famous people I’ve met however briefly

August 19th, 2008

Chris Isaac
Staind
ACDC
Janet Jackson
Marilynn Manson
Dido
Barry Manilow
Hulk Hogan
Edward Norton
Joaquin Phoenix
Mel Gibson
Rene Zellweger
Magic Johnson
Gerald Lavert
Alice Cooper
Brittany Spears
Jaime Lynn Spears (she was 7 or 8 at the time.. lol)
Justin Timberlake
Eve
nsync
Back Street Boys
Winona Rider
DMX
Larry Holmes
Robert Picardo
Tiffani Thiessen
R kelly
Whoopi Goldberg
Morgan Freeman
Michael Douglas
Kathy Bates
Kevin Spacey
Winona Ryder
Benicio Del Toro
Dikembe Mutombo
Larry Holmes
Steve Yzerman

I love Chinese Food!

August 19th, 2008

I love cooking and my earliest memories of television are of Sesame street, Mr. Rogers and Wok with Yan. Indeed a good deal of the cooking I do is Chinese style cooking with a wok. I owe a debt of gratitude to Stephen Yan.

Change

August 17th, 2008

When I was a child I didn’t get sarcasm. I imagine I was teased often because I took things perhaps a little too seriously and was hurt a lot. When I attended high school things all fell into place and I became as sarcastic as the best of them.

My new wit served me well. It has been ingrained into my personality and through the years it has given others and myself many a laugh. The other day however I said something in a joking manner and someone else didn’t take it in the fashion I had intended it. I think through the years I’ve become somewhat numb to the impact and power that words can have.

It was at that time where I had a realization. If I have a tendency that can easily hurt people, I should change that. I will change this. I feel as though this is a natural process of my maturation and growth as a human being, and development as a parent and a teacher.

So specifically what this means is:

I will try to keep from using negative sarcasm in speech (I will still probably use what would be considered by others as harmless).

additionally I’ve decided to try to be a more positive person, to stop complaining so much and to make a determined effort to remove the snarkiness that has crept into my personality over the years.

It has always been a goal of mine to work to love all other human beings I believe that this should be more than a position but it should be reflected in my acts, and attitudes.

Ruling the pool!

August 17th, 2008

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God I love swimming! I love Michael Phelps!

First there was the 400 M free relay… Holy cow that blew me away…

then there was the Fly photo finish! This race was unbelievable!

Then came the Medley Relay….

It was all great!

Dara Torres… Ryan Lochte, Michael, Aaron Peirsol, Cullen Jones, Katie Hoff, and Natalie Coughlin… You guys all are so inspiring.

The swimming portion of the Olympics has just about floored me.

Our new Home!

July 31st, 2008

We are in the process of closing on a town home. I’m really excited about it. The following pictures are from the ad for the place. First are the community it’s in. There is a nice park for Navab to play in, a nice pool, and a pond. The place itself is really nice, large and will fit all of our needs.

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The Dark Knight is simply the best ever

July 16th, 2008

The Dark Knight is simply the best superhero movie ever. No movie of this genre will ever… ever… be able to compare to it.

It all makes sense now.

July 15th, 2008

Babies are emo.

Just… Wow

July 7th, 2008

I usually don’t post other people’s work to my own blog, but this animation just blew me away…

wow!

Today we blew bubbles.

July 3rd, 2008

She’s a Maniac on the floor, and she’s dancing like she’s…

July 2nd, 2008

Mr. Mom

July 2nd, 2008

Okay… be warned… this entry has a lot of boisterous parent talk that you might want to skip or avoid if that type of thing annoys you.

We just had a family moment, but no one was able to capture it on a digital photo, but it was more of a feeling than a visual, but I will paint a visual for you nonetheless.

We had all simultaneously lost consciousness on the couch: Lacey, Navab, and I.. this is something so normal and natural yet it was completely magical almost as if we had been put under a spell. Lacey had been at work all day feeling deprived of the blessing of proximity to her beautiful daughter was holding her closely and had started to fade slowly after noticing Navab was asleep, then once they had both journeyed into dreamland I found myself drifting into oblivion like a feather in its last three teeters before it softly hit the earth.

I was woken by my disturbing phone ring. It is the opening line to Them bones by Alice In Chains. Talk about a rude awakening. When I woke I studied Lacey and Navab together. Navab’s head so naturally pillowed my Lacey’s female stature. I started to think about our current role reversal.

It’s funny how our gender roles are spelled out for us in some ways by our biology and in some ways by our society. Right now as fate would have it ours are sort of reversed in a way. I am at home because I am a teacher and it is summer, and Lacey is at work because her maternity leave is now over. Therefor for now, during the day it is my duty to take on the role of nurturing, caring for and educating our child at this brief moment in her life.

It’s amazing how freaking hard this is… lol.. I am so amazed by caregivers everywhere, yet I enjoy the challenge as it is bringing me closer to my beautiful daughter.

I remember when I worked at the Bahá’í National Center and my co-worker Husayn remarked how it was hard to find time to even do something as simple as brush his teeth when caring for his daughter Amia. At first I thought he was joking, but he insisted that you don’t have any time.

I understand what he meant now. It’s difficult to even go to the bathroom. Your 10 week old child will assume if you are out of her sight for even a moment that she has been abandoned forever. Still, I feel as though I have been giving a unique opportunity to bond with Navab before the school year starts.

I can not tell you how annoyed I get when men are spending time with their own children and they call it babysitting. whenever this happens I usually correct them immediately.

“It’s not babysitting when it’s your own child.”

Still, so many of us inherently think that what I am now doing is unnatural… That a man’s role is relegated to bringing home the proverbial bacon and not much else. God forbid that he hugs, kisses, and shows emotion or shriek… even says I love you… If he watches his child it’s babysitting because it’s considered unusual… almost abnormal… he should be paid for watching his own kid because it’s not the natural order of things….. I hope someday if I ask a young father what he is doing during the weekend the last thing to spring from him will be the word “babysitting”.

I wonder how many people sit there with their baby and with a slightly insane encouraging yet desperate smile look in their eyes say “Da-Da” pointing to themselves for ten minutes straight hoping that that will be the first word their child utters and at two months she will be declared a genius and he gets the bragging rights to tell all of his friends that his daughter said her first “word” at 2 months…

um.. yeah… I’m that guy.. er um.. freakazoid..

I am however very proud to tell you that she is highly intelligent (considerate even) because she already automatically lifts up her bottom when you lay her down to change her.

It’s crazy to be there when My daughter smiles and coos… I get so excited each time a new odd sound comes out of her mouth. I sit with her, walk her around drive her around, take her to the pool, bottle feed her from the stockpile her mom has pumped and I feel like I’m more zen now than ever. Nothing has you in the moment you are living in more than a child that has needs to attend to.

Baby Navab finally got to meet her grandma Julie!

June 20th, 2008

This was their meeting at the airport!

Student animations

June 17th, 2008

Last year (it’s so nice to say that…***sigh***ahhh.. summer!) I had my students create clay animations using playdoh. I set all of them to start uploading to Flickr before we all left for the airport to MI, and it appears that half of them uploaded before the uploading stopped. Well anyways, below you will find one of these student creations, unfortunately it kills off one of our favorite furry little red muppets :*(


More of my student clay-animations are available here.

What’s in a name?

June 17th, 2008

Home?
home.JPG

We are in Michigan now. I’m sitting typing inside a house that I called home for many years. A place where I matured from my teen years to manhood. The place where my sister died. Home, in a sense. I spent so many years bent on escaping this place that its hard to imagine my sorrow at seeing a for sale sign in the front of the house and it’s 40 acres, yet that is what I felt. Still, it may be awhile before it is sold in this market…anyways… on the the reason whe are here.

Navab is getting to meet her paternal grandparents for the first time. It was a very special moment when I first saw my Mom holding my daughter.

Tim has told us a few funny things about how people react to Navab’s name. Obviously it is … different. Trust me, I’m the father, and a lot of times people do look at me with a slight confusion over the name choice. Apparantly when they react confused about the name he just makes up some crazy story about some female conquerer from ages ago ..lol.. he had Lacey and I cracking up.

“What??? you haven’t heard of Navab? She conquered half of the known world…”

We could have given Navab a western name, or something that was more familiar to people, but the name means a great deal of significance… Particularly to Lacey. Navab is named after Bahá’u'lláh’s wife. Lacey feels a strong spiritual kinship to her. Indeed my wife is very devoted to the Bahá’í Faith and spent a lot of time at the grave site of Navváb (the way it is spelled in the Bahá’í writings) in the holy land.

Grave site of Navváb

In fact it was at that very site where she asked God to help guide her to decide whether or not I was the one for her.

Fast Forward two years…

We were at feast one day. Lacey and I had been discussing baby names earlier that day. We had mostly been coming up with silly crazy names like “Zapatos Pantalones Gerard” to ease the stress of the importance of naming our child. After some prayer, I began reflecting on how important and significant Navváb was to Lacey and to our being together. I struck me. During the treasurer’s report. I caught Lacey’s eye and wrote the name Navab on a piece of paper and tilted it toward her for her to see. The look in her eye said it all she knew exactly what I was inferring. She smiled the biggest smile and shook her head yes. This was to be our daughter’s name. I can’t tell you how important it was to Lacey that we name her this once it was mentioned, it just felt very right despite it not being a very Anglo name. It holds the same significance that a Catholic naming her daughter Mary does, or perhaps more. Because of this with all respect to everyone’s creativity in coming up with nicknames that are more Anglo-friendly we hope everyone will honor the meaning of the name has for Lacey (and myself) and call her Navab or just Nava for short, even if it is a little weird at first.

This seems unfair

June 13th, 2008


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I’m annoyed. There is a federally funded program that would forgive up to $5000 of my student loan debt because I’m a teacher in a title I school. Great!… well, not so great for me because. I do not qualify for this because… ahem..

“To qualify for up to $5,000 loan forgiveness under this program, you must not have had an outstanding balance on a FFEL or Direct Loan program loan as of October 1, 1998, or on the date that you obtained a Direct Loan Program loan or a FFEL Program loan after October 1, 1998.”

this is so annoying because my student loans were started in October of 1997, which means if I had started school just one year later I’d have $5000 less in financial debt! Arrrgghhhh!!

why couldn’t they have set it a little earlier… it just doesn’t seem fair!

Update

June 13th, 2008



As Lacey has mentioned Navab is now 2 months old. Wow! It seems like it was yesterday that she was born, and I’ve already been a father for 2 months…. that blows my mind. Every day she seems to be getting larger. She has just recently started smiling more, but we still have to give her a lot of encouragement to smile. It isn’t quite second nature yet. I’m really looking forward to when she expresses a complete emotional palatte.

Last year I worked over the summer as a lifeguard, I managed four pools in the Sugarland area. As of Yesterday I finished a week long lifeguarding instructor certification course. I’m now a certified Lifeguard Instructor. This means I can make people into lifeguards, as well as train people in first aid, CPR, and the use of an AED (defibrillator).


Give me 36 Hours and I can make you into one of these!

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whoohoo! I’m glad, because I really want to be able to do a few things with this.

1. Give my swim team members a source of summer income while giving them the experience and with it the valuable lessons I learned about responsibility by becoming a lifeguard.

2. To be able to instruct other coaches at my school lifeguarding thereby eliminating my need to be at the high school’s pool at all times when it is being used.

I have to figure out the logistics involved still, but I plan on teaching lifguarding at some point in this new school year. As an incentive to get three managers for the swim team, I’m going to give them half of of the class. I’ve already spoken with the school nurse and she said I could teach the students in the nursing center (for the dry land portions like CPR, and first aid and the book materials).

I finished my triathlon on Sunday! That was my major goal: to finish!


Ready to Rock!


Can You Spot Me?
swim


This was probably the most physically tasking thing I’ve done in my life. I feel as though it was much harder than it should have been. When I was younger I would probably have breezed through it like it was another workout, but I experienced a great deal of pain/cramping/suffering thoughout the event.

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I did well in the swim having one of the better times, but I found that the swim is so numerically short compared to the other segments that I should really try to concentrate my efforts on improveing them. During the bike portion, I watched helplessley as everyone I had outswam and more passed me with ease on the course. I just don’t have my “bike legs” yet. I did fair on the run with an 11 minute mile which I think is good after the bike and swim. IThere were a few things that really struck me for my first tri.

1. I am a strong swimmer, but I didn’t think much about how hard it is to swim through other people. I inhaled and swallowed a good deal of water becuase of battling it out through a herd of swimmers. This cramped me up and slowed me down some. Oddly enough I found myself relying a lot on breaststroke during the swim which I hadn’t anticipated at all.
2. My legs felt so bizarre running after biking I did not train in race order at all. I usually biked to the gym then jogged on a treadmill and swam last so in effect I reversed the order. I realize I need to train in the correct order if I am to anticipate how things will work (or not) and feel during the race.
3. My stride was great at first during the run but it shrank as I got tired. I will have to work on keeping my stride going as I tire.
4. My transitions were faster than most peoples and I don’t have to worry about that so much. I think I beat one person just from having faster transitions though, although my overall place in my age group was very low.

I think I’ll be doing a lot of these!

Quick sketches in clay

June 13th, 2008

The other day I had a chance to do some quick building in clay with a model as a reference. I did the following pieces in ten minutes each.



This last one took 25 minutes. I’m hoping I can work on it further, I’m not sure if I have time though.


All grown up!

June 3rd, 2008

Man, It seems like it was just yesterday that I was changing her diapers.. oh.. thats right… it was today.. So Navab wanted to try out riding bikes so we decided to let her.

not bad… and I thought it all was going to end there, but you know the old adage, give them an inch and they’ll take a mile. Next thing you know, she wants to steer the car.

Finally

June 1st, 2008

Smiley Babies make you melt: Navab (we’ve decided on “Nava” for short which means aptly: beautiful), is finally showing a larger palette of human emotion. IE… she is smiling now… On purpose! We have numerous photos to prove this (which will be in circulation soon).

in other news:

“School is out for summer!”

to quote the sage Alice Cooper Meaning, It’s over, done, finished! Whooohoooo!!!!!!!!!!

In other words, I get to prepare for next year’s classes all summer and not get paid for it.. lol.. But.., yeah, if you think you are glad it’s over as a student… I don’t think you can compare it to the relief you get as a teacher!

Here is a sampling of what I will be doing as far as professional development goes:

-Getting Certified as a bus driver (for the swim team)
-Getting Certified as a Journalism teacher (to teach yearbook next year)
-Getting Certified as a Lifeguard Instructordone
-Getting Certified as a Water Safety Instructor
-Taking a class at Rice University to teach pre-AP art doing now!
-Going to a Yearbook workshop in Orlando Florida
-Doing a workshop at the Glassell School of Art (Houston Museum of Fine Arts) for Art Teachersdone

Additionally, I’m looking into possibly taking some sort of ceramics workshop at some point in the summer. I’ll have two kilns and a potters wheel (are you hearing unchained melody?) set up in my art room next year. Most of my work in ceramics has been figurative (that’s really my biggest love), so I really want to get good at pottery so I can teach it well. I have very little experience with pottery, and I must change that if I am going to be helping students to try it. A lot of teachers would completely shy away from a subject they do not have a lot of experience with. “This is not my forte,” they would think avoiding it altogether.

One thing I took away from my experience working for Billy Roberts at the BNC was that I can really learn and do anything if I desire so, and I am no longer afraid to try. Billy really pushed me. As my boss, he would ask me to do or create something that to my knowledge at the time was completely beyond my capabilities. Then sure enough, time after time I’d pull through and perform the task well. I’m a very competent problem solver, but those experiences in particular have taught me not to fear trying do do something new and difficult in my field of work.

Much of my projects this past year were the result of this sort of thinking. I had my classes make clay-animations, wire sculpture, and other things that many art teachers would have avoided merely because it would be difficult to attempt as a teacher. I don’t ever want to short change my students merely to make things easier for myself!

My philosophy for teaching art is that I should as an art teacher be able to give students a diverse and full experience as far as trying out different materials mediums and techniques as possible. I also am very adamant in being able to not only have them “play” with the mediums but to be able to really teach them to do well if they want that. I think so many art teachers just go through the motions, and give the students the materials and say “play” but don’t really teach them and help them to improve. I think that is sad. My vision has always included that I would learn and do whatever it takes to give my students the fullest experience as artists possible.

It really bothered me when I first came to my school and they did not have a kiln or the capability to have any ceramics (read clay) work in their art classes. A kiln is a ceramic oven that bakes the clay to a hardness. They can reach thousands of degrees, and are quite necessary for a ceramic program. To me ceramics are a staple of art, and a necessary part of any successful high school art program. Sure, it’s hard as a teacher to pull it off (clay is very labor intensive), but teaching is not about the teacher. I spoke to the principal right away and she was very supportive. She had my school purchased two kilns. Then there was the question “where are we going to put the kilns”. I am switching rooms over the summer, to another art room. The new room has an office. At first I was really excited about having an office, but as I discovered the need to have a place for the kilns I proposed the idea to the principal that we convert that office into a kiln room. It made much more sense to me. I’m very grateful that my principal is very much into the arts. She is very supportive.

Actually, I’m really looking forward to the entire summer because I will be not only busy and productive but I will have some R&R time. I’m ultra excited about July particularly because I’m going to be spending a lot of time with my daughter bonding because that is when Lacey goes back to work so it will be just me and Navab. I’m hoping to get back to animating this summer. I’m going to do some small animation exercises in June to get my chops up, and I’d like to do a short animation in July-August. Hopefully I’ll have the time to create something, otherwise I’m going to stop calling myself an animator.

Training for a triathlon kicks your ass When you run, swim, and bike numerous miles in one day you tend to be able to sleep really soundly. I’m usually a very light sleeper waking up up to 5 times in one night even without a baby around. My Mother would keep me up till midnight as a child because I had a hard time sleeping more than 6 hours in a row. As an adult I still experience this phenomenon. Additionally working midnights for numerous years as a hotel night manager conditioned me to be able to be up all night at the drop of a hat, but This training I’m doing definitely helps me sleep longer.

My Triathlon is in one week. I’m glad I have a few bikes, because I’ve been in and out of the bike shop tweaking my roadbike, and I still have to train obviously. Last night I ran 3 miles on the bayou then jumped on my hybrid and rode a few miles to the 24 Hour Fitness where I swam about a half mile. The running part was the most difficult for a few reasons. Most of my running training has been inside (read: air conditioning) on a treadmill, and I decided that if I’m going to race outside (in Texas) I have to start training outside (in Texas), plus a treadmill will work your muscles but its not exactly the same thing as running on pavement. Sure enough, it was brutal yesterday, also I have been biking first before running before yesterday so it was hard to start out with the run. So… yeah, this will be an intese week… Whats funny was yesterday when I rode the bike to the gym I decided to take a quick diversion over to JCPenney to purchase some much needed new running shoes. Buying a size 14 shoe is not easy, you have about 1/10 the selection to work with (ie., whatever they have in your size), but I got a pair of satisfactory shoes and made it off to the gym to swim.

One thing that has made training much easier has been MP3’s. First of all, try swimming an hour straight without stopping. It can get a little mind numbing. I have an underwater mp3 player that I use. It’s great for keeping me from going out of my mind with boredom. I have a playlist I use with really pump you up energizing music that keeps me going as well.

For the running and biking portions I have my Blackberry. Yep… My good friend Greg got me a used Blackberry, and it’s been a great help. After a few days of trying to figure out how to update the operating system on it, I was able to use a 4 GB micro SD card with it. This allows me to use it very effectively not only as a phone but as a sort of IPOD.

I’ve ripped the audio version of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows to MP3, and put it on the device. I’m half-way through this book. I’m going to have to get a lot of other stuff on Audio. I feel so productive!

calm your screaming baby dot com

May 24th, 2008

It’s funny.. Your baby cries and cries and you find out by trial and error that she doesn’t like to be held sitting down as much as being carried around while you are walking. You can’t get her to stop crying by the normal methods then at random you take her outside and find that she prefers it to the inside and often calms instantly. Sometimes she is having such a fit that the outside Texas air and sun do nothing and so you begin walking her around your neighborhood past flowering trees and bushes and things thinking maybe something will calm her. Then magic happens she calms when you walk by an outside air conditioning unit. Ahhh… “white noise” the ac unit outside of our place seems to be the ticket whenever she isn’t able to be calmed down. It is a little annoying though when it’s 3 am and I’m in my underwear to take her outside to the AC unit to get her to relax. I’ve also had some (limited) luck with the blow dryer and dryer (laundry). Today I figured I’d type white noise baby mp3 into google and see what happened. Sure enough, there were a lot of people who had recorded their vacuum with a computer mic and were now selling the file for $3.88… lol.. how lame! But there was one site that offered for free multiple white noise sounds such as water running, and various hair dryer and vacuum sounds for free! Navab is currently passed out (for the second time today) due to these sounds to my right as I now have the free hands to actually type this.

So anyways… here is the site:

http://www.calm-your-screaming-baby.com/white-noise.html