Transition days are difficult. Difficult for Susanna and me; we have to get re-adjusted to either having the boys or having an empty house. But of course, most difficult for the boys; they have to adjust from living at one house to another. It is tough to watch them need time to adjust. It is difficult for the dogs. Okay, maybe not for the dogs; just extra exciting when the full pack is here, and normal exciting when not. I’m pretty sure nothing in life is too difficult for the dogs.
Today is no different. The boys take time to adjust. This morning they took time to write about their week at their grandmother’s house and are now taking time to relax on their electronics. But not for too long. It isn’t raining yet, so will be good to get outside and get some energy out.
I’m sure everyone works transitions differently. It is one of the stresses of a divorce. But one has to hope that two houses where the boys can find peace is better than only one house where there is no peace.
This week should be fun. So far the summer has been going very well. We will try to get some sailing in. Maybe visit Six Flags. The boys can have friends over. Susanna and I are only working two days each this week, so we should have lots of time to do family things. Maybe I can even convince the boys to help me weed the flower bed. But probably not.
Filling the screw holes from the original hinges on the door to the sun porch
Today was the first day of my 11-day summer furlough. I have to take (on average) one day every week for the next 11 weeks. My goal is to get some projects finished with my furlough time.
However, today wasn’t the most productive day. But at least I got something done. I didn’t get started until about 10 AM.
The morning was spent taking a load of bulky waste to the dump. Not the most glamorous of projects, but it makes a big difference at the house.
After lunch I weeded the garden and worked on replacing the hinges in the kitchen. The door hinges in the kitchen are one of the (I’m sure many) small unfinished projects around the house. When we painted the kitchen, the hinges no longer matched. And they always looked like crap anyway. So a couple of weeks (or maybe months) ago I ordered new hinges. The hinges have been sitting on top of the refrigerator since they arrived. At least I didn’t lose the hinges (it is the little improvements that help).
Today I took off the old hinges from the door to the sun porch. The new hinge screw holes didn’t line up perfectly with the old ones. I took a small dowel and used a knife to whittle the dowel down to fill the hole. I hammered the plug into place with a little wood glue, and then drilled the holes for the new hinges. It took under an hour to replace both hinges and rehang the door.
Now to replace the hinges on the two remaining doors in the kitchen…
As threatened earlier, here are some more scans of old photographs of me. I decided to include them in a post rather than in a photo gallery. Every year I print a book from the posts on this website. This way, the pictures will show up in the printed book. It is too hot outside to do much, so here I am, scanning pictures.
Bill and me. Date unknown (best guess by when the picture was printed is sometime in 1982)Bill and me. Easter 1976Me on Mother’s Day 1984 (location unknown)Me in 1974My dad and me. Picture from 1977 in Warrington Township, Bucks County, PA
Will playing with his robot arm after completing the project.
I’m pretty impressed with Will. Yesterday we went shopping – no going shopping isn’t impressive. While at the mall, we wandered into the education store. He found a robot arm kit in the store for $60. After thinking about it for a while, he decided that he wanted the robot and wanted to spend the day building it. He used his entire allowance savings to purchase the kit.
It took him over six hours to build it. I had to help solder a couple of broken wires for him, but for the most part, he did the work. Later in the evening, when he lost pieces, he didn’t get frustrated. He came downstairs and waited until I was finished with what I was doing and then asked for help. That isn’t always the case when kids get stuck in a big project. It is an even bigger accomplishment for a kid with ADHD (and even more so on a medication break day).
Good job Will! I certainly didn’t get as much accomplished yesterday as you did.
Standing in the back yard (picture by Brigitte Laroche)
Some stories from the wedding and party (in no particular order). Of course, names were changed to protect the innocent. Okay, maybe they weren’t:
– The reception (for us) started when we pulled into the driveway. We were met at the end of the driveway by Vicki Sawyer, dressed in a nice white and blue dress. Covered in mud from playing in the yard. We knew that was a sign of a good start to the party.
– There are some very fun Swedish wedding traditions. One of the most fun is the tradition that allows people to kiss the bride when the groom is out of the room. I would like to thank the navy guys for leading the charge in maintaining Swedish tradition when I first stepped out of the room. However, the rule works both ways; when Susanna stepped out of the room, I was open to be kissed. And in the fine Swedish tradition – it is not gender specific. So I would also like to thank the navy guys for not leaving me out of that tradition. Just for the record, it wasn’t just the guys that kissed me (or Susanna for that matter).
– Leaving the sugar cubes out for the coffee wasn’t the best idea. The kids didn’t go for the alcohol. They went for sugar cubes. As far as I know, Tyler has the record with 11 sugar cubes that night. It also explains why he didn’t sleep very well.
-Yes, the Swedes and Americans can party. Lots of beer and wine helped. However, the 3rd and 4th graders can party as well. The boys were crazy after about 10pm. I think the sugar cubes helped. I think the boys stole lots of kisses from all the Swedish girls at the party (I won’t mention names…).
– And yes, 3rd and 4th grade boys will dance. If they are tired enough and given enough sugar cubes.
– Tucker was quite the center of attention at the party. He even wore a bow tie. However, the wait staff fed him enough people food that he didn’t want to eat anything at all the next day.
– Will and Ben loved pretending to be the Secret Service when dressed in their suits. They spent the half hour before the wedding ceremony at the door to the hall where we were waiting to make sure that people went into the correct door of the church. But they didn’t want to get out of the car at the end of the street and jog alongside for our drive to the reception. Go figure.
– In the strangest twist of behaviors – Will fidgeted less during the ceremony than Ben. However, both boys were amazing during the ceremony.
– Susanna cries at everything. Susanna’s sisters cry when Susanna cried. I think that made the first song they sung at the ceremony a little more difficult to get through.
– Rebecka and Sofia are wonderful singers. They sang two beautiful songs during the ceremony. Even if they weren’t “Does your mother know” and “Dancing Queen” by ABBA as I had requested.
Paparazzi photo of the boys helping get things ready for the wedding.
– Our neighbor was the perfect wedding photographer. She even spent time during the days leading up to the wedding day taking photographs of us getting the house ready. She did this without telling us. I felt like a celebrity – we had our own personal paparazzi.
– The boys were super excited about the party, they even cleaned out the second floor of the garage (including vacuuming, until Will vacuumed over a toy sheep), and made it a hangout for those 12 and under.
– If you send a wedding invitation to the President, he won’t show up. But you will get a card congratulating you on the wedding. Not sure if it is the same if you send an invitation to the Swedish King (in hindsight maybe we should have sent him one).
I am thankful for all of our friends and family that were with us (in both person and spirit) to help us celebrate the start of the next big journey in our lives.
Ben reading a congratulation card before the ceremony.
Maybe not the most formal wedding picture – but one of my favorites (photo by Brigitte Laroche)
July 1st was a perfect day for our wedding. It rained all day, and poured during the ceremony. But it didn’t rain at the reception. It was hot and humid. And it was perfect. We both had fun. The boys had fun (maybe a little too much fun). I think all the guests had fun.
We had a small group of friends and family join us for our wedding and reception. We enjoyed a mix of wedding traditions. But of course both the Swedish and US traditions involve having an open bar. Though we apparently the Swedish weddings normally go later than we decided to party.
After a busy week getting ready, and long day enjoying the party, we are all trying to recover. We are all still a little rough around the edges – Six Flags yesterday with the boys didn’t help, but was worth it. I think today should be a good quiet day to recover. I’ll take some time later to post more pictures (and tell more stories).
“Yesterday was as glorious a day as any of us in New England has any right to expect: nearly fifty, partly sunny, an eight-knot breeze, and the waters of Fishers Island Sound a soft, rippled carpet of blue” – From “Moon Wind at Large, Sailing Hither and Yon by Matthew Goldman aka Constant Waterman (Breakaway Books, Halcotssvile, New York, 2012)
I was going to take some time this evening to write about my weekend. Instead, I decided to open the doors and windows and let the cool New England breeze push the heat out of the house, take a seat outside with a glass of wine and read a bit. I am halfway through Matthew Goldman’s book; the book is a wonderful collection of local sailing stories. If you are down to reading this blog, then clearly you are out of anything half-interesting or even coherent to read – go take a peak at “Moon Wind at Large.”
I think having ADHD impacts how one remembers things. I tend to have a fuzzy recollection of childhood events. I certainly can’t go back though the past years and picture my life as a continual timeline. Memories are more of a set of snapshots, but with only a week sense of order. It is like a stack of pictures that someone dropped. The pictures aren’t all in order. Some of them may be adjacent to the proper pictures, but for the most part the order of the pictures must be deduced by the content in them. I’m not sure if this is how it is for everyone, and maybe it is this way to some extent for most people.
I periodically talk about memories with the boys (e.g. what do they remember from last year, or two years). I think Will’s memories are more like mine. Ben seems to have a much better memory for things that happened. Will has to be reminded a bit, and then the pictures come back. He told me that his memories are a little foggy. Maybe this is where a journal or blog will help. It gives us a book to go back to keep the pictures in order. I’ve suggested to Will that he think of his blog as a way to remember what happened, and he seems to be happier writing in his blog with that perspective.
Will enjoying the day from the roof outside his window while Susanna takes a break from painting
It feels like spring is finally here. The weather was much warmer this weekend (though today was a bit breezy). The sun was out yesterday (and some of today). We had a great weekend as a family.
The boys both had friends over this weekend. Will had a friend over on Friday, and Ben on Saturday. And Saturday afternoon the boy next door came over for a while.
Today we went to my friend Mark’s house. He changed the pads and rotors on the front brakes of the Volvo. The boys and Susanna visited the baby (and the chickens). We will be getting four chickens from them early in the summer.
This evening I am listening to Susanna play some Bob Dylan on her computer while she types on her blog. It is nice to sometimes just sit and reflect on the day.
Over the past couple of evenings I have been looking at a new hosting company for hosting this blog (as well as a few other websites). I decided to move to a Digital Ocean SSD server. The beauty is that you can resize the server as needed to support more hosting (or reduce it if the larger plan isn’t needed).
This blog runs WordPress. Previously I had run a CentOS server with an Apache web server. I decided to switch to Nginx from Apache based on some reports of better performance on Nginx. I ran a load test on the site before migrating to the new server and one after moving to a new server. the Nginx server handles a higher load without slowing down. Not that this site ever gets that much traffic, but it may allow for a smaller (cheaper) server to handle the website.
The website load test before moving. The green is the load, and the blue is the response time.
Note that the response time on the post-migration server stays flat for the entire load. The time scale on the left is different from the scale in the first graph.
Website after migrating to the new hosting server (Nginx instead of apache)
So far the migration was reasonably straight forward. I need to work on the Nginx script to allow better permalinks for WordPress. That will be my project one of these evenings.
