Category: Family

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(Click on the picture to get to the photo gallery.)

My mother is blind. This is a source of great frustration to her, because despite her age and her disability, her mind is as sharp and energetic as ever. She listens to the radio, and books on tape/CD, and subscribes to various audio journals; however, in many cases the only feasible approach is to ask someone to read to her. This is time-consuming and frequently inconvenient, and because she feels it to be an imposition my mother often decides not to ask.

Today we were talking on the phone, and she mentioned that she’d been listening to a piece from the New York Review of Books by Thomas Powers in which he reviewed four books about J. Robert Oppenheimer. Someone (my brother, I think) was reading it to her, but it’s a long piece, so he was doing it in several sessions.

After I got off the phone, I decided that there had to be a better way. First I bought a copy of iSpeak It and installed it on my PowerBook. I gave it the URL to the Thomas Powers article, waited while it downloaded the piece, edited the text a bit to clean up extraneous navigation links and so forth, and instructed iSpeak It to transfer it to iTunes. A few minutes later I had a 55 minute AAC track in my iTunes library containing the article in OS X’s Bruce voice. The quality is not wonderful, but it’s quite recognizable. I burned a CD-R, and tomorrow I’ll mail it to her in England.

It’s no great chore to do this for my mother once or twice a month, but I wish there were a more straightforward solution. Of course I could set her up with a DSL connection, buy her a Mac mini, and set up a few Automator scripts for her, but I’ve tried similar approaches in the past without success. What I want is a big USB-connected control unit with a dozen big keys with glyphs that can easily be recognized by feel, and yellow on black for maximum contrast….

I love FriendsReunited. I don’t make many contacts there, but every few months something comes up in a serendipitous way. Sometimes it’s a happy serendipity, sometimes not. For example, I came across the name of someone that I was at school with back in 1962-3 at St. Benedict’s School in Ealing. I sent off an email, received no reply, and thought nothing of it. And then a few months later I had a message from his account, written by his wife – or rather his widow. He had died suddenly, and she’d been cleaning up his electronic personæ and come across my query. That felt strange.

The most recent connection was just today. FriendsReunited have expanded from their original school and college contacts to include workplaces and now street addresses. Back in 1954-1963 we lived in a suburban semidetached house in north-west London: 75, Oxgate Gardens, London NW2. (Google Maps only shows the street; number 75 was on the north side, about three houses from the corner of Coles Green Road.) Just across the street and a few houses down there was a slightly larger three-storey house that had been converted into a small private school: Blenheim House. Both my brother and I went there between 1958 and 1962. (It’s mentioned towards the end of this history of schools in the Willesden area; apparently it closed a year or two after I left.) I noticed that another FriendsReunited subscriber had lived at an address that must have been next door to the school, so I sent her an email. We exchanged messages, and it unlocked a torrent of memories from about 50 years ago. Delightful. Thanks, Sally.

We were babysitting Tommy this afternoon, and just after we’d fed him he seemed to want to roll over to take a look at something. He’s only seven weeks, so rolling is not yet supposed to be in his repertoire…. After he’d being trying to roll for about five minutes, I decided to capture a video clip using my Treo. It’s over two minutes long*, and Tommy kept going for several minutes after I’d finished. It should play in QuickTime; sorry about the quality. Check out the leg action around a minute into the clip – a natural soccer player, I’d say…!

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* And 2.6MB in size – don’t try this over a dial-up connection!

Our grandson Tommy’s christening was yesterday, so we headed up to Lynn. The plan was for Mark’s sister and Kate’s brother to be the grandparents (nicely symmetrical), but Chris was 2500 miles away getting packed. (He and Celeste are relocating from Seattle to the Oakland/Berkeley area this week.) So I had to stand in for Chris, which I was happy to do*. (Perhaps I should Photoshop Chris’s face into this picture!) And of course Tommy took it all in his stride….

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* The deacon conducting the christening was one of those loud, enthusiastic types that shouts out the prayers and the responses, so I didn’t have to profess any beliefs that I didn’t have. On the other hand, the priest who conducted the regular mass (and who appears in this photo) was a fascinating character; we had a long discussion with him afterwards. At one point when he was talking about how he’d like to conduct services, I pointed out that he had nearly 1700 years of imperial pretension to get rid of; he agreed that the problems he was thinking about really started with Constantine. Let’s hope Benedict’s authoritarianism doesn’t squeeze all of his imaginative aspirations out of him.

Just a few pictures of my grandson Tommy from Sunday, when I was baby-sitting. (He’s 30 days old at this point.)

My daughter, Kate, had her first child* this morning: Tom. He’s shown here in a rough phone-cam picture curled up on his mum at 3 hours old. Despite dire predictions of a 10 pound baby, he was actually 8 lbs. 9 ozs., of which about a pound seems to be hair. Congratulations to all.

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* And my first grandchild

UPDATE: There are some more pictures here. Enjoy.

Chris and his fiancée Celeste were married this morning in the Thomsen Chapel of Saint Mark’s Cathedral here in Seattle. Their good friend, The Reverend Ann Holmes Redding (shown here with the happy couple; click for full-size image) presided. It was an intimate and beautiful service, with family and friends doing all of the readings. After lunch at the Café Flora, the newlyweds headed off to the airport in a vintage London taxi – see cameraphone pics below.

I spent yesterday evening at the Joe Bar with Chris and a bunch of friends, getting nicely mellow and shooting the breeze in advance of Chris’s wedding to Celeste today. Jon Lasser (author of Think Unix) was there; he’s already blogged about it, and posted a couple of pictures to Flickr. It was a nice, low key, geek kind of evening, with talk of music, PDA software, the benefits of seamless WiFi-GPRS, Unix file system APIs, and puppetry. Oh yes, and embarrassing confessions from all of us (like Chris admitting a fondness for the music of Garth Brooks, and a certain person’s recollection of a schoolday “chastity pledge”….).

(The photo on the right was taken outside St. Dunstan’s church in Carmel Valley last February.)

I didn’t mention where I was staying in Seattle. It’s a new Silver Cloud hotel at Broadway and Madison. I love the slightly freaky cosmopolitan character of Broadway, and yet we’re only a few minutes walk from Pioneer Square. Highly recommended.
So this morning I met up with Chris and Celeste for coffee, and eventually we headed over to the Cathedral for the 11 o’clock service. One of Chris’s jobs as acolyte was to to be one of three manipulating 12 foot long poles (actually more like fishing rods – really flexible and whippy) with long streamer ribbons on the ends. As the Easter procession snaked around the pews (accompanied by a satisfying amount of incense – that takes me back a few years!), they twirled the ribbons above the congregation. The whole effect was like something out of a painting from the Italian Renaissance.
Bishop Warner gave a nice sermon in which he quoted various poets including John Lennon, citing (without any irony) “imagine there’s no religion”. The folks at St. Mark’s don’t seem to want doctrinal issues to get in the way of being nice to each other and building a community….
The other cool thing about the service was the music. I grew up on Palestrina and plainsong, and I’ve found much of what passes for “religious” music these days to be about as moving as “I’d like to buy the world a Coke”. The music at St. Mark’s was delightful, both as music and in context. From a performance perspective, the organist, trumpet soloist, and percussion were superb, while the choir was very good (but not great). As for the compositions, much of the music was written by one Peter Hallock. I’d never heard the name before, but the style was striking and effective – and very English. Strongest influences were clearly Britten and Warlock, though there were touches of Saint-Saens. I visited the Cathedral shop and bought a CD of his works after the service. I gather that he has been associated with St. Mark’s for years, and was responsible for arranging their renowned Sung Compline program.
After lunch, we split up, and I did some serious power-walking – from the hotel down Madison to Pioneer Square, up 1st Street to the Public Market, then over Pike Street to Broadway and back. After that I was too knackered to do much else; Chris and I met up for a drink and then retired. (Memo to self: my drink was a strong English cider by Aspall. Stunning.)
Tomorrow morning to SFO on Alaska Air, and so to work.