News and Views From my kids accomplishments, to my heretical perspective of the world

Derek graduated from high school yesterday, so we no longer have any “kids” in the family. We do have a couple of young men in college, so that’s not a bad trade.

Derek graduated 5th in a class of about 500. He was President of the National Honor Society his senior year and Saxophone Section Leader for two years. In his junior year he had the highest score in the school on the State Math Test (including seniors), and was exempt from taking it his senior year. He was active in the Marching Band and several sports (Track, Soccer, and Football), as well as several clubs.

Derek applied to only a couple of colleges, and is happy to be going to the University of Arizona in Tucson next fall. He hasn’t decided what he will major in, but officially it’s “Mathematics”. He is also interested in Medicine, and next month will probably be interested in something else too. He has a full-ride scholarship, covering all his tuition and more. He is in the “Honors College”.

Big brother Devon is spending the summer at his college (Harvey Mudd, in Southern Cal). He has a job doing research. Next year is his senior year, so it’s almost time to think about graduate school applications and the GRE exam.

I’m not proud of these guys, or anything… Don’t go reading between the lines! 🙂

They caught the man who killed our friend. See here.
The wounded mother and father have been discharged from the hospital, and are staying at an undisclosed location.

It feels good that he is not running around, and will have to pay for his insanity, but “feels good” is only relative, since our friend, Zhao Jian-Yun, will not be coming back.

These 3 were all friends of Gisele (and me). They went to Gisele’s church.

We gave them our love seat when we didn’t need it anymore. I was at their house more than once to help with computer problems.

They were such nice people. Every time we would visit they would try to feed us, and send us off with home-made food. They took us out to eat a couple of times, as we did them.

The 30-ish daughter was so friendly and cheerful, always smiling. She had got involved with the man when she was much younger — I don’t remember the details. He gambled all his money away, then stole from her to gamble more. He used to beat her. He was obviously crazy. I helped her understand some of her divorce and court hearing papers a few months ago. She was studying nursing at MCC, struggling as a waitress to support her parents and child while going to school.

She has a 10-12 year-old son (not the child in the picture; her parents were baby-sitting that child). I haven’t heard where he is but assume somebody from the church is taking care of him. Hopefully he was at school when all this happened.

Last we heard the parent’s injuries were not expected to be fatal.

We’ve got a little travel planned for the summer.

Gisele is going to France for a tour of castles (“Chateaus”) the first couple of weeks of June.

Then the first three weeks of July the whole family is going to Peru. We’re friends with a family who came from there and they have organized a tour of about 10 friends. We’ll see Lima, Cuzco, and Machu Pichu for the high points, with lots of little places in between. There may be a side trip to see the “Nasca Lines” from the air, but it might not fit in conveniently.

Otherwise, it will be a quick trip to bring Devon home this weekend, and a quick trip to take him back next weekend. He has a summer job at the college he attends (Harvey Mudd). Derek will be going down to Tucson for a two-day orientation at the U of A in preparation for his enrolling there in the fall. He was accepted into the Honor’s College.

Maybe a trip or two to the mountains to escape the heat.

And that’s a brief preview of our summer travel plans!

Derek is doing the long jump, high jump and triple jump this year in track.

Last week there was an invitational track meet with 8 schools participating. Derek won the long jump event with the longest individual jump of 19′ 7″. Not bad to be the best out of 8 schools!

There is an asterisk, however. This was a “minor” invitational, and a couple of the more competitive schools were saving their best for the major invitationals. Nevertheless, it was still an excellent performance.

I’m flying out to California tomorrow (Thursday) morning to see if I can fix Devon’s computer. My return is scheduled for Friday evening, but if things go very well I may try to come back earlier. We’ll see!

We’re driving Devon and Keri back to California and college tomorrow (Sunday, 1/15). Over and back in one day again, as usual.

Our thoughts are with our “other” Carrie, Brian’s wife, as she goes through eye surgery.

Derek has been participating in a class at school that competed in the “We The People” competition. The students represent their schools, and are judged on their understanding of the constitution and US government.

A few weeks ago Derek’s school (Marcos De Niza) won their district, and yesterday they went to the state competition.

The judges were state legislators, state judges, lawyers and educators. They were very complimentary towards the students from Marcos, especially their understanding of the issues, their quoting of relevant Supreme Court decisions, and their poise. Derek was singled out with a compliment on a comment he had made.

We really felt that they had a good chance to win, in which case they would have gone on to the national competition in Washington DC, but alas they “only” made third place.

Their high hopes were dashed, but I think in retrospect they will look back with pride at what they did achieve. Third place in the state is very good indeed. I know we’re very proud of Derek, how hard he studied and how well he performed.

Boy, I thought 30 minutes would be enough buffer to catch the whole game, but it looks like I needed another 30. Tivo stopped recording with 5 or 6 seconds left in the first overtime.

Double overtime, 1-point win! They don’t get much more exciting than that! Nice comeback, too.

We are currently at the top of the PAC-10 at 2-0, though by the end of the day we will probably be tied with UCLA and others.

Mom and Donna came over for Christmas, as well as Bill and Esther Wright. Donna made home-made cinnamon rolls — they were delicious!

In the late afternoon, Kelvin and Grace Inouye came over with their daughter, Keri (Devon’s girlfriend) for dessert and a couple of rounds of Taboo. I ate too much, but it was good, especially Keri’s home-made strawberry cheesecake.

I got new speakers for my computer — my old ones broke a few weeks ago. Gisele got a new computer, 2.8 GHz dual processor system. Now she can’t complain that she always gets stuck with the slowest computer in the family!

We gave Mom her Tivo, bought by (in alphabetical order): Betty, Daryl, Dianna, Don, Donna, and Richard. It will be a couple of days before we get it hooked up at her house.