Dad, Tell Me About the Time (55)

Tuesday, June 17, 2025

What child is most like you? In what way?

Let me talk about this with each child.

Kira, while I love Kira dearly, we are about as opposite as we could be. She is a highly talented artist, I am not. I am great at technology, she is not. She is good with people, I am not. I am good with numbers, she is not.

Brandon and I have a lot in common, we both love technology, we both love to read and stay current with the latest in technology and we love to contemplate what we would do if we were in charge. We have plans to save the world, and we have plans to destroy the world.

Ben and I are also about as opposite as we could be. He loves sports, I have little interest in sports. He isn’t too into technology while that is kind of my life. He is calm and soft spoken while I tend to just blurt out what is on my mind.

Alycia and I have a lot in common. We both have opinions on just about everything and we are happy to express them. We will also contemplate what we would do if we were in charge, but we tend to focus on laws more than technology. Alycia and I share oddly similar tastes in food. Not just a few types of food but just about all foods.

Alex and I are an odd mixture. On things like sports, we have little in common, but he loves fantasy and science fiction just as much as I do. I do know that Alex has cultured a desire to enjoy many of my interests because he saw early on that we had few natural common interests, and he wanted to have more in common with me. What a mature desire at a very young age? I have tried to do that with sports and music, but I would never have thought of that as a child.

Sarah and I love camping and running. She is obviously a much better runner than I am, but she started when she was fifteen and I started when I was fifty. We also love camping and hiking. We never missed a father daughter campout, and we would occasionally go on an overnight camp just for the fun of it. We will also go for a run together every chance we get.

What activities do you enjoy doing as a family?

That is easy, we enjoy doing everything as a family. We even love to work together. Sometimes when we had a huge chore to do, we would all get together and tackle the job together. That is how we usually cleaned up our yard sometimes the garage.

We would go to the beach almost weekly during the summer. Every spring at the end of school we would gather up all their friends and have a bonfire on the beach and burn all their homework. We would hike to the waterfall every Memorial Day and often a few other times during the year. We would usually have a picnic in Coronado and watch the fourth of July fireworks. We would often have picnics at other places as well. We loved to hike together. A few times a year we would go to the movies together. For special occasions we would sometimes eat out, usually at Soup Plantation. We loved going to museums, especially the science museum but all museums and we would read all the signs at each display. We had seasons tickets to Sea World and the Zoo.

As I said, it didn’t matter what it was, if we did it as a family we enjoyed it. This post brings back a lot of fond memories.

How did you balance the demands of work with family time?

Brandons young mind often asked very adult questions. He once asked me why I wasn’t higher up in Qualcomms management levels. I told him that I was confident I could have been a director in the company, but to do that I would have to live at the company. Qualcomm was set up to encourage that. If you were there after 6:00 pm you could eat a free dinner in the cafeteria. If you were there on weekends you really got noticed.

I once heard a saying that has become my motto for life.

“No one ever said on their death bed, that they wished they had spent more time at the office.”

Mom gave me a biography of Thomas Edison, and I realized that I could have invented anything he did. The only difference between him and me was that he spent his entire life in his lab. He had a bed there and would not come home for days at a time. His kids hardly knew him and his wife (his second wife) stayed with him mostly for his money.

Early on in my career I made the decision that I was going to work five days a week from 8:00 to 5:00 and that is what I did. On rare occasions, in real emergencies, I would work late or on a weekend, but it was rare. Those had to be real emergencies too, because everything is an emergency for some people.

At Kyocera I was eventually promoted to Staff/Engineer Manager and I led a small team, but I wasn’t going to advance much further, working 8:00 to 5:00 and that was fine with me. I live for my family; I do not live for work.