2009-2014 : The Boys Arrive

2009

At the end of April, 2009, I turned 36 years old. This was my third tripple-ox year, though I don't remember feeling especially powerful or capable.

I don't remember the exact timeline, but over the years, I was able to sell bits and pieces of Sitecore USA, which was eventually responsible for about half of the software sales. In the end, Sitecore (Denmark) bought Sitecore USA and I cashed out completely, I believe around the time that the company was valued at a billion dollars. I think I probably pulled about $5-6M total equity out of Sitecore, but I also had a salary around $200K at the end and a bonus of at least $450K one year. Sometimes it's better for a corporation to distribute earnings rather than pay corporate taxes. At the time of that bonus and one of the bigger equity transactions, I was moving from Albany back to Portland and my partners had advised me to stop in Nevada for a few months, which saved me several hundred thousand dollars in state income taxes. Suck it, California; you and your open source/Java spirit didn't do much to enable our success.

We got pregnant again in 2009. Susan resisted, but there was no way that I was going to try to raise a child in a condo overlooking a freeway. When we had moved into the place, we had two of those Ionic Breeze devices from Sharper Image. When I cleaned the blades in the units, I was disgusted by the black grime that I washed off. There was also evidence of pollution around the windows themselves.

I rented a house in Albany, which for me was within easy walking distance from our condo. We were too cheap to rent a moving truck. We used the Honda for smaller things, and some of the larger things I literally walked over on a hand truck or something. I wrot that we moved things, but it was actually me that did all the work. One could argue that this was because Susan was pregnant, but the reality was that she didn't want to move. I think that she had convinved me to buy that condo knowing that she would want to raise children there.

One of the nice things about the Gateview condiminium complex was a facility called Albany Hill Realty that had an office on the property. A really friendly and helpful guy named Alan there helped us find a couple with a child that rented the condo from us.

The house that we rented and the landlord from whom we rented it from were both great. There were four bedrooms when we really could have gotten away with two. There was a large living room that I filled with house plants. The house was walking distance to the main streeat through Albany, which had bookstores, restaurants, and so forth. I bought the entire Tintin collection available. I also started buying Legos for their future.

John did not arrive when expected. About two weeks later it was time to induce labor. At this time, Susan invited her parents to visit. Apparenly she thought that they would be of assistance, but in general they're just a burden.

Susan and I went to the Kaiser hospital in Walnut Creek for the delivery. Having studied child development, I was aware of numerous risks to the health of both the child and the mother. I would have avoided drugs, but I think Susan had an epidural.

Everything was proceeding normally. The doctors provided some kind of timeline, and after several hours in the hospital, I went out to get some sandwiches.

When I returned, I was told that there was an emergency and rushed into an operating room. The baby's oxygen level had dropped and Susan was having an emergency Caesarean. There was a sheet between me and her lower half, but I still saw a great deal of blood and tissue. Eventually, the doctors exracted - and unfolded - John. He was huge, 23 inches long, with a heard at least half an inch larger than the doctors had estimated - probably far to big to fit through Susan.

Afterwards, I returned to the house, where Susan's parents immediately started discussing whether my son John would attend Harvard or Yale. I was disgusted; I was concerned first whether he would be healthy and second whether he would be happy.

Within a day or two, I brought John and Susan home from the hospital. I didn't like spending time with Susan's parents, especially alone. One night, I walked to a bar, which is unlike me. I met a couple of black guys. I got into a very deep conversation with one of them, as each of us seemed to have a sense of empathy - the ability to feel other people's emotions and possibly to even help to alleviate them. I have a theory that some people who have experienced significant childhood tramua may develop this ability, but it can be draining for them.

On the walk home, I had something like an out of body experience, as if my consciousness was floating down the street where my head was, but not part of my body.

When I got home, the house was ridiculously hot and John was screaming. Susan and her parents are always cold, so they had turned the heat up to almost 80 degrees farenheit. I immediately took John outside so that he could cool down, and then took him to the basement. I was angry that these people seemed to have no idea how to care for a child and would ignore an infant screaming because they apparently didn't know what to do. I almost yelled at Susan's mother: 68 degrees, which I had heard is the optimal temperature for brain development. Of course, the child needs clothing and waddling, and the actual optimal temperature likely varies by individual, but infants are unable to regulate their own temperatures.

Again, while I did not feel like an expert, I had studied child development for two years. I undestood the importance of breastfeeding both for infant health and for mother-infant bonding. Susan didn't seem to take breastfeeding very seriously, especially at first. I think she actually didn't like it, and almost immediately started using formula, apparently not being aware of or concerned about the disadvantages. John had trouble latching, and Susan didn't seem to produce very much milk. We worked with a lactation nurse, but John never got enough breast milk, especially for such a large time.

We tried to follow the hospital's instructions in terms of quantity of formula, but John often cried, clearly wanting more. I am ashamed to admit that at first we probably didn't give him enough food, thinking that we wre supposed to stick to some kind of prescribed feeding regimen. I would say that most infants that are not at some specific risk of overeating should probably eat as much as they want.

Shortly after the delivery, I organized a surprise party for Susan. I even connected with and invited a friend of hers from college, which eventually led to them being friends again, at least temporarily. That friend was on the east coast and could not attend, but sent a fabric gift for John that he slept with almost every night for approximately the next fourteen years.

I did not invite my parents to visit, nor to the party. Actually, I invited my dad, but I really didn't want my step-mother there. For one thing, I really don't like her. For another, she's a smoker, and I didn't want her or my brother smelling like tobacco anywhere near my child. This really upset my father, who chose not to come alone. In some ways, I feel like his relationship with me deteriorated even further from there. I have never understood how he could care so much about that woman with whom I had so many issues, so much more than he seems to care about his own children.

Part of the surprise was that we started the day by going to the city (how many people in the bay area call San Francisco) for dim sum, which is Chinese for something like "heart's delight". This allowed some other friends to organize the house, where I had created a slideshow of things like the baby shower and other family memories.

My maternal grandfather, Ben Gardiner, was a big star At Susan's party. He loved telling people that he was a model and an actor and had been in the US military in Europe during World War II.

2010

Kaiser had a good maternity policy, but Sitecore didn't offer any relevent benefits at all, and Susan wanted to go back to work. Bjarne or his wife recommended a woman that did childcare, I think from the Hmong commuity of Laos, or somewhere in southeast asia. I often worked from home. One day when she returned from the park, John had suffered a significant facial injury. I didn't understand how this was possible, as he couldn't crawl yet and certainly couldn't walk - what could she have done? I assume that she was talking with friends or on the phone, ignoring his care, and he somehow escaped from the stroller and fell on his face.

Shortly afterwards, John we put John in a daycare nearby. I think the owner may have been Mexican. I had a good feeling about the place, and John stayed there until we left Albany.

I remember at one point while we were in that house Susan asked me about whether I was happy to have a child. I said that I could still go either way, which really upset her.

Relatively early, I started to get some bad feelings about John's social development. I can't remember any specific incidents, but he did not seem to develop emotional bonds the way I had expected and seen with other children. He seemed to lack compassion for others. I raised these concerns with Susan, but she discounted them completely.

It was only 2010, before smartphones and tablets were everywhere. I think we did a good job of keeping John of screens including the television, but we did buy some stupid "Your Baby Can Read" DVDs and let him watch those, which I think was a total waste. I actually think that program was a fraud; babies can't speak, let alone read, and expecting them to memorize even a single character seems developmentally inappropriate. This was a sign that Susan's tigermom Chinese focus on education was overpowering what I now consider to be my better sense in raising children: they shouldn't be around technology, they need opportunity for stimulation but don't need instruction and constant stimulation, they need to get bored and follow their own interests, and they absolutely don't need technology.

Coming from China's one child policy, Susan had been an only child, and didn't seem to understand the value of siblings. Coming from a large family, I could not picture myself raising a single child, and we agreed to have another.

Paul, who was the Chief Marketing Officer at Sitecore USA, convinced management that the company would have a trade show. This required that I give a presentation. I titled it "Ten Things You Didn't Know That You Could Do With Sitecore", but it was more like twenty things. I had about an hour, which required me to give an absolute onslaught of words, and I think some number of live demonstrations of custom code that I had developed.

I practiced in the living room, surrounded by houseplants. The event was in Boston. As it happened, a volcano named Eyjafjallajökull in Iceland errupted, which interfered with air traffic from Europe. While I was in the hote, Lars, who was one of the founders of Sitecore in Denmark and basically my technical counterpart there, called me and told me that I would have to give the keynote speach, which absolutely terrified me. Luckily, he was just kidding.

Michael, who was the CEO for the Danish company, had the penthouse at the hotel, and I went to a party there. Sitecore was certainly doing well.

I could be significantly off, but when it was time for me to speak, I feel like there were at least 300 people in the crowd. I think I made one major mistake, which was to ask people to interrupt me with questions, but as soon as someone did, I probably rudely contradicted myself by asking them to hold their questions until the end.

I think by this time, many of the people in the audience alredy knew who I was from my work blogging and helping people on the Sitecore developer forums. I had started on the forums in 2004 and the first blog post I can find is from 2008, so I had likely helped dozens or possibly hundreds of people in the audience.

The crowd seemed to really like my speach. I don't know if I ever answered the original question, but someone asked me how I had done it so well. I replied that I had practiced in my living room full of plants, and then just pretended that they were all plants. As the audience likely consisted of somewhat shy developers, this joke went over relatively well.

At the conference, a woman approached me and Bjarne and offered to write a book about Sitecore. One of our competitors, Ektron (where sales lead Jason had worked before joining Sitecore), had release a book. This seemed like more of a marketing opportunity than something that would actually help developers. She had already published one book with WROX, which would simplify the process of developing a relationship with the publisher.

2011

In 2011, we got pregnant with Ben. During the entire pregnancy, I felt like I could never get Susan to drink enough water. Ben was born in August of 2011 at a Kaiser hospital in Oakland with no issues, I believe by Caesarean (best avoided in general, but if you've had to have one, the subsequent births should probably go the same way).

I have a sequence of photos of John when he saw Ben for the first time. In a matter of seconds, they go from a sort of excitement to a sort of disappointment. Maybe he realized that Ben would take much of his mother's attention, or maybe that his younger brother was a baby, not another child his age.

Probably at least halfway through 2011, it started to feel like the author might not complete the Sitecore book on schedule. I saw some early drafts and was disappointed.

I also decided that I didn't want to raise my boys in the Bay Area. There was simply too much concrete, not enough greenery, and too much time spent driving. Plus, it was ridiculously expensive for the quality of life. I am not sure how I did it, but I convinced Susan to move back to Portland.

Susan worked with our friend Karen in Portland to find a house. Kare was the wife of a guy named Rolf that I had met while teaching a class in Portland during my early days working at Sitecore. He had eventually worked for Sitecore, but that didn't last long. Rolf was not a typical American guy, which generally interests me, but he was also kindof creepy.

Especially relative to what we could afford in the bay area, the house on the east side of Portland was amazing. It was in a great area, but it was in a dense neigbhorood, which never appealed to me. It had been built in 2004, which was relatively new construction compared to almost anything I had lived in recently. There was a master bedroom with a great bathroom, two small bedrooms, and a huge laundry room on the upper floor, two living rooms and an office on the main floor, a finished basement with windows that had a big media room, a smaller office, and a large closet with a wine rack, as well as a tandem garage (big enough for two cars parked end to end).

When Eric, a Danish guy who was one of the founding partners at Sitecore USA (and the father of the CEO in Denmark, Michael) found out that I was moving, he suggested that I spend some time in a state with no income taxes, as Sitecore was going to have some kind of equity event. I rented a house

Despite the fact that it saved us hundreds of thousands of dollars, gave ys a great experience living near Lake Tahoe, and resulted in a much better home and lifestyle in Portland, Susan eventually strongly resisted the move. The city has a lot of cool things, but it's a better place to visit than to live, and by now it was clear that we would never live in San Francisco. I guess she thought the bay area was a better place for her, for educating the boys, for what people thought of her stats, and things like that.

This meant that I had to do all the work, both for getting to Incline Village and for getting from there to Portland. At the same time, Bjarne and I decided that I should write the book, as the original author seemed to have become unreliable and was not producing the quality that we needed. So I had at least a new child coming, a book project, and multiple relocations in the second half of 2011. I rented a house in Incline Village, on the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe.

I think that for the entire time that we were in Incline Village, Susan was on maternity rather than working from home. I might have sometimes slept on the bottom floor of the rental house in Albany, but while we were in Incline, Susan and I lived in separate rooms. I don't know if she suffered post-partum depression or was upset about the move or what, but she was absolutely terrible during this time. I remember that she referred to our second son Ben - an infant - as disgusting.

John, who was two years old at the time, attended a Christian daycare. I had purchased a road bicycle with a child seat on the front. Some of my best memories from this period or of Jon and me riding through the forest singing song like The Beatles' Yellow Submarine at high volume on the way back from daycare. At the Christmas paegeant, it was clear that he was a discipline problem relative to the other children.

Brooke and his wife and their children visited for Thanksgiving. My family came for Christmas. Unfortunately, there was almost no snow that winter, at least until we moved in early January.

2012

As soon as we moved into the Portland house, the basement flooded. I had experts come and assess the situation. They told me that the cause was hydrostatic pressure from below the foundation and got me to commit to a significant and expensive project that involved jackhammering trenches throughout the foundation to install drains connecting drains to a sump pump in the garage.

Some time after they left, it became clear that hydrostatic pressure had not been the issue. One day I was in the basement and I saw water pooling outside of one of the windows.

When the house had been built, Portland had had some stupid building codes that prevented drainage of rainwater to either the street or the sewer. This required a drywell on the property, which is like an underground storage tank that holds water while it disippates into the ground. All of the water that landed on the roof of of this huge house in Portland, which gets some incredible storms and more than 40 inches of rain per year on average, routed into that drywell.

The drywell was in the back yard, which sloped down towards the house. When the drywell filled up, it overflowed, and the water came straight into the concrete box around that basement window. When it reached the window sill, it leaked into the basement.

As soon as I saw the water, I went out and bought a pump and a hose and drained it, but I think it may have already been too late, because I eventually pulled up the carpet that apparently had not been removed by the conractors that had installed the drainage system. In doing so, I found stained carpet pad that indicated that the previous owners must have experienced such a flood that they never disclosed.

I thought about sewing the contractors. I threatened to sue the previous owner and got some money from them. I had different contractors come and install a french drain around the back yard, with water draining to the street.

John attended a daycare that Susan selected. It was far from our house, requiring a trip on Stark Street. Somehow, this was generally my responsibilty - Susan had wanted children, but she could not support them financially and wanted me to have most of the responsibility. I referred to this commute as my Stark Trek.

Ben went to a different daycare that was closer. Eventually, John moved to a different daycare that I think was about the same distance but not as bad a commute.

I think it was in the the summer of 2012, at her father's property on Sonoma mountain, my step-sister Sierra held a reunion for my Great Oak class, who would have been mostly turning 40 years old that year. I took my son John. I don't remember many details, but it was interesting and entertaining to reconect temporarily with so many people from my grade and how their lives had progressed. I particularly enjoyed swimming in a pond with a rope swing. I think John enjoyed riding in Ulysses' old Ford Bronco that had the chop topped off. Other than meeting with Stephen once or twice and a few text exchanges, I have not kept in touch with any of those people, just as I have not been in contact with anyone from high school and have only had mininmal contact with Dave and Brooke from college. Distance makes connection hard and I have other interests.

After that summer, John enrolled at Portland Montessori School, which was walking distance from our house. Before enrollment, he met Mr. George, who would be his teacher. John was playing with a figure that Mr. George referred to as a duck. John corrected him by informing him that it was a drake (a male duck).

2013

John and Susan were getting into conflicts more freqeuently. One day, she wanted him to wear a parka to school. It wasn't very cold. John, being a true Pacific Northwesterner, wold probably rather have worn shorts. She basically forced him to wear the jacket. There were also days when John really didn't want to come home from school, probably partly because there were no other kids his age to play with, but I think also because of issues with his mother.

As it turned out, Shannon's friend Donna, with whom I had shared an apartment in Humboldt in the year spanning 1995 and 1996, was living in Portland with Ben, who she had been dating then. They had enrolled their child at PMS. Donna and I talked once or twice, but never in any depth.

In April of 2013, I turned 40 years old. In August, Ben turned two and in October John turned four.

I believe that I took Ben to daycare on the bicycle once, which was somewhat dangerous due to car density. Then I left the bicycle in front of the house overnight and it got stolen. It was a nice neighborhood, but it was not far from a MAX (Metropolitan Area Express) train line. Portland was nicer at the time than it is now, but even then it had many degenerates that would do almost anything to get their next heroin fix.

Susan was always arranging activities with the kids. I rarely wanted to be involved, but felt compelled to attend.

At this time, weed was stil illegal. I think I used craigslist to find a source that would buy medical marijuana and deliver it to me.

I still maintained some fantasy that my children would like Star Wars, especially the first two movies that had had such an impact on my childhood and me. I ordered some posters online and took them to an expensive framing shop.

While I was waiting for the framing work, I walked to what I thought was a convenience store nearby known as The Bodega. Strangely, there were beer taps and books, so I had a drink and started reading. The cashier was a young black guy with dreadlocks. When I asked him if he knew where to get any weed, he rejected me. I stayed around for a while and eventually he took me into the back and sold me some weed. Judah and I exchanged contact information and this random stranger has turned out to be one of best friends for at least ten years.

It turned out that Judah made music, especially hip hop and rap. Shortly after we met, I saw him perform at a live show held at the Bodega, which was a great party. At some point he came to my house and met my kids at around this age.

It was probably this year that I had some people build build a treehouse around the plumb tree in the back yard. It wasn't actually a treehouse, because it was on the ground, but it was built around the tree. It was really cool and high-quality, with complex railing worked designed to look like spiderwebs, as my boys were into Spiderman. I thought I would use it for writing, so there was a removable desk where I could put a computer, but I generally only used it to smoke weed.

The guy that managed the project was named Skyler, but the guy that did all the work was named Devan. Devan definitely had an eye for detail and quality, but towards the end, he said that he wasn't even measuring for the railing anymore - just eyeballing angles, which is pretty impressive.

//TODO: picture of treehouse

Devan and I got to be friends. I eventually lent him money to buy property for his marijuana refining business, as there are challenges obtaining finances in that industry. We have stayed friends since then, typically getting lunch together every few months.

I have a video from this age that demonstrates the issues that I had with John. He had received a plastic toy designed like an excavator but large enough to ride. Ben is using the toy and John hassles him for it, clearly not concerned for his brother or any sense of actual fairness.

Around this time, I have a memory of giving the boys some toys. Instead of playing with the items themselves, Ben was most interested in a piece of the packaging that had the Star Wars log on it. While I continued to buy some of the lego sets, it was around this time that I started to feel hopeless about Star Wars.

One day I was carrying Ben down the stairs. The stairs were carpeted and I was wearing socks, which resulted in a slip. I did everything I could to protect Ben, holding him high and falling hard on my ass. As we were falling, he looked directly into my eyes and asked "Dad, are you OK?" The differences between my two boys are amazing.

At some point, Susan explained to me that her father's mother was a wicked person that they tried to keep shut in. I feel that there was something malignant in one of her X chromosomesthat somehow mostly skipped Susan's father but got into Susan and John. I honestly think that this condition reduces their potential for compassion for others. I think that Ben must have gotten Susan's mother's X chromosome instead.

At some point, Susan's parents came to visit. We tried to arrange their visits for periods when I was not home, both so that they could support Susan in my absence, and so that I wouldn't have to deal with them. It's often difficult for me to get straight stories, but while I was gone, Susan's dad dropped or fell with Ben, which left a scar on his forehead. It seems that the family intentionally confused the two falling incidents such that Ben holds me responsible for this scar.

Sitecore symposiums, speaker training work was starting to not work for me blogging the book sold M3