Wanted: Team Mascot and Colors

We went down to register Mason and Spencer for fall soccer today. I have never played soccer, but I figured I could offer to be an assistant coach, because they're just 4 year olds after all. When we sat down to go through the sign-up sheet, the woman behind the table noted that I had offered to be an assistant coach and then asked me how I would feel about being a head coach instead. I explained that I had never played soccer and wouldn't really know what I was doing. She said they were really short on coaches, and besides, there was a workshop scheduled to go over rules and give practice tips. So here we are. I will be coaching a sport that I've never played in my life. I guess we'll all be learning as we go along. Besides, they're only 4 year olds. How hard can it be?

Our first item of business is to come up with a team name and a team color. This is very important because we can keep the same name and color next year. Any grand ideas?

The End of an Era

This is what my old Powerbook looks like (though with considerably more wear and tear)

About eight years ago, I purchased a titanium Apple Powerbook. The laptop was a work of art. My classmates frequently commented on how beautiful the machine was. And it was fast, at the time. It made our old Power Mac desktop seem like a dinosaur. And it opened up all sorts of capabilities that I had never experienced before. I started editing videos and then burning them to DVDs. Of course, there were a few shortcomings with the computer. When I purchased it, I upgraded to the larger 20 gigabyte hard drive. It didn't take long to run out of room once I started doing larger video projects. Then eventually our DVD burning software ceased to work and I had to hack iDVD (Apple's DVD-authoring software) to get it to recognize an external DVD burner. And of course, the older it got, the slower it seemed.

Eventually we finally made the decision to buy and new iMac for home use. The switch has been wonderful, but I still found myself using the Powerbook from time to time. I took the laptop with me when I went on away rotations so I could stay in touch by email, and occasionally Mason will want me to pull it out so we can connect the two computers and we can play Age of Empires II together.

At work I have grown increasingly frustrated with the computers that are provided to us. Most of the anesthesia department is outfitted with Lenovo Thinkpad netbooks. In spite of the fact that they are new, they are slow—very slow. The screens are so slow that everyone is provided with a dock and a larger monitor, so you can actually see what is going on. The netbooks are portable, but they don't have CD drives and we are not allowed to use flash drives to move documents around. As a staff anesthesiologist at a residency program, one of my duties is to give lectures to the residents. I have watched more than one staff struggle as they have tried to find a way to pull up their lectures, and the thought of preparing a Powerpoint lecture on that small, slow machine was almost more than I could bear. I finally decided I was going to do my presentations on my Powerbook. Even if it wasn't the fastest way of doing things, I figured at the very least that I could make sure that the presentation would work on my machine and then just hook it up to the projector. I had done this in the past and it had worked out fairly well.

When I was discussing my situation with Teressa last night she suddenly said, "Why don't you go order yourself a new laptop." Well, how can you argue with that? Besides, we had always planned to purchase a new laptop before I get deployed so we can talk over the Internet. I'm just buying it a little early. So I put in the order last night for a new 13-inch Macbook Pro with extra RAM (4 gigabytes) and an upgraded hard drive (320 gigabytes). Now I should have the capability to make great presentations, and do a few other fun things on the side.

More from Spencer's camera

I call this one "Putting Your Best Foot Forward."

Spencer continues to shoot non-stop with his camera. He is leaving tomorrow with Teressa and the other boys to go visit cousins in Washington state, and he wanted to make sure that I downloaded all of his new photos so he could have plenty of room on his camera for pictures from his vacation. As I was downloading photos, I found this gem and couldn't help posting it on the world wide web, hopefully to the future embarrassment of my eldest son.

Artistic genius

This self-portrait was my favorite shot that Spencer took

Spencer has always had a fascination with photography. Of course, that seems to run in the family. For his birthday last November, Spencer received a digital camera. He filled up the memory again and has been begging me for days to load the photos on the computer so he could get back to shooting photos.


I haven't figured out what about this toilet was so fascinating

The photo collection was an eclectic mix of people and objects. Some, like the first photo were actually quite charming. Others, like the five photo toilet series were just downright bewildering. At any rate, Spence is so excited that he wants to shoot pictures with me some time.


No one was spared the ignominy dealt by Spencer's camera

Last call

June 18 was it—my last overnight call as a resident. Of course, that certainly doesn't put an end to overnight call. It just means that I will be staff instead of a resident.

Pinewood Derby Time

Mason's car (Number 23) sits among the other entries


This post is a little late, since the pinewood derby was months ago, but it still seems appropriate to mention Mason's experience. We had a three-ward competition. We would be racing four cars at a time on the track, and it seemed like Mason was always coming in third. But the track had an electronic timing system and it seemed like Mason's car was doing well from a time standpoint. When the times were summed up, Mason took seventh place out of 25 cars. Not too shabby for our first attempt. The top four finishers and six of the top eight were all from our ward.

The Prophet said to plant a garden (so that's what we did)

Spencer discovered that digging though San Antonio soil was no easy work

As many of you know, I spent most of February and March away from home doing pediatric and major vascular rotations in Corpus Christi and Dallas. As soon as I came home, I decided to take a week off from work. During my time off, I decided to put build a small raised garden, a project that Teressa and I had been considering for a while. Spencer was excited. He even spent his own money to buy a pair of small shovels and a pair of gloves to he could help out. After two days of work, we have two small gardens with cucumbers, tomatoes, peppers and carrots that are already starting to grow. We still have a long time before we will be harvesting anything, but we are hopeful that we will be eating tasty tomatoes this summer instead of the tasteless grocery store variety.