So, what happened in 2004?
Well, none of the important things
changed: same wife, same kids, same job,
same house.
Laura got a new job, working in the Budget
Office of EPA.
Arvind is four. He started the year still liking Thomas the
Tank Engine, but then he got into super heroes: Superman, Batman and the
Superfriends, watching the tv cartoons and reading the comic books, hitting up
his parents and grandparents for ever more elaborate super hero costumes and
pyjamas, refusing to wear anything but a super hero costume (accessorized with
the appropriate cape, natch) to school or to bed. As soon as we had gotten up to speed on the
lingo and had acquired sufficient super hero clothing so that we were not doing
laundry every night, he, of course, moved on, leaving us the state of uncool
parenthood where I expect we will be spending most of the next twenty
years. Now he is into PowerRangers and
Scooby Doo. I’m sure by Spring it will
be something else.
Ravi is 18 months. He has picked up all the human-type skills,
like walking, talking, eating solid food and watching tv. He thinks Arvind is the coolest – follows him
around and imitates whatever Arvind does.
Ravi now enjoys Thomas the Tank Engine, so hopefully we’ll get another
round out of the super hero stuff as well.
The house has a new coat of paint, new
steps, and additional flowers/bushes/ground cover.
We traveled quite a bit this year, mostly
short visits. We went to Rhode Island in
February, to Manhattan for Padma and Salman’s wedding in March, to Lancaster
County, PA to see Thomas the Tank Engine and Amish people in April, to New
Jersey for JJ’s 60th birthday party in May, to Chicago in June, to
West Virginia and Virginia in July to see steam engines and
Harini/Umesh/Avinash, to Rhode Island in September and to St. John, USVI for a
week of sunny relaxation in December.
I was reading Greek history early in the
year: Herodotus, Thucydides, Arrian and Plutarch’s Life of Alexander. I had moved on to Roman history (Gallic Wars)
in Latin when I started biking to work which severely cut into my reading
opportunities. I read some Jane Smiley,
a Paul Bowles novel, a book of I.B. Singer stories, and I finished Derek
Walcott’s Selected Poems while we were in St. John. No writing except for some song lyrics.
I got a 20GB mp3 player this year, so I
have spent a lot of time moving my music collection onto the device. The CD’s went fairly quickly, but the analog
2/3’s of the collection takes almost twice real time to transfer, so I have
many hundreds of hours left in that project.
It is nice to listen to things I haven’t heard in many years, but I am
finding that the audio fidelity has declined significantly in the interim. No original music this year, although I am
hoping to put something together in 2005.
So what else. I rode my bike 10 miles to work most of the
summer/fall, which was great. The route
took me along the C&O Canal, the Potomac river, the monuments and the mall,
and my mp3 player came in handy. I
played soccer most of the year (twice a week in the fall). No tennis.
I watch a lot of European soccer on Fox Sports World and RAI.
The Red Sox won the World Series. I thought I would never see it. I cried, I called my father. For my birthday, Arvind got me the DVD. I still haven’t watched it.