trip a couple weeks back, she demonstrated to my sister-in-law how she would return fire when some stuck their tongue out at her. Last night, I taught Tara how to blow raspberries. She picked it up right away–the kid’s a prodigy, I’m telling you. There we were, lying in bed, blowing raspberries at each other for a good five minutes. Tonight, I went to get her up from nap, and she started right away as soon as she saw me. Finally, after dinner, I was able to capture it on video for your viewing pleasure.