Hyun Family

Last week, Caleb took his Yellow Belt test for Tae Kwon Do.  It would be an understatement to say that he had been looking forward to that day.  He was talking about it from his second Tae Kwon Do lesson, as soon as he figured out that there were these belts that you could earn.  For about a month and a half, if you were someone new (or someone not so new) coming to our home, you would be treated to a martial arts show complete with the requisite screaming (Gi-hap as it is called in Tae Kwon Do.)  One time, Michael Brown and Rob Campbell came to our home for a visit, and Caleb instantly went into Tae Kwon Do mode.  But this particular show did not end well.  Caleb seemed like he was trying to set some records for how high he could kick, but in the heat of the moment, he slipped and landed on his back which required some consoling.  Sometimes it’s good to have an injury during the show to remind the audience that it’s not just all fun and games… so the audience can feel the danger involved…

The Yellow belt test at first seemed like it would be a breeze for Caleb.  Most of it was punching and kicking which he could do well.  There was another section on reciting Korean words.  We clearly had an advantage on this one as Caleb already knew most of the Korean words and the other kids were mostly Hispanic with no predisposition toward Korean.  But, there was a final requirement – busting through a board with your bare fist.  When the instructor was telling Caleb this particular requirement, I smiled an uncomfortable smile at the edge of the DoJang (Tae Kwon Do Studio).  Was my little 5 year old boy really required to break a board to get his yellow belt?  I got up to Green belt, but I don’t remember breaking any boards.  Usually that was left to the Red and Black belts in exhibition type events!  I wondered if he was joking.  But, the seriousness in which he told Caleb made me worry.  Perhaps, it was a way to keep little kids from advancing too fast.  I could tell that Caleb had some apprehension about this too.  Sometimes he mentioned it and asked me if I thought he could do it.  I tried to be encouraging, but I didn’t know. 

The day finally came, and I took off from work a little early, so that I could watch this day.  Needless to say, Caleb was very excited.  He had been punching and kicking every day that week.  Maybe even a little more than usual.  We studied all the Korean words that he was supposed to know, and he had mastered counting to 10.  He could probably actually count to 30. 

Caleb’s turn finally came up, and a cohort of all the white belts took to the mat.  There were 3 of them.  They were asked to do some basic punches and kicks, which all of them breezed through.  They were each asked to say a few Korean words.  One kid hesitated a bit, but for the most part they all passed easily.  Finally, the board.  From a distance it looked like a fairly thin board.  Maybe about a 1/3 of an inch thick.  Caleb was instructed to make a fist, and pound it down on the board like a hammer.  He did.  And he was the first to bust through his board in one thwack.  Those few seconds seemed like it was the proudest single moment in this boy’s short life.  I confirmed this by asking him a few days ago, to which he also added.  “Do you know what the proudest day of my life will be?  When I get my black belt!” 

He grabbed his now split pieces of wood and sat down at the edge of the mat anticipating his award – the yellow belt.  After all of the belts were handed out, he came over to us, his family, and beamed as he held up his split piece of wood, his yellow belt certificate, and his old white belt which was now replaced by his new yellow belt which he wore. 

As I was growing up, my mom had created a binder of awards that I had received over my school years.  When we got home, Caleb said that he also wanted to start a binder.  He put a picture of himself, his yellow belt certificate, and one of the shards of wood into the binder.  He is quite anxious to fill up his binder.  He keeps asking me when he can get another certificate…. when he can get as many as me…. Hold on buckaroo… I have a feeling you’ll dwarf your old man in the awards department pretty quick…

Later, Caleb and I were playing around and I was inspecting the piece of wood that Caleb broke.  Caleb asked if I could break it again.  Well… I suppose if my five year old son could break it, it certainly couldn’t be that hard….  I tried.  Several times I tried to punch through it without success.  To the point that it scratched up my knuckles and drew some blood.  Admittedly, I was trying to break it against the grain which is a bit harder… I’m not trying to dispense excuses, but it sure wasn’t a piece of styrofoam.  The piece of wood now stays (intact) in the award binder where it belongs.   Apparently, I’m no yellow belt…  

Tenille gets all the credit for the Hyun Family Halloween this year.  She found the costumes for the kids, made her own costume, and put together mine.

We went with the Winnie the Pooh theme.  If it’s not obvious from the pictures – Caleb was Tigger, Andrew was Pooh, Tenille was Piglet, and I was Christopher Robin.

The kids’ costumes were great for trick or treating outside because they’re nice and warm.  Indoors - there was high risk of heat stroke.   Also, Andrew had some balance problems because Winnie the Pooh’s head was a bit heavy sitting on top of his own head.   But it was worth it… This year we won the Best Family Costume award at church.  After years of Halloween Family costumes and the years of failure.  (2008, 2007, 2006, 2005)  We finally did it.  My life is now complete.   I’m not really sure what else there really is to accomplish.

We were also invited to Kennedi Kersavage’s baptism, and spent the day with them trick or treating in our old neighborhood.

Hyun Family at the church Trunk or Treat.

We spent Halloween day at the Kersavages after Kennedi’s (Hannah Montana’s) baptism.

Caleb and Klare – like peas in a pod.

I took a day off a few weeks ago to head down to Ocean Shores for the opening of Razor Clamming season.  Last year was a lot of fun, so we recruited my mother and my sister to come with us this year.  Tenille’s big requirement this year was that our housing include Internet service, because last year, there was a lot of downtime, and we watched a lot of movies between low tides…

We rented a condo called Anchors Ashore, which was great.   It had 2 bedrooms.  It was new.  Had a great kitchen.  They had a TV, DVD player, and some movies.  And, of course, they had Internet.  In some ways, I somewhat regret the Internet connection, because it would have forced us to do more creative things with my mom and sister  (play games, explore the town, etc)…    Next year, we’ll see how many people are coming, and use our judgment on this aspect of the trip.

Day 1:  After a few stops, we ended up leaving our house about 1:30pm.  There were a few major traffic jams on I-5, which ate up almost an hour, and we ended up pulling into the condo about 5pm.  Low tide was 5:40, so we hustled to get everyone ready in their clamming gear and headed toward the beach.  On the way out to the car, we met some folks that were just returning, and they had apparently caught their limit.  It was raining pretty good, and so I was prepared for a bit of a rough time.  When we got out to the beach, I would classify the precipitation as no less than a torrential downpour.  To make it worse, the wind was almost unbearable.  You could see the rain streaking sideways, and if you’re looking the wrong way, it was like looking straight into a hose.  All this rain caused a sheet of water on the sand.  Typically to find clam, you need to find a little hole or a divot where the clam is digging.  With this excess of water, all the holes and divots were getting washed away.  There were no clam divots.  I saw Caleb and Tenille in full rain gear starting to walk towards us.  When I looked up again, they were walking back toward the van.  Apparently a few minutes was enough in these conditions.   My sister was out there for about 15 minutes with me.  The water had soaked through to her feet by about the 2nd minute and she expressed some dismay at walking around in wet socks and boots.   She was quite a good sport considering how miserable it was out there…   My mother, ever the wise one, opted to stay in the van and watch Andrew, our baby.  That left me, the lone clammer, out on the beach with other loser clammers that got to the beach too late, desperately looking for a clam hole.  After another 15 minutes of aimless wandering, I noticed a few people that were on a sand island.  I crossed the channel which came up my mid-thigh and the surge of the current was a bit frightening.  I wore my waders again this year, which was great for this kind of thing, but was also thinking that it’s probably allowing me to do things I shouldn’t… Luckily, I didn’t get swept out to sea, and made it to the island.  During a 2 minute break when the rain slowed down, I found a divot and started digging.  I got on my hands and knees and dug up the sand as fast as I could.  Victory at last!  One clam!  The rain started pouring again.  No divots.  After another 15 minutes, I gave up and came back to the van, a bit disappointed.  It ends up that the cops had visited the van while I was out.  They asked my family if they had clamming licenses.  When they all produced licenses, they gave the limit of clam to each of them.  Apparently, they had confiscated some clams from illegal diggers.   Ended up that they got 45 clams just sitting in the van… Add my one clam, and the daily haul was 46 clams! 

We got back to our condo and cleaned them all up, and fried up a plateful of clams.  Tenille and the kids didn’t like them and opted for something else, but the rest of us finished off the plate.  I can somewhat understand.  Razor clams are enormous, and when you fry them up without cutting them into bite size pieces, they look grotesquely big.  Nevertheless, they were delicious.

Day 2:  We spent a lazy morning watching some TV, playing on the computer and bumming around the house.  We made some clam chowder for lunch which was quite good.  It was basically cream, bacon, and some clams… Tenille ate the chowder, but picked out most of the clams.  

In the afternoon, we went driving around Ocean Shores to kill time before clamming.  We were afraid that it was going to be another rainy day.  And my fear was that my sister and my mom who have never been razor clamming would go home without having experienced the thrill of the dig…   But when we stopped at the grocery store in the afternoon, the sun started poking out.  By the time we got home, the sun was blazing and it was even a bit hot inside the condo.  We excitedly got all our gear on and got the kids ready, then headed for the beach.  There were clumps of people all up and down the beach, and we found a little section that didn’t seem to be too crowded.   Later, we found out that the reason it wasn’t occupied was because there weren’t very many clams.  Tip for next year:  Just go where all the people are digging- they’re there for a reason…   Once we started walking down the beach and got to an area where a lot of folks were digging, we saw divots everywhere… Sometimes there were 3 or 4 clumped super close together.  And under almost every divot was a razor clam.  After I dug up a couple clams, my sister rolled up her sleeve on her hot pink jacket and wanted to give it a try.  I used the shovel to dig down about 6 inches, then let her start digging with her hands.  You don’t want to dig too deep with the shovel, because it will cut off pieces of the clam or sometimes bust the clam.  On the first dig, she felt the clam and tried to wrestle it up from the sand.  But alas, the clam was too strong and she didn’t dig enough around the clam, and had to let it go.  By this time, Tenille started rolling up her sleeve and gave it a try.  She never dug for a clam last year, because she was watching the kids.  This year, Tenille got a clam on her first try, and became a clam digging machine.  My sister also after a few tries developed her clam digging technique and within an hour, we had caught our limit – 45 clams!

When we got back to the van, we found mom and Andrew eagerly waiting.  Mom was impressed at how quickly we had caught our clams.  We went back to the condo, dropped off the clams, and went to Alec’s for dinner.  There might be other semi-nice restaurants in Ocean Shores, but it seems we always end up here.  The food is decent, and everyone had their fill.  After returning to the condo, my  mom and I cleaned all the clams (which took longer than digging them), and put them in some water in ziploc bags and froze them.  A guy at the Ocean Shores supermarket told us to preserve them this way last year. 

Sunday morning, we packed up our things and headed back to our home.  Another successful clamming trip.   Razor Clams are delicious.  They are sometimes referred to as the filet mignon of clam.  If you want to try some, there are cheaper and easier ways to try them (like a restaurant or Uwajimaya supermarket).  But, you’ll miss out on the thrill of the dig…

Started my new job at Amazon a few weeks ago.  I’m working in the high availability team.  Our team works cross company to increase availability of the Amazon.com retail website.  If for some reason you see an I’m Sorry Page while you’re shopping on Amazon, our team is likely tracking the incident. 

I have been so impressed with the amount of data that is freely made available to the employees.  In one week at Amazon, I got access to take a look at the number of orders that are being generated on a daily, hourly, by minute basis, errors that are being thrown, and dig down into various incidents.  These are metrics that are available to all employees.  Some metrics are, of course restricted, and some metrics pop you on the restricted stock trade list.  Measuring is often quite difficult for a large scale companies and so far, I’m quite impressed with the effort put into measuring almost every aspect of the business and making it as widely available throughout the company as practical.

Some significant differences between Microsoft and Amazon – At Microsoft, I more or less felt like I had an unlimited operations budget, and we were always building services for millions of users.  Some services I worked on hit “Microsoft-sized scale”, but several others topped out at a few thousand hits per month at their peak…  At Amazon, we actually have millions of users (hundreds of millions), and every minute of every day there are HUGE numbers of people placing orders.    But, it’s also clear that the company is extremely frugal.  It’s a bit like the wild west, and people/groups make do with what they have and keep their services up and running. 

It’s a bit too early to make any commentary on Amazon culture.  So far everyone has been friendly enough, but not shy about pushing back when it’s warranted.  As with Microsoft, I’m not sure if I believe that there is a single Microsoft culture.  I’ve heard people say that Microsoft culture is aggressive and can be perceived as rude by the uninitiated.  But, I’ve been in 3 different groups all with their own very distinct micro culture.  There are cohorts, managers and GMs that are extremely courteous and encouraging, to those that pop off on the other end of the spectrum.

So far, it’s been exciting to explore a new business (retail), and especially one with so many customers, and so much data.  The charter is seemingly broad enough to keep me busy and engaged for a long time.

Since working in Seattle, I started riding the bus from Day 2.  It takes about an hour door to door, but honestly, it's great.  It takes about 10 minutes to get to my transit center from my house, and then for about 45 minutes on the bus, I usually have wireless, and if I don't I at least have a book I can read.  I can take care of all my emails and read the news while somebody else does all the driving for me. 
I'm not particularly someone that is extremely environmentally conscious, but I suppose it's also good to know that I'm doing my part in reducing pollutants and not creating higher demand for imported oil.
It ends up that there are 3 different options from Federal Way to Seattle.  There is the 577 which is the Sound Transit express bus from the FW transit center that goes near Union Station.  There is the Light Rail that starts from Tukwila and goes right into Union Station.  There is the Metro 194 which is not an express, but goes from the FW Transit Center (or I can hit it on the onramp at the Star Lake Park and Ride, and goes right into Union Station.)
So far, I've only taken the 577.  I've had wireless about 80% of the time.  The other side benefit of taking the bus is that it keeps me on a fairly regular schedule.  I'm usually home by 6. 
It seems like a hip thing to be working in downtown Seattle, but I haven't really gone exploring too much except for some lunch mostly in the international district.  Perhaps this new job will force me to finally get a little more familiar with downtown Seattle.  For now, it’s just where my cubicle is….

It has been a long and rich tradition in our home that Caleb got a puppet show for his Birthday since his very first birthday…. until this year when he (to my dismay and relief) expressed his preference for a soccer party rather than another puppet show.  It’s hard to let go of traditions sometimes, but considering our hectic circumstances having just returned from China, spending a week at Lake Powell, switching jobs, moving to my mom’s home, preparing our home for renters – it was also an enormous relief.

So this year, we wrote a check to Arena Sports who did a fantastic job of entertaining a dozen 4-5 year olds, and making Caleb feel like a King for a day.  Hopefully, the outsourcing of parental duties is an exception and not a trend… but regardless, it worked out great for this year.

Coach Marty runs the kids. 

If there was any energy left, it must be completely burnt off running around the balloon toys.

Traditional party fare, complete with soccer cake.  I thought Caleb was going to burn his chin blowing out the candles.

Pull-string pinata – an interesting concept… It kinda eliminates the fun of beating something senseless… but I guess it also eliminates the injuries…

Klare shows off her loot.

Happy birthday boy and happy parents…

Mission accomplished

Caleb also proposed a “Science” party…  If you look at the Lake Powell pictures, there’s one where Caleb is reading an Encyclopedia of Science book while his other cousins are playing in the water…. He loves science, but hopefully it will be tempered with a love of other things as well – like sports, friends… girls….  and believe it or not, there are “scientists” that you can hire for birthdays…. If scientists are moonlighting at birthdays, the economy must be pretty rough…. Ended up that we couldn’t get the scientist because he was totally booked.  I proposed that I could get a lab coat and mix up some vinegar and baking soda, but that got a thumbs down….  I’m assuming the puppet show is off for next year, too…. so perhaps my best chance to get back into the act is to beef up my science acts… Anyone know where I can get some anti-matter?  fusion reactor?  String Theory for Dummies?

Summary:  Awesome time with all the cousins!  No injuries except for some bruised egos of aging water sports enthusiasts.

Two weeks ago, we moved into my mom’s basement - a life-long aspiration finally realized.  It was amazing that we were able to put everything we owned into a 26’ truck and somehow squish it into my mom’s house.  For a few weeks before the move, we had been triaging everything we owned into one of several piles  - keep, donate, sell, throw away.  After we moved in, we went through another round of triaging, except now we are going through my mom’s stuff…. Stuff that her and my dad had accumulated over 25 years.  My sister told me today that she knew that mom and dad were packrats, because she is finding that she has been turning into one… There is a lot of stuff…. I don’t know how many RCA cables one man needs, but after throwing away about 90% of them, I still have a bucket full.  I’ve had to make a LOT of runs to the dump.  I think I made my last run to the dump today… The lady that works there is probably starting to recognize me as one of her regulars coming in every weekend.  Maybe I can qualify for some frequent dumper program…

We had a few hiccups in the move-in plan, but it’s finally starting to feel like home… On the weekend that we moved in, a contractor was finishing up some work in my mother’s bathroom.  To test whether or not the shower was leaking, he kept the hot water on for 45 minutes.  I’m not necessarily saying that this is related to the next part of the story, but it does seem that there is a possibility that there could have been some correlation.  That afternoon, the water heater burst and flooded the entire basement (same basement that our family moved into with 26’ truck worth of boxes.  )  When I got this call, I was at the office.  Tenille was stunned, and most of the answers to my questions were “I don’t know.”  I don’t blame her.  There’s something about standing in your own house with water sloshing up your pants that slowly shuts down your brain.  I know, because this happened a week before we left for China earlier this year at our Bothell house.  And as I saw the water rush in from outside to inside the house, it wasn’t clear to me what we should do.  Similar to wife, my reaction was – call someone…   Someone else who hasn’t been brain-zapped by the kryptonite affects of flood water between my toes. 

Just as in our Bothell home, when people who knew what they were doing finally got to my mom’s house, they were able to get things in a stable state pretty quickly.  They suctioned up as much water as they could.  They took off all the baseboards.  They piled all our boxes into the middle of the rooms.  They set up about 20 heaters/blowers throughout the basement.  By the time I got home, I told my wife that it didn’t seem so bad and everything looked like it was under control.  She almost gave me a black eye with her dirty look.

This was the state of our home for the next 7 days.  We got out Caleb’s kid tent and set it up in the middle of my Mom’s upstairs living room to make it seem like a fun thing for Caleb to be sleeping on the floor.  He loved it!  Andrew slept in a pack n play in the den.  Tenille and I got the couches.  I’m not sure if it was because I was dead tired from moving, but the couches weren’t so bad… It was slightly crowded, but again, not so bad… I think the worst part was just our own antsy-ness to get moved in once everything dried. 

Last  week when all the dryers were finally moved out of the basement, we started the process of setting up our home.  Today, we hit a milestone – my mom can park in her garage again.  It’ll probably be another few weeks before we’re able to get Tenille’s van in the garage also.  That should be a big day…

1.  Built in baby sitter that loves the work.

Save $25/month – Since being in China, we got used to our Ayi who watched our children.  We probably went on more dates in China than we have in our whole marriage.  It was just so easy to get up and go out.  Back in Bothell, we have great baby sitters, but we’re always mindful about getting home early enough, and that it costs us money every time we want to go on a date.  With mom in the house (and sometimes Grandma (my mom’s mom)), it’s much easier to head out for an evening spontaneously, or attend some events that we normally wouldn’t because we can’t justify paying someone to watch our kids.

2.  Great Korean Food, the way it was intended.

Save $25/month– Every time I sit down at a Korean restaurant and pop open the menu, I ask myself what I’m doing there.  I get better food for free at my mom’s house.  And usually, mom won’t let me leave the table until I need to roll out of my chair like a blimp. 

3.  Mom can teach the kids Korean

Save $50/week – Our experience in China has definitely taught us that being multi-lingual is a special skill.  It draws you closer to nations of people as you understand them and are able to express yourself in their native tongue.  Tenille and I have both agonized about how we will teach our kids Korean as we are both not very good.  But living with mom, I think our kids will get more exposure to Korean, and it will likely force Tenille and I to both speak more Korean which also will in turn help our kids.  There are classes that we can enroll them in, but typically they are on the weekend, and yet another bill to pay.  Can’t ask for a better teacher than mom, and best of all, she’ll cut us the mom discount.

4.  Rent out the other house and share the utilities.

Save $25,000/year – This was an eye opener for us.  We never really seriously considered moving out of our house, but when you start calculating the rental income, utilities such as phone, cable, Internet, water, sewer, garbage, etc…. it adds up very quick.  As a family, this move will cut our expenses by more than half.  In most of the world, this is probably one of the driving reasons that most households are multi-generational.  Whether you like it or not, it makes eye-popping economic sense. 

5.  Share our lives with a family member we love dearly

Priceless – As we’ve mentioned that we’re planning on moving in with my mom, we’ve found that many families don’t have spectacular relations with their parents.  Typically, either the wife or the husband will quickly chime in and say, “Hmm… yeah… we couldn’t do that… “  We feel fortunate that we have a great relationship with my mom.  She has always been welcoming to us and supportive of us.   Sure, there’s a small concern that living together might create new problems, but for now we’re naive enough to think that the good times we’ll have spending our days and evenings with each other will outweigh any issues that may crop up as a result of living together.

Ask in a months how it’s working out for us.  We’ll see if the actual results are as good as the theoretical….

But, perhaps you’re already convinced that maybe this might be the right thing for you and your family also.  You might be asking – how does one pull off such a feat?  How in the name of all that is good, do you convince your wife that this might actually be a remotely sane idea?!  I think the only way this can really be done is to live outside of US/Canada/Europe for an extended period of time.  Living in China for 6 months, a few things quickly got deprogrammed out of us.

1.  We need a bigger house! – In the U.S., when you’re about to have another baby, it’s not uncommon to hear, “we need more space… another room… etc”  In much of the world, children sleep in the same room as their parents until they’re almost teenagers.   Many homes are single room shelters that are really only used for sleeping.  Also, living in a 900 sq ft apartment in Beijing, we figured out quickly that living in a place that is less than half of the size of our home is not so bad.  Moving into my mom’s house will actually give us more space than in Beijing.   Not that we need it, but we know we certainly don’t need 500 sq ft per family member.  I’m not one that really needs much privacy from my family, and I enjoy all of us being together in the same room.

2.  We’ll be losers still living with our parents! -  I’m not sure where this mentality came from, but again, most of the world lives in multi-generational households.  I don’t mind throwing my lot in with the majority of the population.  And it may be because I’m getting older, but I’ve stopped caring what other people think.  Frankly, if I could be even “more of loser” for another $25k/year, sign me up.  Sign me up a couple times, and I’ll even wear a hat… I have a feeling that this propaganda might have its origins in the real estate industry.  I can’t believe our government is paying people to buy their first homes.  Despite what your real estate agent tells you, despite what the government tells you, the secret is that most of the world does not feel they need to pay tens of thousands of dollars per year to live away from their parents or risk being labeled a loser. 

3.  I need my own stuff! – I can certainly understand why we might want our own room… but a rice cooker?  a refrigerator?  a dining room table?  Again, most of the world live in tight communities where people pool in to buy things together and share it within the community.  You can sometimes see glimpses of that in the poorer communities in the States, where neighbors have informal agreements and various necessities and conveniences are shared and/or borrowed.  We’ve seen one end of the spectrum where bathrooms and faucets are shared within a community.  As we get wealthier, we lose a lot of that interdependency as we can pretty much afford anything we need or want.   We end up buying things that we use 4 or 5  times a year like boats and swimming pools.  (This is an illustrative statement rather than a commentary against those who own boats and swimming pools.  Our family also has plenty of things in this category like an Xbox, camper, gardening tools… )   

4.  I need my privacy!  - This was an interesting issue.  Tenille ended up finding out that she actually very much enjoyed the company of other adults during the day.  Luo, our Ayi, had become a wonderful friend to us and Tenille looked forward to her visit and enjoyed talking with her throughout the day.  She much preferred it to her life in the States where she often kept busy, but didn’t always have social contact with friends.    She mentioned that if she wouldn’t have had this experience, she wouldn’t have realized that living with another adult during the day could add a different kind of richness to her life.  For my mother, my dad passed away 3 years ago, and we hope that having our family in her home will contribute to the richness of her life.

These are not the things we thought we’d learn in China… but we can’t always choose what we want to learn… we just choose what to do with what was given us.  We’re looking forward with hope to the next chapter in our lives.    

With all that said, one down side is that we’ll be leaving our very good friends in Bothell.  We have developed many good friendships through worshipping together, serving together, and just through fellowship.  Federal Way is a mere 45-minute drive, so hopefully we’ll have an opportunity to pop in occasionally.  And we should note the disclaimer that we’re renting out our house not selling it, so in case our party boat starts taking on water, we still have one foot on the shore…

First week back from China, we had an interesting weekend.  We invited our good friend Zhiguo from China to spend the weekend with us at my mom’s house.   Zhiguo took special care of us helping me with learning Chinese and took me to restaurants in China.   On Friday, we got down to my mom’s house and got the boat ready to go crabbing.  We managed to launch my boat, despite by reverse driving skills with a trailer.  After a false start (because I forgot the bait in the truck), we got out to dash point and dropped the crab pots. We went back to Redondo to pick up Tenille and the kids.  By the time, we got back to dash point, it was time to pull up the crab pots.  When we pulled up the pots, we had 4 crabs!!  Only one was big enough, though.  I thought that the proper crab picking up technique was to pick him up by the rear by the hind legs with the thumb on the underside and the other fingers on the top of the crab.  I thought that this would keep the crab from being able to reach with those threatening claws.  I thought wrong.  He got me.  He got me hard. 

Tenille mentioned later that the crab had grabbed me and was hanging off of my thumb.  I vaguely remember that part.  Perhaps because I was distracted by the blood that was quickly pooling around my fingernail where he squished my nail into my flesh.  Big drops of blood fell on the boat.  I’ve never been mauled by a wild animal before…  It hurt a lot.  We somehow managed to get the bad boy into the cooler, but honestly I don’t remember how.    I just remember that he tasted pretty good when I exacted my revenge.  The hypochondriac in me was a bit afraid that I might get some weird crab disease, but so far so good .  We ended up getting two crabs that day, which was apparently more than enough for us.  We saved half of a crab for my mom.  We also caught a starfish which was entertaining for Caleb.  We tried fishing, but only caught a dogfish.  We had to cut the line, because I forgot my de-hooking pliers, and I wasn’t about to reach into the dog fish’s mouth, especially after the crab attack.  Oh well… it was worth the excitement. 

One person that didn’t enjoy the excursion was Andrew.  Andrew is a bit of a tinkerer… and he doesn’t really like to just sit there… It made for a tough experience for Tenille trying to keep him contained.  With Andrew as an exception, a good time was had by all, and we filled our bellies with crab.  Zhiguo told me the next day that he spent the evening talking with his parents and telling them about the day.  He had never ridden in a boat before, nevertheless drive one.  He said that he had never seen the ocean before getting on his first plane ride to Redmond a few years ago. 

The next day, our family and Zhiguo went down to our good friend, Michael Brown’s dad’s farm out in Enumclaw where apparently there are no laws…   We had some yummy BBQ, and the kids had a great time lighting off some small fireworks before the big show.  Caleb loves fireworks.  He was quite good at running away from them as soon as it was lit, which I was thankful for.   (note how far Caleb is in front of Michael in the first set of pictures)….  Sometimes I see kids linger… I’m glad they’re not my kids… One day there will be a price for lingering…

As dusk set in, the adults started entertaining themselves with roman candles.  Apparently, cows must be Tories, because they did not appreciate the fireworks as much as we did.  In fact, many of them started running off causing a mini-stampede.

This year, at the farm, I saw one of the most spectacular private fireworks shows I’ve ever seen in my life.  There is one firework show that I distinctly remember as the best I’ve seen.  It was in Junior High school, and I was in the University of Redlands California for a summer camp…   There I remember the fireworks being so ENORMOUS, and they seemed to linger forever in the sky and slowly drift down until I was afraid that would land on my face.  This private show at Michael’s dad’s farm for 20 or so people definitely rivaled that spectacular experience.  I am not sure how much money Michael had to spend to put on such a show, but I felt a tinge of guilt that such a wonderful show was delivered to such a small number of people.  Using my kids as an excuse, I got to sit in the lawn chairs and watch the festivities from afar.  Zhiguo, on the other hand, was not so lucky.  He got a VERY close view of the fireworks as he lit the fuse of most of the explosives.  It seemed like he was having fun though as he and the other 20-somethings lit off the fireworks and ran for cover.  There were a few close calls where the fireworks exploded on the ground, and I saw Zhiguo running away from the blossom.  Hmm… I wonder what he’ll tell his parents.    For next year, if you know Michael Brown, I highly recommend you attend the show.  If you know someone that knows Michael Brown, you should ask if you can come.  The show was city fireworks quality. 

I thought that after seeing the 3-week long Chinese New Year celebration in Beijing, 4th of July in the US would pale in comparison.  But, the show was incredible, and it was an extra special occasion because we got to share it with our Chinese friend, Zhiguo.