The Baby Dragon

Kaylee is going to have a little brother or sister. We are very happy to announce that a new Robleto is expected in late May. This one will be born, by the Chinese zodiac, in the Year of the Dragon (just like their dad).

We do not yet have something to call this new bundle of joy. If you have any clever names to call the yet-unnamed yet-unborn child, please share. (Special consideration for dragon-themed names).

Everyone seems to have that problem of a few sock casualties each time the laundry is done. Despite numerous hints from Heloise we can’t seem to develop a way to solve the issue. Until I discovered Greg’s method, which answered and raised a lot of questions.

Step 1: Don’t do laundry, ever.

If Step 1 is not an option, try Step 2.

Step 2: When finished with laundry, gather all clean, loose socks without mates and immediately place them back in dirty laundry hamper to see if they will find mates magically. Repeat cycle until socks are all paired up by magic. Doing this 6 or 7 times may produce more missing socks, as the socks without mates from the next batch will compile onto the current batches. Also, DO NOT try to look in drawers for any lost socks that wife may have come across and stored away for you. DO take wife’s socks and claim them as your own, even though they do not fit feet.

If Step 2, surprisingly, does not work, proceed to Step 3.

Step 3: At this point, you should be noticing a difference in your laundry. Perhaps more socks are now going missing than ever now if you have been diligently adhering to Step 2. The final step is to take all the socks that have now lived in laundry purgatory for 6 or 7 washes and throw them in the trash. That’s right! Throw them away! This includes wife’s socks that you think are yours that may have mates appropriately living in wife’s drawers. Perfectly good socks that have been tortured by living in the laundry hamper have no use without their pairs. Again, do NOT check in drawers for possible large pile of single socks that will now forever be mateless.

This is the methodology I had accidentally stumbled upon one day doing laundry. While I can’t quite figure out a system myself, I didn’t think Greg’s running system was helping. Any suggestions of solutions from the blogosphere?

I was at The White House this week for their holiday Tweetup.

My friend and social media expert at The Motley Fool, Katrina, showed me an page on the White House site where you could submit your request for an invitation to a day of tweeting at The White House. There was a series of speakers in the morning who’s roles covered a huge spectrum from the National Economic Counsel advisor discussing policy topics such as jobs to the official White House Pastry Chef revealing how long it takes to make the official White House gingerbread house (3 months). It was a full morning and really interesting to get all these perspectives of people who work so close to the President and his staff. (It made me want to re-watch The West Wing).

Only one real hiccup with the White House Tweetup, was that the conference room was in the basement of the EEOB next to the White House and there was no Wi-Fi signal in there so no one was able to get onto Twitter. The irony was not lost on the positive and upbeat organizers of the event from the White House Digital Strategy department.

After a lunch (on our own), we were able to tour the White House. it was the same self-guided tour that Selena and I had taken a few years ago, only this time, being that they had just decorated everything for Christmas they welcomed taking photos.

I got whole lot of pictures, including finding the hidden Bo (the dog) that was hand-crafted each room – one was paper-mache, one was made of candies, one was made of buttons – that are displayed below and in the Flickr set here.

The morning briefings

The first of 73 White House Christmas Trees

George says "Check out this tree."

Decorative ornaments at the White House

Greg in the Blue Room of the White House

Bo made of Buttons

Lincoln thinking about Christmas

The White House Gingerbread replica

A choir in the lobby singing carols

Greg at the White House

Kaylee had such a great time this Halloween.

It started on Friday when she, dressed as a ladybug, crashed the local day-care’s Halloween parade. She goes to an in-house daycare with only three other kids, so they don’t really do a lot to do for Halloween. When our neighbors who go to the bigger facility invited us to join them for their daycare’s Halloween celebration, we decided to go. She only participated in the parade long enough for us to snap a few pics then went and played on the playground and in the big sandbox.

Kaylee as a Ladybug

Saturday, our good friend Catherine’s sister had a party for her one-year old daughter in Germantown. There was a huge inflatable bouncy-house. So while the snow was falling outside, the kids, all in costume (again ladybug for Kaylee) ate cake, played with balloons and bounced around in the oversize moonbounce.

On Monday, Selena brought Kaylee into my office where we do up Halloween right. I had already won the best pod decorating in my social media pod because we did some thematic decor (bats and such) and then set up a Tweeting photo booth, where we had co-workers sit beside a white board shaped like a thought bubble. They selected at random a pre-set tweet from one bucket which we wrote on the board and then a random emotion from another bucket which they had to display, then we snapped the picture and you say things like someone emoting sad with the thought-bubble saying “Me want cookie” or emoting angry with the words “I could really use a McRib right now”. It was a lot of fun.

Tweeting Photo Booth

And we even got one of Kaylee when she arrived in her now chicken costume saying “Why did I cross that road?”  Kaylee then went on to trick-or-treat througout the office and I was beaming with pride getting to take her around.  She didn’t really get what was going on, but quickly picked up the mechanics of picking something from that big bowl and putting it into her bucket on her arm. She enjoyed doing that.

Why did I cross the road?

She did have one minor meltdown at the office, when someone gave another little kid a piece of candy, and Kaylee decided it was also okay to reach into another kid’s bucket and pull out a piece of candy and put it in her own. I interceded and she didn’t take it well, belting her rebellious discontent across the whole office.

Following our quick exit, we headed home in time for Selena to make some caramel apples which she stayed on the porch and gave to our adult neighbors that we knew when their kids came up for candy. While Selena held down the fort at home, I took Kaylee around the block. She really was in the zone now, running from house to house, and running up to the door and through the door and into their living rooms (she didn’t really get that this was a front-porch transaction). We took her up and down our whole street and then drove her over to her grandparents to ring their bell as well. She just had a blast.

Here’s a picture of her at the end of the night, still giggling and laughing at the fun night.

Kaylee at the end of Halloween night

One of my friends I’ve known the longest is Michelle. She was my closest friend in high school and although since that time, our paths have seldom paralleled, we’ve continued to make an effort to stay connected. She and her family moved out to the suburbs of San Francisco about a year ago, so I was excited to get the opportunity to visit with them, and we planned the final weekend we would stay at their place.

Unfortunately, the kids were visiting their grandparents on the East Coast and Michelle’s husband, Mario, flew out to collect them the same weekend we were visiting. We did get a nice dinner with Mario and Michelle earlier in the week in Fisherman’s Wharf, but for the weekend in San Ramon, it was two days of the Robletos visiting with just Michelle.

They live in an amazingly beautiful house, only a few years old, in a town that wasn’t much older. Everything was new and fresh and well planned with ornate outdoor shopping centers that had water running through them where you could feed the ducks to parks with water-features for the kids to play in as part of the playground. In fact, water-features were sort of everywhere, even on sides of roads and at entrances to developments. We asked Michelle and she said “There was one builder for this whole area… and he liked water features.” Amazing. In my conversations with Luke W earlier in the week we were lamenting the futility of trying to maintain a holistic design for an entire website, and here was a sense of aesthetic continuity, at a much grander scale, it was an entire town. Incredible.

Speaking of water-features, Michelle’s home had a water-feature too, a huge pool in the back with a hot tub attached. We gave Kaylee her first soak in a hot tub (with the temperature significantly reduced) and also took advantage ourselves after Kaylee was asleep. It was so relaxing, and I’m sure the few bottles of wine didn’t hurt the cause.

Speaking of wine, living in San Ramon, about an hour south of Napa, they were in close proximity to some great wineries. We toured a winery called Wente and were educated in the art of wine-making and wine-sampling. We did a lot of homework on that subject as well while we were there after Kaylee went to sleep.

We also visited with Michelle’s parents, who moved shortly after Michelle and Mario to the same area, to stay close to their grandchildren (hint, hint, Mom and Dad). They have a beautiful house too. Unlike their kids who have a yard big enough for a pool and hot tub, they have the more common home for that area where you can stand in the yard and with one arm touch the house and another touch the fence. Yards are that small! The house takes up the bulk of the land. And that doesn’t mean the houses are McMansion size. They are comfortably sized, but could easily get overwhelmed by a collector of things. Minimalism is the key. I was inspired seeing those beautiful homes so well put together. I was determined to come back and do a great purge. I feel our home could be that nice, if we didn’t have so much stuff in it.

We left from the weekend with Michelle for the airport, a red-eye flight home culminating two weeks in California. Over that time we’ve been leaving destinations every few days, but it was really hard to leave San Ramon. I realized later it was because after seizing every minute in Los Angeles and San Francisco to see the sights and experience the city, we slowed down in San Ramon. We relaxed, drank some wine, lounged around, soaked in the hot tub and shared stories and laughs with a close friend. Selena said “staying with Michelle was like staying at a resort and spa for the weekend.” Yes! It very much felt that way.

Michelle and Greg

Kaylee and her dad feeding the ducks

Kaylee in the water feature in the park in San Ramon

The whole family in the water feature in the park in San Ramon