End of my first day as a manager, time to head home.  I hop on the shuttle bus to the train station, and then as I'm walking up to the turnstiles I reach for my wallet... only to realize that I've left my wallet at the office.  I could have just exploded from sheer frustration at that moment.  I smack myself HARD on the forehead, turn around, trudge back to the bus stop, wait for the bus, then back to the office, grab my wallet, back down to the bust stop,  wait 15 minutes for the bus, then hop on and head home.  To top it all off, it was the same bus driver the entire day - he must think I'm completely retarded.

What a fitting end to my dubious first day as a manager....  *sigh*  I do hope that it's not a reflection on my career as a manager...

I'll most likely need to move to a new cubicle for my new role, so I walked over to an area of the office where I've not visited before.  A few of my coworkers sitting there were all "Hey Jim, congrats!" and I'm all "thanks" and then a little chit chat, then I left.  After I left I realized I hadn't mentioned that I was scoping out the place as a possible future seating assignment.  They must have thought that I went over there just to get some congratulations from them.  This is getting worse and worse - I'm slowly but surely becoming Michael Scott...

Today is my official first day as a manager, and it's been a comedy of errors so far.  First I go and spill yogurt all over my shirt on the train ride this morning, then I fell asleep on the shuttle ride to the office and the driver had to wake me up at the stop.

I feel like a major doofus.  This is not the most promising start to my career as a manager...

The other day, Sara picked up Cam from daycare and the daycare reported that "Cam had been bad."  Apparently, Cam had been smacking the other girls in the daycare.  They take a toy from him, then he chases them down and bops them on the head.  Is this is a preview of Sara getting called by the principal because Cam got in trouble?

For a couple months now, Cam's temper has been developing and evolving.  At first, he would simply give a cry and pout for a few seconds, then he started to get into larger physical actions, where he'd flop down onto the ground and roll a bit before recovering.  Now, when he doesn't get his way, he'll actually run a few steps away before diving onto the ground and crying.  Very dramatic stuff.  If you're holding him or restraining him, he'll thrash his arms around, knocking things over, or worse, he'll reach out for stuff to grab and throw them around.  If no objects are within arms' reach, he'll end up hitting you instead.  He also recognizes when you are speaking ill of him - if you are holding him and talk bad about him, he'll furrow his brow, give you a semi-evil look and swing his arm at you.  He'll hit you and then sort of look at you with a half-mad, half-curious expression.  He's unsure if he's allowed to hit us, and he's probing the boundaries of what he can do.  Sneaky and slightly evil... do all kids go through this?  He hit me a couple times but I grabbed his arm, looked him in the eyes, and told him very sternly that he cannot do that.  Now, if I'm holding him and he gets mad at me, he'll sort of swing his arm half-heartedly at me, but never actually hits me.  I'm hoping that's enough of a scolding to get him to stop, but really I think I'd better start brushing up on timeouts and other disciplining techniques.

Cam's only a year and a half old yet he's displaying behaviour of a Terrible Two year old.  Do they call this the Ornery Ones?

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Despite his anger management issues, Cam is insanely fun to play with now.  He's doing some funny stuff now, like bending over and balancing on his head while sticking his butt up in the air.  He'll look at you while doing this and giggle up a storm.  He's also learned to sort of row with his arms when we sing 'Row row row your boat', but the best thing is we start to make chomping sounds and he squeals with laughter and runs away.  We'll chase him around the dining room table, with him laughing uncontrollably the whole time.

He got a lightsaber-type toy for Christmas, and he loves to wield it properly, like a sword, and run around making loud sounds as though he's making sound effects for the sword itself.  He also received train tracks and a wooden building block train and makes not-quite choo choo sounds as he pushes the train around.  Fun fun fun.

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We went to the new California Academy of Science on Family Day a couple Sundays back, but the free admission had thousands of families flocking to the site and the line extended off into the distance.  We couldn't see the end of the line and decided not to waste our day by standing in line.  The weather was fantastically beautiful and we ended up just playing in the grassy park-like area in front of the museum.  Living in a downtown condo, we don't get a ton of exposure to green space so Cam loved just walking around and exploring the grass and trees and even chasing after the birds.  After wards, we sat on one of the park benches and enjoyed our mini-picnic lunch.  It was a very nice Sunday afternoon.

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Sara and I completely forgot about Chinese New Year last year, and we would have also let it pass this year without celebrations, but Cam had a fantastic Chinese New Year outfit so Sara decreed that we must somehow celebrate just so we can throw Cam into the outfit.

We ended up going for a Chinese New Year dinner with Brian, Sooji, their kids, and Laomi.  We went for Malaysian food, which was awesome, but the great part was seeing Cam and Haiden happily wave when they saw each other.  They really exhibited signs of friendship during dinner, with Haiden coming over to Cam's high chair and the two of them having fun and hamming it up a bit.  It was very endearing to watch, and we got some great pics of the two of them together, including this shot which looks like Cam is holding the camera and snapping a self-portrait style shot of him and his buddy Haiden.  I absolutely love this pic:

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I've posted a bunch of new pictures of some of our recent activities.

Note that I've not finished sorting through the pictures from our holiday visit back to Toronto yet so none of those pictures have been posted.  Soon, soon, be patient young one...

I've discovered that some NBA players are twittering, and I've begun to follow two in particular:
Shaq and Chris Bosh.

It's quite amazing to be able to connect with the players on this level, as it goes sooo much deeper than the typical post-game quotes you get from players.  For example, in last night's game, Bosh had the ball with the game on the line, then had his shot blocked.  That play effectively lost the game.  Bosh's twitter update afterwards: "Eating a nice juicy steak to cheer myself up."  Things like that turn Bosh the Player into Bosh the Person, as I remember blowing a big play in a game back in my playing days and I can totally relate to what he's feeling.  You won't get that from cookie-cutter post game interviews.

Shaq's twitter updates are just as entertaining as you'd imagine.  Examples:
and

Anyways, this is a whole new way to be a fan of sports and it's pretty cool.

The most amazing thing for me is the realization that all this will be so normal for Cam as he grows up - he will be connected and plugged in on a level that I cannot even imagine right now.  Twitter and social networking in general is only a couple years old, who knows how it will evolve over the next 5 to 10 years?  Maybe Cam will be cheering his favourite players by sending them tweets right in the middle of games... and they'll respond!

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I'm working offsite today, and I'm currently sitting in a very sunny Starbucks.  The sun is shining onto the back of my screen, and I've got an apple-shaped bright spot right in the middle of my screen - the sun is shining through the Apple logo on the lid!  This can't be good for the laptop, but there's no other spot to sit as there is only one power outlet in the entire shop.  I guess I'd better put something on the table behind my laptop to block the sun...

When I give Cam a bath, I always blow bubbles for him right before I shampoo his hair.  During today's bath, as I poured the shampoo into my hand, Cam broke out in a big smile and said "Bah-bel."  Bubble!!!  I was so excited - his first multi-syllable word!  He said it a few more times as we played with the bubbles.  After the bath, I tried to get Cam to repeat it for Sara, but he would not; looks like it may be a bath time-only word.  :)

About a month ago, we started giving Cam those little Goldfish crackers and of course we would always say "fish" to him as we gave it to him.  After about a week of giving him the crackers, he said "fis" a couple times as we gave it to him.  Sara was excited that Cam just spoke his second words, but I wasn't entirely sure he was actually speaking the word or if he was just making random sounds.  Then he repeated it again while in Toronto, except he didn't say it when we fed him the crackers.  Instead, we were having dinner at my sister's and when Cam was checking out their aquarium he said "fis, fis" to the great excitement of my mom and sister.  Definitely he is saying 'fish'.

So his first words were "uh oh" followed by "fish" and today were his first multi-syllable words, "bubble".  I wonder the little guy's going to say next!

We wanted to keep Cam to a sleep schedule in Toronto, but try as we might, he was all over the map with his naps and bed time, what with all the dinners, parties, get-togethers, etc.  The day of our return flight was the absolute worst, as Cam would not sleep and rather than fight him we decided to let him stay up while we packed.  He ended up falling asleep at 3am and we woke up at 7am, then we spent the day in the airport where he had a couple small naps and did not sleep at all on the flight.

Since we've returned, he's had trouble falling asleep.  I'm not sure if he's fighting sleep or just in a bad state, but he'll cry for quite a long time until we finally coerce him to sleep.  He definitely will not sleep on his own in his crib; at least Sara has to be in bed with him and sometimes it takes the both of us surrounding him before he'll fall asleep.

We end up laying in bed with him for 45 minutes or longer before he'll sleep, and it is extremely hard for us not to also fall asleep while in bed for that long.  This means that our sleep schedule is also messed up, as we end up sleeping for two to three hours when we lay in bed with him.  We usually put him down to bed at 7pm, and then we end up not waking til 10pm or later.  We end up losing the whole evening to get our stuff done, and then I feel all messed up and unable to get back to sleep.  Tonight was the worst, as I did not wake up til almost midnight... now it's 3:30am and I'm not feeling tired at all.

We really need to get everybody back on our regular sleep schedule.  I think we'll have to go through the tough sleep training with Cam again and just let him cry it out... it was difficult the first time, but hopefully it'll be very fast this time round.

Back on New Year's day there was a fatal shooting in Oakland's Fruitvale Bart train station, when a Bart police officer fatally shot a 22 year-old.

This was big news, but then the issue exploded when an eyewitness sent a video of the event that they'd filmed with their phone to a local news station.  In the fuzzy video, the youth is shown handcuffed and lying on the ground on his stomach, not being much of a threat, when an officer pulled out his gun and shot him in the back.

This shooting happened at the same station where somebody tried to steal my laptop last March, and my first reaction upon hearing the news was 'good, hopefully that means no more punks will do anything stupid there', but after seeing the video, my stomach turned - he was not posing any threat whatsoever, how could a police officer shoot him like that?!?

Of course the video caused a huge, huge reaction.  There were immediate demands to arrest the police officer.  The officer was not arrested, but an investigation was held.  Rather than submit statements on the incident, the officer chose to resign and as a result was protected by some law which said that he does not have to testify or provide statements or anything.  He was not even held in custody at any point, and there was a protest staged in downtown Oakland this past Wednesday.  The protest quickly became a riot, with lots of damage to the surrounding stores and cars.  The riot reminded many of the Rodney King riots in LA, though it wasn't quite on the same scale.  BART took the precaution to not stop in Fruitvale station, where the shooting (and my attempted mugging) took place.

After watching news reports from the frustrated and scared owners of stores and cars damaged in the riot, and hearing the victim's family pleading for a stop to the violent riots, I'm a little apprehensive to ride on the Bart through that station.  Luckily I worked from home on Thursday, so I did not pass through the area when there must been some residual anger, frustration, and fear.  My Friday commute seemed lighter than usual, though I can't really whether it was mere coincidence or if it was in fact due to fear of possible violence on the train.

I expect that by Monday things will have died down, but I'm still hoping to not see a police officer on the train. If there are any angry/stupid Oakland youths on the train at the same time, who knows what will happen.  I do not want to be caught in the middle of a violent confrontation.

I took my car in for servicing yesterday, and the courtesy shuttle dropped me off at a nearby Starbucks to work while I waited.  The Starbucks was in a big plaza that contained a Home Depot, and as we pulled into the parking lot I saw many Mexicans just milling about in the parking lot.  I wondered what they were all doing there, then somebody said they're looking for work.

I had heard stories about this - illegal Mexican immigrants wait outside of Home Depot stores, looking for work.  Apparently you can hire them as cheap labour for construction, painting, yard duty, anything that requires manual labour.  One of our friends moved awhile back and afterwards said they wished they'd hired a couple Mexicans to do the heavy lifting.

This situation is very strange to me, but I suppose it's better for them to sit outside of Home Depot hoping to get a short term job than to sit on a street corner begging for money or food.  It can't be easy to do that; I guess that speaks greatly of their living conditions in Mexico if they're willing to do this in the US.

Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard

We didn't get onto the standby flight and ended up spending over nine hours at the airport.  We were all tired from lack of sleep the night before, but could not get any proper rest at the airport.  By the time we boarded the flight, we were all very fatigued.

Due to the late booking of the flight, we ended up getting the very last row of seats.  It sucks to be all the way back there where it's hot due to the close proximity to the galley, but the worst thing about sitting at the very back is that you are the very last to be served at meal time.  They ended up running out of food by the time they got to us - all that was left were apple slices and cashew snacks on the menu.  Luckily they had packs of instant noodles which were not on the menu, so we had some semblance of a meal, but it was not very suitable for Cam, and he was crying for more food.

Cam was actually very difficult on the flight - he did not sleep at all and was constantly trying to climb out of our seats.  We had a person between us and the aisle, and the people in front of us fully reclined their seats for the entire flight, so it was an extremely cramped space.  He was crying a lot, and was actually screaming at a couple points - I feel bad those who were sitting in front of us.  Not that I really blame Cam, mind you - he was tired from lack of sleep, hungry from lack of food, and just generally uncomfortable with the cramped space.

All in all, it was an extremely trying flight, with Cam screaming and us not getting any rest whatsoever.  And to top it all off, our luggage did not arrive.   A very long and tiring day of travel.

It was the absolute worst day of travel Sara or I have experienced.  We were soooo glad to be finally home and crashed out in our bed.

8:40am flight back to san francisco; get to airport by 7am; leave house at 6:15am; set alarm for 5:45am.

That was the plan last night. I finished packing at 3:30am and went to bed.

Woke up this morning, looked at the clock. 7am.  OHMIGOD SEVEN AM!!!

Drove like a maniac and got to the airport at 7:32am, but by the time we loaded our gear onto a smart cart and ran to the check-in area, there was only one minute left before the cutoff and they didn't have enough time to check us in.  Argh!!!

So now we're sitting at the gate, waiting on standby for the next flight at 11:40am.  Ugh, what a pain.  :(