In retrospect, it’s not surprising to me that working full-time and parenting three kids would leave little time to write blog posts. However, I didn’t expect it would leave so little time to even shut this thing down properly. More than time, it was also the fact that the details of my work now are proprietary and Facebook has turned out to be a good platform for wry parenting observations, leaving fewer reasons to write here.

I’d still like a place to record thoughts that need more than a couple of sentences to express. Ironically, I find that writing on a personal website seems more private and intimate than using a platform that is supposed to only publish to your “friends”. I think this is because with a weblog both the reader and writer have made some significant effort to connect—the reader has gone off the beaten path of the buzzing social networks, while the writer has (hopefully) put together something worth reading for more than ten seconds.

However since it’s doubtful that I will be able to write more than two-sentences at a time with any regularity in the short term, I’m going to shut down this blog. This will also give me the opportunity to redesign this site. I’ve been wanting to do this for some time, but have been avoiding it in part because I was afraid to touch the creaky software that runs this blog, which I haven’t looked at since I installed it seven years ago.

My server logs tell me that there are still some people subscribed to this through a feed reader. If you’re one of them, feel free to stay subscribed; I’ll leave the feeds around and will update them if I start posting new things here.

Woah. Yup there’s been quite a hiatus since I’ve written here. I have a couple dozen excuses though. The big news, of course, is that our daughter Catherine was born July 12th. This was about a month earlier than expected (story to come), so it kind of threw us for a loop.

Put that together with a trip back east in June, visits from our parents and my grandmother, buying bikes for the family, buying a second car (minivan of course), my brother’s wedding in Chicago in August, Peter starting up 1st grade and AYSO soccer, and lots of craziness at work and you get a sadly neglected blog. I still intend to keep writing here when I can, though.

Having a baby again is life-changing as always, though at this point the impact is a little bit more modest than when Peter was born six years ago. With Catherine I feel like we’re mostly on autopilot, which is a good thing because the boys have their own more complex needs.

In fact, for the first couple of months I didn’t see her that much because I was focused on taking care of the boys to give Terri a break. This gave us a chance to go on excursions like the Berkeley Kite Festival and the trip to my brother’s wedding in Chicago, where I took the boys and left Terri and Catherine to have some down time at home.

Things are a bit easier now that she’s three months old. We’ve had a chance to adjust and we’ve taken care of many of the big things, like car shopping that were sucking up a lot of time. Also, she’s awake more often and at that smiley, cooing stage that’s so much fun.

The dates are set. I’ll be visiting Boston with my clan saturday May 29th through Monday June 7th. The primary reason for the trip is for me to walk in my graduation, but of course it’s also a major homecoming for us as well and we’ve been looking forward to it pretty much since we moved.

I have a difficult time describing how it felt to leave my home of 15 years so abruptly. In our last few weeks there, we managed to say our goodbyes to as many friends as we could squeeze in, but after we arrived here I realized that I never got a chance to say goodbye to the city itself. So while I’m definitely excited to see everyone when we visit, I’m also excited to just have the opportunity to walk around and see the sites.

Our schedule is filling up fast. We’ll be sending email to various groups of people, but if you’re reading this and in Boston, feel free to get in touch and we’ll see what we can do about getting together.

Last weekend, we organized our garage in what turned out to be a full-day event. When we moved to this duplex 5 months ago, the garage was initially haphazardly filled with boxes that had come from our attic in Boston. Our house was also filled with boxes at the time, so the garage wasn’t much of a concern. We eventually worked our way though the boxes in the house, but some of those too wound up in the garage until one could barely walk in there, let alone find anything.

Something had to be done, especially since our landlords were putting the house next door on the market this week and weren’t thrilled with the prospect of us filling the driveway with boxes during their open-houses. So, last saturday we pulled everything out of the garage, swept, vacuumed, put our car in for one shining moment, and then packed everything back in, collapsing a bunch of packing material for recycling.

So we can now walk in our garage now and actually access the stuff, but it was only a partial victory. We didn’t actually have time to open most of the boxes figure out what to do with the stuff. Most of them were packed by the movers and are so half filled with packing paper. It’s my hope that over the next year we can make some headway into the pile, donating, recyling, using, or trashing as appropriate.

Last December my papou and namesake, Dr. Nicholas D. Matsakis, passed away at the age of 95. There is a lot to reflect on in his life, but not here. I will say that I’m glad that my papou lived to see me complete my doctorate. It’s difficult to understate how much he valued the education of his children and grandchildren; I can’t help but think he wanted me finished more than I did myself.

It was an emotional ending to a very eventful year: January to September was an intense sprint to finish my thesis and then we immediately transitioned to a new stage in California. In December our family traveled to St. Louis twice, first for the funeral and then again for our annual holiday pilgrimage. When we came back, I took some time off of side projects, including writing here, to focus on my new project at work and really setting in.

Sometime in January it hit me that we really were settled here. We still had boxes in our living room, but I came to the conclusion that our life in California had reached the same level of entropy as our life in Massachusetts. I still don’t have a California driver’s license, but we have made some good progress on the house and the living room is free from boxes. Sometime in the next month we’ll attack the garage.

There is also one more bit of news I’ve been meaning to mention, which is that Terri and I are expecting a daughter in early august! This news hardly deserves to be left for the last paragraph, but with my writing schedule the way it is, it’s better to get it out while I’m writing (even though I think my three readers already know about it).

Two weeks ago, we took Peter to his first chess tournament. He started to learn the basic rules of chess last year, but his interest really picked up when he began to attend the chess club that meets weekly at his school. We were a little apprehensive about going to a tournament, since he’d only been attending the club for a month, but it was a small one close to our house, so we decided to check it out.

We didn’t really know what to expect. Bay Area Chess, the organization that runs the tournament, has an abominable website that is not very helpful to those unsteeped in the world of chess ratings and tournaments. Still, we managed to register him for a “quads” tournament, where he was assigned to a table of four kindergarteners who competed in a round-robin event (three games each). Winners of two or more games got a trophy.

One thing that caught us off guard were the tournament rules, which we only learned once we arrived. The rules are all very simple and sensible, such as “your move ends once you’re removed your hand from the piece” but we didn’t have a chance to practice them with Peter. He was constantly changing his mind about where to put things and even occasionally touched the other player’s pieces, which I can only assume is forbidden. Fortunately, it was a first tournament for most of the other kids at his table and all the parents were chilled out about such minor transgressions.

Peter’s first game ended quickly as he got trapped in an early checkmate. He did very well in his second and third games, both times capturing all of his opponents pieces save the king and a couple of pawns. He hadn’t really practiced his checkmates, though, and so the end game dragged on and on as he chased his opponent’s king around the board. In both games, his opponents eventually got tired and resigned, giving him two wins and a trophy, which was thrilling to him.

Since the match, he’s been very excited about chess and has started studying a “chess for kids” book we picked up a while back. He’s getting better and I’m guessing it won’t be too much longer until he can beat me (since I’m a terrible chess player).

On a recent outing, Terri asked me how long it would be before we felt “settled”. My reply was that I would feel settled when my weekly todo list consisted of the same types of things we would have had to do had we not moved. By that metric, we still have a little way to go before we’re settled. At the very least, we still need to get our California licenses and also buy a washer and dryer for our house.

At the same time, I think we have settled into a routine of sorts: school, work, homework, play, dinner, bedtime, repeat. The arrangement of our house is settled as well, and it just remains to get everything out of the boxes and into the right place, purging unnecessary items as they come up.

We also got a chance to celebrate Halloween, first with a trick or treating event at A9, then with a party at Peter’s school, and finally trick or treating in the neighborhood. The boys had a lot of fun and I got a chance to try out my new camera. I’ve even managed to post picture.