Ken Starr

What a busy weekend this has been. I've been so busy that I haven't had a chance to write anything for a few days. I guess that has given you a break from me. Thursday I was consulting for this company that has had some battery issues. That is a euphemism for "they've had batteries blow up". I've been helping them for a while but Wednesday their customer flew into town and they wanted answers. We went all out working late into the night and I was really dragging but by Thursday afternoon I figured I knew what was going on. I wrote up a report and Thursday night we called Taiwan and did a webex with my presentation. The guy in Taiwan listened while I went through my presentation and then he sort of sheepishly said on the phone, "yes, we've been a little worried about that happening, we're changing our process to fix that problem". I about fell over, I fully expected them to deny everything and I was prepared to do battle. I was not expecting them to admit it right off the bat. I'm now a hero in my customer's eyes and they are really glad they hired me.

Friday was "family day" at Pepperdine so that was the only excuse we needed to head to Malibu. It was a great day and if I thought Brandon had picked a good school before I'm even more convinced now. We got to go to a class with Brandon and then they put all the parents in one room and had a panel discussion. Of course we were one of the first in the room and we sat on the front row. I saw the Dean of the Law school walk in and I went and introduced myself. In case you don't know who the dean of the Pepperdine law school is it is Ken Starr. In case you don't know who Ken Starr is, he is the lawyer who prosecuted Bill Clinton and impeached him. He is my hero. Check out the link if you want to learn more about Ken Starr. So after I introduced myself, Ken asked how Brandon was handling the stress of the first few weeks. The first year of law school is famous for being a very stressful time. I told him that Brandon just graduated from a difficult bio-chemistry program and he knows how to work. I told him that Brandon is doing fine. Which he is, he's working hard but he is getting results. Serene and Sydney were with us (Brandon was in a class) and I pointed them out to Ken. He immediately walked away from me and went straight to Sydney. He took her from Lisa and started playing with Sydney and visited with Serene and Lisa. He then asked if he could introduce Sydney to all the parents. He took Sydney up to the podium and introduced her as the youngest law school student. Everyone applauded and Sydney beamed. It was great. Sadly the lunch and the tour were soon over and we had to pile into the car and rush back for Alex's game. If you remember the doctor told Alex he was to wear his cast for at least four weeks but he did do a second x-ray this week Thursday. He told Alex that it was healing nicely but he was to keep it on for another three and a half weeks. Counting the week he just completed that is more than the original estimate of four weeks but who's counting? Alex asked if he could play with it and after warning him of all the dire consequences of hurting it again he finally consented. Alex passed the message on to the coaches and they told him great but he wouldn't be playing this week because he hadn't been allowed to practice. He had been to all the practices but he was under orders not to hit. They did actually put him in at the end of the game and in the few plays that came his way he played stellarly. They padded up his cast so it looked like a huge club but it worked well. That is Alex with his club taking down University City's receiver. We won 59 - 14. Not much of a challenge. Alex and I saw a pop warner kid and Alex complained that we would never let him play pop warner. Pop warner is the little league equivalent for tackle football. We told our kids that they would have plenty of opportunity to damage their bodies in high school they didn't need to do it sooner than that. I also reminded Alex that this was his fourth cast and that along with his torn shoulder I'm convinced that we made a wise decision.