We found a place in Ferndale, and setup base camp. There was no wireless, which made for a desperate attempt to steal from the neighbors, which went exactly no where. That did mean though that we spent a lot more time just hanging out, playing guitar, and chasing Amelia around the house. There was a cute little grocery store in town where we got our food for the weekend, and spent the day before the race checking out the North Coast.

Massively windy. Massively beautiful. Don’t know that a coastline like California’s can be rivaled. There’s something to the cliffs and the sheer coldness of the water that makes for this beautiful yet distant combo. Unrivaled in what I’ve seen.

On to the race!

The race sucked. I just didn’t train enough. I got to 7 miles and some steps at a perfect pace. I was really happy with what I was doing, and then I just couldn’t keep going. I hit neither my time (2:28:56) nor my objective to not walk (about half-a-mile over the course of the race). There was an epic hill at about 1.8 miles to go, and it just knocked me flat.

BUT

I ran the last half-mile as hard as I could, and Amelia and Micky were both at the finish line to cheer me on. It was quite awesome. That was by far the best part of the whole thing.

Lessons learned for next time:

1. Do a training run more than 7 miles
2. Set realistic goals, and accomplish them
3. Bring Micky along for the whole ride

Don’t know when it will be, but looking forward to the next one.

• Don’t walk over the 13.1 miles
• Finish in under 2:10

Stay tuned, and I’ll update tomorrow as to what happens.

They gave her a little belly button, and it’s quite cute. That’s the last plastic surgery that she’ll ever get as far as I’m concerned though.

I just want to thank everyone who has supported us through all of this. The amazing team at TokBox who never once said that Micky or I couldn’t go to get things done for Amelia. The family and friends who have called, texted, and emailed. And of course my darling Micky without whom I never would have survived this whole ordeal.

If ever there is someone out there who needs help through a birth defect situation, and specifically an oemophalocele, please contact me on this blog. The biggest thing we need in these moments is someone who listens, and after the miracle I’ve just lived the least I could do is be an ear to someone who needs it.

The next amazing Amelia update will hopefully be about the big 1. I can’t wait

Amelia refuses to sit still. The energizer bunny has nothing on her (plus his insides aren’t on the outside either). However neither walking nor crawling have been mastered. As a result, she constantly needs someone to watch over her. She doesn’t really want us to be there from a play perspective, but we have to be there from a fall on my head perspective. She is dependently independent.

In the same way, I feel as if I’m desperate to get to the next level of my career. I’d be lying if I said I had any idea as to what it was, but I just feel like I need to get there. The problem is that I don’t know if I can crawl, much less walk, and so someone is constantly having to make sure I don’t fall on my head. And let me tell you it sucks to be dependently independent.

Amelia has the advantage of time, but for me time feels like the crux of the problem. When she does fall on her head, she learns. I feel like I don’t get the chance, and so I haven’t.

I want to find a way out to the other side. I know she will make it. But in the meantime we’re both keeping both hands on the table around those tricky coffee table turns.

You see, the adults have no idea how to react to a digitally connected world. I’m sure horrible things happened before MySpace, but I don’t know if they were nearly as viral or long lasting. On top of that, I think kids are just getting meaner. We are, so as not to hurt their feelings, being too nice to our kids. Their reaction is to be mean in return. It’s a bit bizarre and disheartening.

I’m glad that shows like Glee try to take on issues such as coming out of the closet, the lack of arts education in schools, and societal expectations of gender and roles. But I’m just not convinced that a 43-minute episode does enough to keep the conversation moving. We see it; we think to ourselves what a tragedy it represents; and then we move on to the next week’s episode.

Somehow parents need to be empowered to engage their children in difficult conversations. We should start when kids are much younger before they are overburdened with puberty, confused about their own identities, and struggling to make a place for themselves in the world. Young children are much smarter than we give them credit for, and I think challenging them with reading, writing, and arithmetic needs to be supplemented by making them aware of how we are different, and why those differences make us a better society.

I want my children to understand there is poverty, and that a middle class upbringing is not a right. I want my children to understand that there is race, and that because of it we stereotype and do harmful things to one another. I want my children to understand that someone can have two mommies or two daddies, and that that’s okay.

But I want my children to be kids, and to be naive as long as possible. And I think that’s the wall that stops us from having those conversations.

Between now and then, it sure would be nice to find a way to make it happen. I guess it’s one more thing to add to the to-do list.

Related articles

• Parents: Gay Suicide Victim Had No Close Friends (abcnews.go.com)
• Last week’s ‘Glee’ inspires record traffic for The Trevor Project (cnn.com)
• Motherlode Blog: Shootings in Ohio School Provide Another Opening to Talk About Guns (parenting.blogs.nytimes.com)

In that vein, I’m going to publish my stats weekly to gauge whether anything is getting better or not. It’s quite scary right now, but I’m sure it’s going to get better.

Weight: 206 lbs
Waist size: 35″

What else should I be measuring?

My goal is to be in the 180s and 32″ by June for a physical.

Ever since, I’ve tried to give up one thing per year, and really push myself as to what it was. One year it was fast food (at which I succeeded). Another year it was sloth (at which I epicly failed).

Since I’m giving up fast food this year as part of my New Year’s resolution, I’ve decided to stay in that theme. This year I’m giving up soda for Lent. I’m hoping that by Easter I’m 10 pounds lighter, and I’ve lost the taste for sugar. I’d be lying though if I said that it was easy to skip having a coke with Thai food for lunch (for some reason Indian and Thai food + Coke go together so darn well).

I’m trying to sign up other folks to join me, but at the end of the day this is one of those things you have to do because you want to do it for yourself.

What are you giving up for Lent?

We made a full weekend of it. On Saturday, we swung by the Monterey Bay aquarium. While we were there, I heard a mother screaming at her child about the value of a bottle of soda, and why she asked for it if she wasn’t going to drink it. It was a horribly adult conversation, and the 8-year old had no idea how to react. There was no framework for the kid to understand a budget, the value of a dollar, or even why they shouldn’t consume frivolously. There was just a mom yelling at her daughter.

It was just a horrible experience for everyone involved. The mother and the daughter yelling at each other. The two friends who were awkwardly stuck at the table. And me for eavesdropping, wishing I hadn’t, and then not being able to break away to see how it all ended.

It made me mentally note to never have that fight with my kids.

From there, we made our way back up to Capitola to check-in to our little beach house. Our next door neighbors were having a massive 35-person birthday party, and it was quite fun to watch all the kids run around. You notice kids, and their behavior, a lot more after having kids.

I kept thinking to myself, holy shit how do I prevent Amelia and #2 from being like that one over there? Or, wow, that girl is so kind, I wonder how to make sure my kids are kind? The one I kept coming back to that proves I’m officially an old man is, there’s no way in hell she’s ever wearing anything that looks like that!

I’m not great at a lot of things, but I will give myself credit as a strong pattern matcher and observer. I’ve learned the value of listening over the years, and have found that a large part of the equation of being a strong listener is being strong with your eyes as well. With all of that said, I still can’t find the pattern that distinguishes the girl getting yelled at for buying a soda she wouldn’t drink, and the kind girl on the beach who helped her sister/cousin when she bumped her head.

I think it’s going to take a lot more pattern matching before I can figure this one out :-/

I know, it’s shocking. We were shocked too. And so has everyone been who has heard so far. But it’s going to be amazing!

Today we went to the pre-natal folks to get our last ultrasound. To say we were nervous is a massive understatement. After Amelia’s oemphalocele, there hasn’t been an ultrasound machine that hasn’t made us nervous. As fate would have it, we were in the same room with the same ultrasound tech who found the problem with Amelia. Too many coincidences to really get comfortable.

Amelia was with us, and we were giving her a play-by-play of what her new sibling was showing off. We started with the spine, and worked through to the heart, various organs, 10 toes, 10 fingers, and then we shut our eyes so we wouldn’t see the sex.

We wanted to know everything was okay first.

Dr. Goldberg, with whom we’ve been through a lot, came in, and told us that everything looked great. We then excitedly, the three of us, got a peek at the little guys boy parts. And we smiled. And now we’re going to be four.

And it’s going to be amazing

Looks like the competition is heating up. In the words of Gandhi, the fight has begun. It’s been quite an impressive ride though. Your stock price. How you’ve pushed the competition to bankruptcy. Quite impressive.

If you want to win the next round (which by the way is probably the final round of this bout), then you have to massively improve discoverability.

Netflix does a few things very well.

1) Netflix is on all devices
We moved to Roku just about one year ago. It’s fantastic because between Hulu Plus and Netflix we have almost everything we need. Yeah we’ve added Amazon Instant for some newer releases, but I know those are coming to the previously mentioned channels.

On top of that my PC has Netflix. My iPhone and iPad have Netflix. If I hooked up my XBox to do TV, then that would have Netflix. It’s a truly universal platform, and that’s awesome.

2) Netflix recommends wonderfully
Between the fact that I watch a bunch of documentaries and cop TV shows, and the fact that Micky watches a lot of cheesy Rom-Coms, Netflix has us figured out. Their selection isn’t great today (see next point), but of what they have they are able to categorize and relate it to what I’ve seen.

Netflix hosted a massive competition to improve their recommendation engine by 10%. It took 3 research teams over a year to put together the right algorithms, but they did it. It has definitely proven to be a competitive advantage for Netflix, and hopefully the million dollar prize has treated the competitors well.

3) Netflix is very aggressively going after content
Netflix just signed an extremely big deal with DreamWorks and is demonstrating a clear desire to increase its streaming catalogue. The competition is heating up, and so the price  is going to increase as well, but based on CEO statements Netflix is up to the battle.

This is really going to make the platform that much more compelling. However, the one thing that you do horribly is discoverability.

A movie platform, to be successful with discoverability, has to make it easy to search in any dimension that I want that I associate with the movies even after I discover the movie that I think I’m looking for. Movie title, actors, directors, genre are the obvious search topics that are most obvious. Today, you can search on those dimensions, but for Netflix search and discoverability are not the same thing. It’s not delivering the content that matters. Right now the web interface sucks, but it still gets the movies in front of me.

It’s all about how I interact with the content once I’ve had it presented to me. Give me cross-links on top of the movie that I’m looking at. Is it the actor that I’m interested in? Is it the location? What about the writer? Or the style of comedy?

How can you, Netflix, not have this data? And beyond that, how can you not encourage me to build such verticals into queues which are, “Melih’s Caribbean Instant Queue” or “Melih’s Witty British Humo(u)r Instant Queue”. I can have a movie night around self-categorized, self-discovered films, and, oh by the way, it makes Netflix that much smarter.

Also, please make this available on the Roku. Discoverability is even worse on devices than it is on the PC. But that’s a topic for another day.