Family

The end of D.C. baseball?

My wife passed her Korean exam with flying colors!  She passed 2/2 in Korean in just 24 weeks (level 2 speaking, level 2 reading).  Congratulations!  She is a language learning star.  It’s extremely rare for someone to reach that level in such a short period of time.  Me, I’m stuck at the 1+ level with over 1 1/2 months left to go in training.  She definitely leveraged her mastery of Chinese and might not have been so lucky in a completely unrelated language like Pashto or Finnish, but it’s still an amazing accomplishment.  Hats off to her.  I can only hope to be at about 2/1 in Korean by February.  Maybe next time I can study German!

Is this the end of professional baseball in Washington, D.C.?  I even went out and bought my new Washington Nationals baseball cap to support bringing back to D.C. after the announcement was made in late November that the Montreal Expos were moving to the Nation’s Capitol.  Last night though the D.C. Council approved funding for a stadium with the condition that about half of it would be paid for by Major League Baseball.  Three months ago D.C. Mayor Anthony Williams had negotiated a deal with MLB to pay for a new stadium for the Nationals, but now MLB will re-open the deal and possibly cancel it unless the D.C. Council agrees to pay for funding.  I would really like to see baseball in D.C.  I love baseball and miss watching the Mariners at Safeco.  Rooting for the Nationals would let me jump on the bandwagon early while they’re still terrible.  I’m personally critical of public funding for ballparks, but in this case if Williams had been given the authority to make a deal to bring the Expos to D.C. the issue of funding should have been sounded out months ago.  If the Council was opposed to public funding then Williams could have changed the terms of the deal during negotiations.  A deal breaker after the team move has been announced is a lousy way of doing business and gives the city a huge black eye.  The 2004 election changed the Council’s composition, but the main instigator Linda Cropp is a holdover from the previous council and has been pulling strings behind the scenes to change the terms of the deal.  Now it looks as if the team will remain the Expos and could move elsewhere.  Oh well, I guess that Nationals’ hat will be a collector item.

I dropped off some food and clothing today for the marine guards and families of Foreign Service nationals at the Jeddah, Saudi Arabia Consulate.  A few of us worked together to put together a care package to send to them in the wake of the recent bombings.  It’s the least we can do sitting here thousands of miles away from the Consulate.  It should arrive before Christmas.

Will the library become obsolete?

Google (of which I own shares) announced today that it will make available online the book collections of five major universities and library systems.  The institutions are Harvard University, Stanford University, the University of Michigan, Oxford University, and the New York Public Library system.  All I can say is, “Wow!”  If they can pull it off that would be a major coup for the upstart technology company.  In recent months following Google’s IPO it has faced a number of challenges from its two largest competitors, Yahoo and Microsoft (MSN).  It has met these challenges well so far.  When MSN announced its new beta search engine, Google announced that it had doubled the number of indexed, searchable web pages on Google.com–twice as many as are available on MSN.  It was the first to release a new Desktop Search Tool ahead of Yahoo and MSN, both of which recently release versions of their own.  Google is taking on Yahoo and Hotmail/MSN head on by offering Gmail, a free E-mail service.  When Google announced it was giving away free 1GB E-mail accounts, both Yahoo and MSN upped storage capacity for all users.  Google is the only one of the three to allow free POP access to E-mail through clients such as Outlook.  Accoona.com is a new Google copycat search engine backed by President Clinton, among others.  It will be the exclusive provider of China Daily content online.  Today’s announcement is akin to Google responding with, “So what?”

Anyway, I digress.  Google’s recent announcement of Google Scholar and the new library initiative may foreshadow its rise to rareified air.  If it can successfully make these collections available online, Google will no doubt be the elite search tool for the next decade.  It will probably not render physical libraries obsolete, but it may do to library usage what E-mail did to snail mail–decrease the volume of usage.  I hope this initiative is successful.  It will substantially increase the value of the World Wide Web by having offline and out-of-print resources available online.  This could be the start of a new paradigm shift.  For years people have wonder when, if ever, books in print would be replaced by digital e-books.  This could provide an inkling of that potential future.

Today when I came home I again saw a murder of crows hovering around our building.  It was a scene out of an Alfred Hitchcock movie.  The sky was dim, well past sunset.  The trees are skeletal, and the landscape was quite murky.  The crows flew about so that they were nearly indistinguishable from bats.  Tonight would have been a perfect setting for Halloween.

I also put together an English-Korean song put to the tune of “The 12 Days of Christmas.”  Once I’m finished I’ll post it here.

Understanding children

Try as I might, sometimes I don’t understand children.  Tonight our toddler really acted up.  He had his mother at wit’s end trying to figure out what he wanted.  He took a late nap and was a bundle of energy the entire evening.  We couldn’t get him to sleep because he was so wound up.  He looked like he wanted mommy to come out and play at 11 o’clock at night.  Daddy just wouldn’t do.  He was really upset, and because he doesn’t say much yet he couldn’t tell us what he wanted.  Mommy was very tired, so she asked daddy to take him out to the living room to play and exhaust the last of his energy.  Our toddler cried and cried and just wanted to go back to mommy.  I thought he was hungry and tried to feed him some food.  He didn’t want it.  I thought he might need some milk but he didn’t want that either.  Finally, I noticed he was looking at his sippy cup.  I finally figured out that he wanted some apple juice mixed with water.  I finally understood what he had been trying to tell us all along.  We just didn’t have a clue.  We were frustrated with him, and he with us.  Once he got his juice he was fine.  He was thirsty after playing so hard and crying all evening.  Juice is what he needed.

You try to be a good parent and listen to your children.  Sometimes you just can’t understand them.  But instead of losing your temper, you just have to try harder to communicate and figure out what they’re trying to tell you.  In a year or so our son will be old enough to put short sentences together and will be able to better tell us what he wants.  He already can convey simple ideas like “car”, “bird,” and “diaper”.  However, he can’t tell us he’s thirsty.  We have to be magicians by figuring it out from his signs and trying to read his mind.  It’s frustrating for us sometimes, but no more so than it is for him.

I never understood why children go through the so-called “Terrible Two’s” (which really start around 1 1/2 years of age).  I now know that it’s because sometimes children at that age have to resort to extreme forms of communication to get their point across–blood-curdling, mind-numbing temper tantrums.  Our son is now in that phase, and I hope for his sake and ours it will pass soon.  In the meantime, I’ll keep working on my listening skills.