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I got a call from my aunt Kathy on Monday inviting me to go with her and her daughter to Brigham City to go get some peaches for canning. Unlucky for me is that all my kids are in school and there is no good time for me to go except for weekends. I was in luck though because she told me that they would get a half bushel for me and all I had to do was go to her house(which is really close by) and pick them up. I have the nicest relatives in the world. So on Thursday night I went over and picked them up and spent a good half hour or so catching up with my aunt Kathy.

On Friday I decided that I would can the peaches before they started going bad. I thought I might only get one batch out of them but I lucked out again and got two full batches of peaches. They were pretty big peaches so I had to quarter them instead of halving them. I think they turned out great. Now I have to go pick some tomatoes out of my own garden and then I will have to can some more this next week. We should be stocked up on peaches and tomatoes for the whole winter and then some.

While stumbling around the Internet today I bumped into this article [via Newser] on a new line of preppy menswear that Harvard is endorsing.

Photo: Robert Mitra/WWD via New York Fashion

Some interesting bits:

Harvard Yard — a lawn we imagine makes a nice resting ground for Harvard students to repair glasses, wipe down their pocket protectors, and memorize an extra few digits of pi — inspired the spring collection.

The author’s imagination about Harvard types sounds more fitting of Harvard’s crosstown academics from MIT. It’s probably not too far off from what Nancy thought of me and my fellow geeks at school a few weeks ago. No worries. I wear my geekdom proudly. I would rather wear a pocket protector than be caught wearing the outfits modeled in the photo – penny loafers without socks? Gak! – so clearly, either I or the designer doesn’t have any fashion sense. Given the amount of scoffing about the clothing line already out there on the web, I’m thinking I’m not the culprit in this instance.

The next bit is what really got me:

The clothes won’t be very Harvard-y in the literal sense. “Harvard” only appears on the labels inside the garments, while the university’s signature crimson only appears in buttonholes, zipper pulls, and other trimmings. Prices range from $165 for pants to $495 for sport coats.

$165 for a pair of pants with a Harvard label inside? Are you kidding me?! Oh, the snappy remarks one could make about the price one pays for the Harvard label on either clothing or diplomas. Of course, given the cost of the label on the diploma I’m currently pursuing, I think I’ll refrain from making those remarks.

Just got back from a long weekend in Sunnyvale, CA for Carnegie Mellon’s incoming student orientation. It was a fun weekend – filled with seminars and workshops. Nancy went with me and spent the time visiting her family.

The orientation opened on Friday morning with class pictures and a “mixer” activity designed to help students get to know each other. You can see photos and videos of the various activities on CMU Silicon Valley’s Facebook page.

Friday featured a teamwork exercise that required each time to build a castle out of Lego bricks according to a specification. Each time had to have a project manager, QA manager, warehouse manager, construction engineer, and process analyst. Our team did reasonably well although we had a costly integration mistake at the end (one of our towers was rotated 90 degrees which caused all bricks in the base of the tower to be counted errors).

The completed castle

Saturday started off with a guest speaker – the CEO of CollabNet. I thought he did a great job as he discussed various aspects of managing a business. It was just the right blend of business/tech insights for our mixed group of software engineers and software managers. On Saturday evening Nancy and I attended a barbecue for staff and students. I chuckled a bit as Nancy interacted with the CMU folks who were an interesting combination of professors and tech geeks with the occasional spouse or NASA researcher thrown in for good measure. I don’t think Nancy has experienced that level of nerd conversation before – we discussed the relative difficulties of Linear Algebra or Differential Equations, the merits of the band Journey, and whether or not Software Management students should practice managing a team of Software Engineering students. When one of the guys started talking about “stochastics” I could see Nancy mentally deciding that it was time to go. Look on the bright side Nancy, at least we didn’t subject you to a discussion of Captain Kirk vs. Captain Picard!.

On Sunday morning we had to participate in presentation workshops. I signed up for the executive presentation workshop where we had two minutes to pitch a team of executives on a particular product, service, request for funding, etc. We then received feedback from the execs on our pitch as well as a rating by our peers. I felt I did reasonably well although I fumbled the close a bit because I felt pressed for time and struggled to find a nice crisp ending to the pitch. The feedback from the execs was brutal but necessary if I’m going to improve. I got a pretty good rating from my peers so overall I was pleased.

We flew back home yesterday in time to get the kids dinner and put them to bed. It was a fun yet tiring weekend. Now I launch straight into classwork, assignments, and team meetings. It will be pretty much a non-stop process for the next two years including summers. I just hope I can hang on for the ride.

Driving to work today I saw a license plate holder that said the following:

I see it, I want it, I throw a fit, and I get it

While obviously intended to be funny, the sentiment struck me as a glorification of selfishness and childishness and that one would not consider putting such a sentiment on one’s license plate holder unless there was an underlying current of truth behind it. Contrast the sentiment on the vehichle with that expressed by Paul in 1st Corinthians:

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things 1 Corinthians 13:11.

There is also a commercial playing on the local radio lately that encourages people to go out and buy things, anything, if they can afford it. It states that by buying things you’re helping your neighbors. Again, contrast that sentiment of consumerism and instant gratification with this counsel on provident living from Elder Hales in the latest General Conference:

When faced with the choice to buy, consume, or engage in worldly things and activities, we all need to learn to say to one another, “We can’t afford it, even though we want it!” or “We can afford it, but we don’t need it—and we really don’t even want it!”

Obviously, all economic activity is based on mutual exchange between parties (i.e., buying/selling/trading) and there isn’t a day that goes by that we don’t “buy” something (heat for our homes, water, energy, etc.). Thus, the counsel to focus on needs and not on wants, even if one can afford it, need not be construed as “go be a hermit, spin your own yarn, and never purchasing anything from anyone”. That being said, the contrasts between sentiments produced by the philosophies of men and sentiments produced by scripture and modern prophets are still stark.

Today was the day I decided to break in my new pressure canner by doing beets. We planted two rows of beets and most of the seeds sprouted so we had tons. We started off using the beets by making Borscht and beet salad. They were really good but we grew tired of beets pretty quick so Brian told me to just go ahead and pick the rest of the beets and can them. So this past Thursday I went and plucked all the beets from the garden, laid them on the grass and cut off the greens and cleaned them off good with the hose. I then filled a bucket of water and put the beets in it and left it over night in the garage. I would have brought them inside and prepared them further, but by the time I was done picking and cleaning them I was behind on all my other chores that day so I left them for later. I decided to can them today because I did not feel like doing any of the other chores around the house that needed my attention. So here are a few pictures that show the fruits of my labors.

I just got the reading/course material for classes this fall. I have two classes: Elements of Software Management and Metrics for Software Managers. The books for the Metrics class are:

Balancing Agility and Discipline: A Guide for the Perplexed
Agile Management for Software Engineering: Applying the Theory of Constraints for Business Results

The books for the Elements of Software Management class are:

Strategic Market Management
Finance for Managers
Beyond Software Architecture: Creating and Sustaining Winning Solutions
Strategic Management

It looks like I’ll have plenty of bedside reading for the next 4 months. Fortunately, I’m desperately interested in all of these topics so that should make the load seem a little lighter.

Sam has been asking me since before last Winter if he could have a lemonade stand. I took the day off today because we were originally planning to go and pick blackberries; however, the blackberry farm said the berries wouldn’t be ready until next week. A hot summer day with nothing else to do? That is the perfect time for a lemonade stand.

Sam’s Lemonade Stand

Nancy made the lemonade. Anne baked some chocolate chip cookies and helped them do the sign. After a quick trip to Sam’s club to get some plastic cups we were ready. I loaded up the wagon with the goods while Emily, Caroline, Sam, Diana and the neighbor girl all headed out to find the perfect spot for the stand – right on the front sidewalk. I told them they wouldn’t get any traffic on our sleepy street and that it was better to set up on a busier street. We headed out to the busy street behind our house that marks the entrance to the subdivision.

Waiting for customers

I helped them get the table and sign set up and instructed them on how to make change and to make sure they used a napkin when they gave people a cookie and then I set off for home with a warning not to eat and drink up all of their merchandise. When I set off, panic set in:

Kids: “Dad, where are you going?”
Me: “Home”

“But we need someone to help us!”
“I’m not in the lemonade business – you guys wanted to be in the lemonade business. You can do it.”

“But dad, nobody will stop on this street. This is embarrassing”
“Of course nobody will stop when you’re standing in front of the sign. You’ve got to stand behind your sign and wave at cars and then they’ll stop”

The kids weren’t very convinced that I had selected a good spot and weren’t too sure they wanted to be in the lemonade business but I left them there and went home to fetch Nancy and the camera. I was gone only about 5 minutes and when I came back they said “Dad! We got a customer” The neighbor lady whose lawn they were utilizing had been their first customer so they didn’t feel too bad about the spot anymore.

Nancy started buying a lemonade and I started to take pictures when the best customer of the day pulled up: a big FedEx truck! The kids’ eyes were wide as plates and their jaws dropped open. They couldn’t believe that a FedEx truck had stopped for lemonade. The driver ordered “two lemonades and a cookie”. The kids just kind of stood there with their eyes bulging out so Nancy had to coach them a bit on getting the driver his order. Lemonade was 25 cents and cookies were 50 cents. That meant a whole dollar from one customer! The driver gave them two dollars and said the second one was a tip.

Thanks Mr. FedEx guy! You made their day

After the FedEx guy the kids were convinced that I had chosen a good spot. After about a half hour the first casualty was Diana. She was hot and didn’t want to sell lemonade anymore. She wanted to play with her friends. A half hour later Buddy was the second casualty. He said the girls were being mean to him (they probably were) and that he didn’t want to sell lemonade anymore and wanted to play with his friends. I told him that it was his lemonade stand so if he didn’t want to do it anymore I would come and take it down. He said the girls still wanted to keep selling lemonade so I decided to let them keep going. I left them out there another two hours before I decided to go check on them. When I got there, they were drinking up the last of the lemonade and all the chocolate cookies had vanished. They all had big chocolaty grins and sunburns on their faces.

We took the stand down, packed up everything, and hauled it back home in the wagon. I counted up the money they had earned and was surprised to discover that they had made 11 dollars. Not bad for three hours worth of lemonade and cookie selling. The only problem was that the 11 dollars didn’t seem nearly as big an amount when it was split 6 ways (Anne got a share for making the cookies and doing the poster). Overall it was a fun activity. They kids had a good time and Nancy got a couple of hours to herself. Maybe next summer we’ll do another one.

The nicknames are gone. They just sounded dumb and they were too hard to maintain. It was also impossible to prevent commenters from using our real names. I am making one concession to anonymity though: I have removed all instances of our last name from the blog.

The part of raising a family I don’t really enjoy dealing with is that of injuries. This past weekend we had another trip to the instacare to fix another injury. It was Luppin’s turn to get some stitches.

While I was mowing the back lawn Luppin and Samuel were in the front yard playing around. I was about a third of the way done with the lawn when Texas comes up to me and tells me that Luppin is really hurt. Usually when someone is hurt I am not to worried, but when they are really hurt I come running. It turns out Luppin fell down on the front steps on her chin. There was a pretty big and deep gash and I knew that a bandage was not going to be enough. I even saw the fatty tissue under the skin. So I took Emily with me to put pressure on the wound and we went to see the doctor. Luppin was really good and stayed really still while they shot her with numbing medicine and then stitched her up. She got six stitches in all, one underneath the skin to close up the underlying tissue and five on the top to close up the skin. Now we will go back on Saturday to get the stitches taken out.

It’s been a few years since we’ve been to the 4th of July parade in Provo. If you’ve been to one of these parades you’ve been to them all so there isn’t really any need to keep going each year. Of course, we’ve been enough times in the past that we’re considered the “experts” on the logistics of this parade in the family. This year, Aunt Melissa was in town and her boys had never been to a parade so we were happy to go with them.

Waiting for more candy

The key to enjoying the parade is to get a shady and grassy spot on Center street. Unfortunately, those spots are in high demand so some expert strategy is required in order to secure a spot. Provo City ordinances, specifically title 9.14.220 of the municipal code, prevent anyone from putting their blankets and stuff down before 5:00 a.m. on Center street and the Provo Police typically enforce the ordinance. Thus, there always is a mad rush at 5:00 a.m. as people throw down their blankets and chairs, rope off spots, and generally act like buffoons as they try to reserve space in the prime locations. If you don’t live in Provo and don’t want to get up really early to catch a prime spot, there are still a few tricks you can use to get yourself a nice shady location. The first trick is to realize that people always grab way more space than they need. They’ll set out a huge tarp for only 5 or 6 people. They also put a foot of space between their blanket/tarp and the next guy’s blanket/tarp. The gaps and spaces between tarps are prime real estate for late comers. You also need to remember that all the kids go running up to the curb as soon as the parade starts passing by so that they can get candy. The kids never actually end up sitting still on the tarps/blankets/chairs which contributes even more to wasted space. Finally, remember that possession is nine tenths of the law and if someone doesn’t physically hold their space down it is prone to usurpation from squatters. Usurpation is also perfectly legal because, as the parade website says “Please note that in order to reserve a spot on the parade route at least one person must be present. Any items left unattended may be moved.”

If you’re a squatter like me, you need to get there early enough so that it’s not jammed packed but late enough so that the original land rush has settled down and the hard-cores have tired of holding down their spot and have set off to collect their families or get something to eat. Between 6:30 and 7:00 a.m. is about right. You walk along the sidewalk looking for gaps between the existing arrangement of blankets/chairs/tarps then you swoop in and do a little rearranging. A little tugging here, a little adjustment there, and viola! – you’ve converted that unused space into a perfect little area for your own blankets and chairs. Avoid doing weak junk like folding their blankets in half or removing their blanket altogether (even though it’s perfectly legal). You’re not decreasing the amount of overall space they’ve claimed – you’re simply making the most efficient use of the total available space by rearranging such that small gaps become big gaps.

Enjoying the parade

Of course, squatters are prone to protestations from the few hardy souls that have stuck around since 5:30 to hold down their blankets. The staker-outers mostly just sit there and glare at you but the bold ones may cry, “Hey, those are someone’s blankets!”. You need to be tough and say, “Well, I’m only scooting them over so I can use this extra space over here” or, simply, “Well, they’re not here”. You also need to periodically loudly say “People ALWAYS reserve way more space than they need!”. That generally shuts up the most vocal sentries. The most important key, of course, is DON’T BUDGE from your space. You have to put your chairs down and sit in them and don’t leave. Otherwise, you will get squatted upon yourselves or you will get moved aside by the original homesteaders when they return to reclaim their land.

The return of the original homesteaders is where your resolve will be tested the most. They will say “Hey, that was our spot!” or “We reserved that location!” Good responses are “what spot?” “where?”. They will say, “There, where our blanket is”. You can then respond “Your blanket is still there”. Remember – don’t move. Don’t stand up. Just STAY SEATED. They will think you are a mean jerk but that’s OK because you think they are greedy land-grabbers reserving way more than they need. Eventually, the homesteader’s full party will arrive and they will realize, “Oh, we didn’t really need 30 chairs for only 20 people” and they will start to fold up some of their blankets and such. At the same time, the super-late crowd will begin to arrive and ask things like “Is it OK if we just squeeze our blankets in here?” This is your chance to really sink the knife into the homesteader’s greedy heart. Your response should be, “Sure! No problem! There’s always room for more. After all, people ALWAYS reserve WAY MORE space than they need”. This response accomplishes several things: You gain allies among the super-late crowd, you look like a nice generous congenial person, and you make the original homesteader look like a dork for reserving WAY MORE space than he needed. Now, you can enjoy the parade from your nice shady spot!

Thanks to Melissa and Kyle for helping me successfully squat on some shady ground at this year’s parade. Thanks to Grandma Connie for the treats. I’m glad we went but I certainly have no desire to go again next year.