Category: Family & Home

Perfect for the last day of the year – Dill Pixels’ Flickr collection of “The End” screens from famous movies:

Quick recap of 2008 for the Hacker/Kubes family:

Miles started 1st grade and is barreling full-steam ahead into an amazing childhood. Watching a child go from knowing his letters to being able to read full-on books aloud is a delightful experience. His ideas are still mind-bending, his physicality still awesome. He doesn’t just ride a two-wheeler — he rides it long distance (he and Amy surprised me on bikes at work one day – a five mile trip each direction). Two days after getting a pogo stick for Christmas, Miles logged a record-breaking 23 hops (love that recovery at the very end of the clip). He’s sweet and thoughtful and loving and every minute with him is a joy.

In sadder news, Plato – our family cat of 17 years – finally reached the end of his comfortable life. We had him put down late summer after he could no longer move comfortably or hold his bladder. Plato’s been a staple of my life with Amy since I’ve known her, long before we were married. And he was the cat Miles was born with – his first relationship with an animal. Losing him was tough.

On the work front, I’ve transitioned from webmaster for the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism to webmaster for the Knight Digital Media Center, while staying in the same chair (and realized I’d been sitting in the exact same chair for seven years running). Taking that job meant spending a few months learning Python and Django. A long ramp-up, but absolutely loving Django now, and using it for more and more side projects as well. Birdhouse Hosting also started offering Django this year.

With the Knight Center, I’ve been involved with a mission to help newsrooms across the country figure out how to address the challenges of crumbling revenues and massive layoffs, as the distributed web continues to threaten the traditional/localized newspaper. News organizations are going through massive mental shifts, becoming increasingly technology focused. The center runs week-long workshops for visiting journalists, who come to have their heads crammed with ideas for ways to create innovative and compelling content online. Year after year, my association with the J-School proves challenging and rewarding, and never sits still for long. I feel extremely lucky to have job security as this ugly recession settles in.

Other misc: I’ve been writing occasional music-related pieces for Stuck Between Stations, which I run with a few friends. When time allows or the weather/mood command it, I’ve been strumming away on the ukulele. And, perhaps a bit sadly, Twitter all but killed my urge to blog. I feel bittersweet about that – on one hand, Twitter is a much more fluid experience than blogging, and can be done in the margins of life without requiring big chunks of time. On the other hand, I do miss the more in-depth expressive capacity of the real thing. But writing regularly is important; I promise not to let the blog die, no matter how much more convenient Twitter may be.

Amy too has a new job. After a year of being a regular parent participator at Miles’ school, Amy applied for – and got – the job of 2nd/3rd grade classroom assistant. And just a few weeks into that gig, she was asked to be the official math teacher for the 3rd grade class. On Fridays she teaches visual arts to the combined class. She’s jumped in with both feet and is loving being with the kids. I built a brand-new web site for Miles’ school this year.

Also in 2008, I made several trips to Morro Bay to help my mother move out of my boyhood home and into a new life with my father in the mountains. The change was a long time coming, went smoothly, and had a happy ending, though it was tough to say goodbye to my childhood home. But the change is all for the better, and has brought new unity to our family.

Looking back, 2008 has been a year of small revolutions and grand plans, satisfaction and warmth. Life is good. Love and best wishes to all Birdhouse readers, and to my extended families on both sides.

Thanks to YesWeCarve.com, found some excellent Obama stencils. Opted for simpler (read: more do-able) campaign logo background, hoping it speaks for itself (“Oooobama” would have been fun, but Miles’ bedtime was coming up fast). Amy went for the classic black cat (artfully executed), and Miles did a ghost. We’re ready!

On a train heading North, mackin’ on salami. Just spent a week helping ma pull up roots, getting ready for the next phase of her life. Looking out the window into people’s backyards, thinking about all the useless crap we accumulate over the years. The longer you stay put, the worse it gets.

To be fair, mom has great taste. But on some level, all useless stuff is junk – great taste just makes it harder to divest yourself of the past.

Letting go is hard. New circumstances mean you don’t get to look to the garage as a catch-basin for every shiny thing that catches your eye. Native American artifacts, antique furniture, classic LPs, rare fabrics… all beautiful, all meaningful, all lacking much in the way of practical value.

Formats expire – cassettes and their players, VHS tapes and decks, records and their tuntables… all superceded now. School drawings and papers by my brother and me, and photos? My dad was (is) a master archivist. The drawers of snapshots go deep as you wanna go. That’s history you can’t dispose of.. but neither can you just flip through a few albums and make a judgment. So amazing that it all exists, all those honeycomb-encased moments. But all a burden too. Weird to see how different the print quality of various development houses was over the years – some shots over 40 years old look like they were shot yesterday, others half that old have gone yellow or purple, or have been virtually lost to the fade of time.

I was five in 1969, when Apollo 11 landed on the moon and Armstrong took his walk. Our family sat on the bed and watched in awe, knowing it was one of history’s great moments, unfolding in our lifetimes. What I didn’t know at the time was that my folks clipped newspapers for days around the event, and put them in a time capsule for my brother and me. Discovered the musty manila envelope last night and was moved, knowing that they had had that foresight.

I have a deep connection to Morro Bay and always will. It’s where I became self-aware as a teen, where I learned to surf and dive and build. It’s where I spent countless hours on the beach and in the woods, boy becoming man. My first experience of a sense of awe in the face of nature was on top of Black Mountain, where I often hiked (and did again a few nights ago, possibly for the last time).

Morro Bay is where I became a punk and a hippie, where I had my first jobs, where I made the circle of friends I was to keep for life.

It was an amazing place to grow up, large enough to not be podunk, small enough to be innocent and funky. Big enough to have a post office and a headshop and a sheet music store, too small for a mall.

A big part of me would love to move back one day – can’t imagine a better place to raise the squirt. We’re pretty entrenched in the Bay Area now, and would have to move some pretty big mountains to make a move like that. So it’s been comforting to have mom there, so we can visit a few times a year. But now, homeplate is gone, at least for the forseeable future. Trips to see ma will not include Morro Bay, a hard pill to swallow. But chapters have to close, and mom will be much better off (no, we’re not putting her in a home :)

Deep down, something in me knows I haven’t seen the last of this place. It’s got a magnetic grip on me – a grip I don’t expect will lessen with time.

Goodbye, boyhood home. It’s been awesome.

Miles woke me up this morning by waving an iPod in my face. He had spent 15 minutes writing this note, getting it just right (which in his mind means a period after each word). His writing has come so far this summer; he’s been busily labeling everything he owns with permanent marker. “Dead alligator head.” “The Specials.” “Secret Spy Legos.” Even an equation: “Play + Mobil = [happy face].” It’s amazing to watch how fluidly he’s taken to computers and technology. He can now read enough to navigate the Tivo interface without help. Knows how to launch a browser and type in the URLs for the sites he likes the most, though he was a bit unclear on the concept at first — typed “URL” into Google, said he was trying to get to the Legos web site. Loves the concept of progressively difficult “levels” in games and now talks about life as if it were a game. “Daddy, what level are you on at your job?” We take care to limit the amount of TV and technology time he gets, and to balance it against analog time. But we also see concrete evidence of it making a big impact on his reading and writing skills, so cut him some slack.