Closing my quarter with Lily

I kept meaning to post these pictures, but this week has been a blur. It's weeks like this that I wish I drank (and weeks like this that everyone around me is glad that I don't).

It was the end of my company's quarter. It was a long, painful quarter - the hardest I can remember. We managed to come in above our commit as a territory and as a company, again. Eight straight quarters.

Perhaps we did it because of Lily's faith. When she prays, she prays in serious style. It's like having one of the Buggles there to pray with us.

Or maybe it's because she made it such an inviting work environment. Who could resist having Ernie and Bert there to help out with negotiations? Invariably, Greta and Lily will find me each day, with both knocking on my door earlier this week to have Greta ask, "Dad, can we follow you around all day today?"

Yes, Greta, yes.

Not sure. I'm just glad that I have my four kids and wonderful Jenny. I can't imagine how dismal life would be without them. I'm sure others do fine alone. I wouldn't. I'm a homebody and I like to have noise around. I generally like it to be outside my room when I'm on a call trying to swear creatively at a buyer with whom I'm negotiating, but perhaps it's better to have little ears taking in everything I say, making sure I'm a little bit better than I would normally be, left to my own devices.

Maybe.

Now that they're asleep and it's August 29, with two more (weekend) days to go in my quarter, I can sit back, relax...

...and start figuring out how the !%!%!% we're going to grow US sales another 34 percent this next quarter.

I think I'll hit The Bobsled tomorrow, though. That always feels better. I just need my kids to get into mountain biking, or Jen.

What you're missing in Argentina

I had bison the other night for dinner. While bison may sound exotic to some of you, it's nothing compared to what was on offer down in Argentina:

Yum. Ape. And "rawham." Yum. Yum.

(I was told that it wasn't really ape, but the sweet girl who translated didn't make me feel much better about it. I think she translated it as "gorilla.")

(Just kidding.)

My daughter approval ratings just went up

Arsenal lost to Fulham this morning, which means this season is going to be just like the last one: we beat the better teams, and lose or tie the cruddy teams. Well, hopefully they'll lose a lot upfront so that I won't invest my emotional health in agonizing over the season. One can always hope.

In brighter news, we just completed a successful "Daddy-Daughter Campout." Because our ward (like a parish or congregation, for the non-LDS inclined among you) decided to cancel its daddy-daughter campout at the last minute, and Lily and Greta threatened to mutiny if we didn't follow through, I grabbed Raj, my neighbor across the street, and we put on a modified campout.

In other words, no campout at all. We went to the Marriott downtown and stayed over night, after eating out. With French fries for dinner, swimming for entertainment, and enough beds for all, it proved to be a highly successful evening. I think my ratings just shot up a bit with the girls.

I started the day (5:00 AM) at the LDS temple, trying to seek some shelter from a brutally difficult quarter. That and mountain biking in the middle of the day with Bryce Roberts seem to have done the trick. I ended the day much more relaxed, which even bedtime at a hotel for Lily and Greta couldn't disrupt. Well, not much.

I guess given all the good things that happened yesterday, something bad was bound to happen today. Life isn't meant to be rosy and easy, though on the balance it is supposed to be happy. Having Arsenal lose is probably not all that significant in the grand scheme of things. That's what I'll keep telling myself as I wipe the tears of disappointment from my face. :-)

That said, how can I remain unhappy with this crew? Lily, Greta, Scout, and a great neighbor in Isabelle (Raj's daughter)...they more than compensate for the occasional disappointments life throws at me. Of course, someday I'm sure that they will be the disappointments (I'm just planning on Lily becoming a drug addict by the age of six), but we'll get through those times, too. Maybe Lily will have some narcotics to share around to make it go down easier.

An experiment in friendlessness

I've long hated Facebook, not the least reason being that it uses the word "friend" to describe all of one's contacts on the site. "Friend" means something specific to me. It doesn't mean "That person I met once at a conference but would never recognize in a crowd." It even doesn't mean my mom, though I do consider her a friend.

But Facebook just has one big "friend" designation for all of my contacts. My wife becomes a "friend" in the same way as someone I barely know. I hate it.

So, today I decided to dump all of my friends, or nearly all of them. I went into Facebook and "unfriended" myself from 90 percent of the people with whom I was connected. Basically, if I don't talk with the person on a daily basis, or if I can't get away from seeing them on at least an annual basis (i.e., family :-), I scrubbed them off the list. I tried to answer the question, "Does this person, or should this person, care what I'm doing today?" If the answer was "No," I removed them from the list.

In the process I eliminated a wide range of people that I really like, and some that it would probably be in my financial interest to be "friends" with, like Tim O'Reilly, Craig Mundie, etc. In some cases, like Tim, I removed people that really are friends "in real life," but whom I expected probably don't want to see my family pictures and what not.

In short, my elimination of "friends" is probably just as arbitrary and coarse-grained as Facebook's inclusion of "friends," but I'm trying to figure out if I'll use Facebook more if it's a close-knit group of people that might actually care what Lily did today, and first off know that I have a daughter named Lily.

If you were on the list that was removed, don't fret. You won't be missing anything. I can't remember the last time I used Facebook. If you're on the list, you won't be getting anything, either. But maybe, just maybe, I'll start to use it more. We'll see.

Fourteen years, and Jen still hasn't left me

Today was a miserable day. Between a tough personnel situation at work, negotiating a contract with a company that takes lessons from Lucifer, and the constant pressure of end of quarter, I can't wait for today to be over.

Except that today is also an incredible day, because it marks 14 years of Jen enduring me. Seriously: it is a significant feat to have Jen put up with me for so long.

I mentioned last year that Jen seriously considered divorcing me in our first year of marriage. (We were "cool" in our first year of marriage, as shown in this picture from a reggae concert we attended, but we weren't very happy. Especially Jen.) For anyone that has had the "pleasure" of living with me, you can appreciate the feeling. I'm great when I'm on my game - the rest of the time, well, I'm not.

I'm a bit of a control freak. In our first year, I tried to control the time Jen woke up, the books she read, and probably the cereal she ate. (Actually, I'm pretty sure I tried to control what everyone ate in the morning - I distinctly remember telling people that they couldn't possibly feel inspired in the morning if they had eaten.)

If only she would have known all this when she met me at the airport when I returned home from my church mission. Instead, as shown left, she hugged me, thinking her near future was going to be happy. Nope. :-)

Jen is not a pushover. She has a pretty strong personality. This is a girl who once babysat her sisters with a 22-caliber rifle. (No, I'm not kidding.)

And yet, 14 years later, she's still married to me. This is a credit to Jen and her Christian charity, and not to anything I've deserved.

A friend of mine suggested the other day that "Humans were not designed to be monogamous." I'm not sure it would be possible for me to disagree more. There is a peace, a security, a devotion that comes from focusing my attention on Jen. A nomadic life of loose friendships and looser love interests is an excuse to skim through relationships, rather than invest in them. An excuse not to work, in other words.

Fourteen years after we started, Jen continues to chip off my rough edges, bit by bit. I'm by no means a good person now, but I'm a much better friend, husband, and father, all because of Jen.

Home

I'm in Atlanta, waiting for my flight to SLC to take off. I had such a great week in Argentina, getting in a few great runs at Las Lenas but mostly just enjoying family and friends. My mom stayed with me at the airport for a few hours during my layover. It was a bit of home away from home.

But I can't wait to get back to Jen and the kids. I've always been a homebody. No matter how much I enjoy getting away, it always gets old for me. Mark Shuttleworth and I were discussing this, as he has a much more nomadic life than I. I couldn't have his life. I need a constant grounding of home. Somewhere with a comfortable routine. Somewhere with people that I love and who at least will put up with me.

Charles Dickens once wrote that "it is a most miserable thing to be ashamed of home," or something to that effect. Quite often I pine for a better house, but never for a better home. I have been richly blessed in that department.

I'm sure I'll come home to fighting kids, a tired and frazzled Jen, and all the other things that remind me that I'm nowhere near the perfect life and have lots of work to make it so. I can't wait.

A perfect day in Argentina

I'm in Argentina this week for customer and partner meetings, skiing with my friend, Mark Shuttleworth, and to see my parents, who are in Buenos Aires as full-time missionaries for our church. I arrived at 8:30 this morning, went back to my parents' house to sleep for two hours (stopping off at the LDS temple on the way so that my dad could drop something off), then woke up in time to listen to Arsenal win the Amsterdam Tournament.

A great start.

I love Argentina. Actually, I love every South and Central American country that I've visited (Venezuela, Costa Rica, Argentina, Mexico). Great people, great food, and still relatively untouched.




Perhaps the highlight of the day was seeing Guillermo Franco, a member of my church, play against Banfield, the local professional soccer team. Franco's religious affiliation is interesting (I might as well be Canadian, I'm so interested in knowing who the famous Mormons are :-), but he's particularly interesting (even more so than Jeff Kent, who made a San Francisco Giants fan of me until he left to play elsewhere).

Why? Because Franco became a member at the age of 19, when LDS men serve missions. He had just signed with a professional soccer club, however, and was torn on what he should do.

He served the mission. Incredibly, after he came home he was able to find a team that would take a guy who had been out of commission for two years. He plays center back for Godoy Cruz. I'm getting a shirt before I leave to have him sign so that it can join the signed Barcelona shirt we have up in our family room. (I'm sure Jen would prefer decorations other than soccer jerseys, but....)

By the way, that picture of the crowd above? That's Franco's family, cheering him on. How cool is that? This is Argentina's top professional league and he's got a built-in cheer squad.

What the devil looks like

This morning I sat next to the rudest woman in Manhattan. I was having breakfast with a friend from my law school days, and we kept being interrupted by an amazingly rude woman sitting to my right (shown at left below). She kept sighing, uttering profanities, and otherwise trying to display her displeasure that we would dare to have a (relatively quiet) conversation in a public place. A bagel shop, no less.

When I asked what her problem was, she threw her hands up and muttered something about having to listen to our conversation (I guess we were distracting her from her highbrow New York Post. Today's headlines? "[Morgan] Freeman in Car Wreck," Paris [Hilton] Won't Take a Prez Stand," "Heath [Ledger] Secret: Mary-Kate Wants Immunity Before Talking to Feds," "Older Gals, Younger Guys," and more of the news you need to know).



Of course, it could have been worse. I could have been home, as Jen was, with Lily, who has decided that being potty trained is highly overrated. The one benefit of living in a house that is at least a billion years old is that Lily's fertilizer on the carpet can't hurt it any more than it already is.

Don't get me wrong: Lily is a sweet, lovely girl. Except when she isn't. Which is much of the time. The last time I can remember her being angelic is May 26, 2005....She was born on May 27, 2005.

And yet those few moments when she is sweet are awesome. She is hilarious. This is how God convinces us to have more children: He blesses us with amnesia and our children with the ability to make us laugh. Otherwise the human race would have died out long ago.

All of which begs the question: When does the grumpy lady smile? Surely it must happen, or she would have been taken out long ago....