What Teacher?
Mar 15th
Last week Alex had open house at school right before spring break. They do this as part of the regular parent/teacher conferences except that instead of us sitting down with the teacher in a one on one session going over results and test scores this one is student driven. He has an outline of the things he’s going to show us and there is even some math work for us to do so he can show us some of the strategies they have been learning.
On on way into the classroom there was a woman greeting parents as they came in but she obviously knew all the students but she was unfamiliar to me. We walk up and she introduces herself, “Hi, I’m so and so.” and she adds after I kept staring at her, “I’m the student teacher, today’s my last day.” Of course, the student teacher!
When we got home I asked Alex, “So how long have you had a student teacher?”
“Um, I don’t know. She really just watched us at first but she has been our real teacher for the last couple of weeks.”
“That sounds exciting, when did she start?”
“I don’t know, maybe in January.” He said this more like a question then a statement like I would know the answer.
“So, every night when we sit down to dinner and ask ‘How was school today’ and you just can’t think of absolutely anything except PE, music, art, and what you did at recess, telling us about the new student teacher didn’t cross your mind?”
“Umm, no.”
Ahhhhhhh. Every day we ask about school and not once in the last three months, if that’s really how long she’s been there because I’m sure we’ll never find out, has this has never come up.
Blog Updated
Mar 13th
I’ve been updating this blog more or less on or off since July of 2004 and since that time I’ve been using Google’s Blogger platform to manage and publish it to mceachernfamily.com. At the beginning of the year Google sent me an email saying that they are no longer going to support the technology to publish to my own website.
So I’ve taken the oppertunity to move the entire blogging platfrom from Blogger to my own hosted WordPress solution. I don’t have the bugs 100% worked out yet but I’ve tried to keep everything in the same place as it was before but just expect things to be a little bumpy here for a while.
For those of you that subscribe to the rss or atom feed in a program like Google Reader, you will need to update your settings.
rss: http://www.mceachernfamily.com/blog/feed
atom: http://www.mceachernfamily.com/blog/feed/atom
Soccer and Lacrosse Pictures
Mar 8th
Spring outdoor soccer has started and Andrew has a had about three or four games. I took some pictures at one the other weekend. Alex is playing soccer as well but so far I don’t think he’s made any games since he has had conflicts with Lacrosse and this weekend they were rained out.
Totally Random Picture
Mar 8th
During this process I’ve come across things that I vaguely remember knowing about things but not knowing exactly where they were or even if we still had them. Tonight I was up in the attic bringing stuff down and I found a picture album with this picture that Jen took in 1997 while we were on our honeymoon to San Francisco. 
It was taken during our tour of Alcatraz and is me with Leon “Whitey” Thompson, who was an inmate there for four years. I did a google search for him and it turns out that he passed away in 2005.
According to the obituary in the SF Gate:
“Mr. Thompson had only a sixth-grade education, and writing did not come easily. He wrote and rewrote the book by hand nine times. No one would publish it, and the Thompsons could not find an agent. So they borrowed $3,200 and published the book themselves, took 500 copies back to Alcatraz, by then part of a national park, and set up shop in the bookstore.
They sold all 500 copies in a week. The book “Last Train to Alcatraz,” later retitled “Rock Hard”, sold 85,000 copies”
We purchased a copy of “Last Train to Alcatraz” and Leon signed it right before this picture was taken. I have no idea if we have one of the first 500 copies but we have a copy.
Here’s a picture of us taken at the Muir Woods. Good Lord, how did they ever let two kids like us get married 
Finally, some pictures from 2010
Feb 27th
Between the weeks we spent getting the house ready to put on the market, some work travel, and a bunch of kids activities, the first two months of the year have just flown by.
I’ve been working on getting some pictures put together but stuff just keeps getting the way so it’s taken quite a while. Today I finished up three pages of stuff.
At the beginning of February I got to travel to Germany for work to visit with one of our software vendors. We stayed in Heidelberg but really didn’t have time to go sight-seeing since we arrived Monday afternoon and left on Friday morning. For the afternoon we didn’t have meetings we took a bit of a walking tour of Heidelberg and visited the old castle.
After arriving back from Germany Jen picked me up at the airport and we drove to New Orleans for Mardi Gras. We haven’t been for a couple of years and the timing worked out for us since we had just put the house on the market and wanted to get out for a couple of days while people were going through it.
Any finally, Caroline just had her first birthday this week. I can’t believe it. It seems like just the other day we were in the hospital with her. She wasn’t all that impressed with the cake and just ended up mashing it into her high chair tray.
Here are all the pictures
Christmas Pictures
Jan 28th
It’s only taken me a month but I’ve finally found the time to get the Christmas pictures together. It’s been crazy busy around here the last month and I just haven’t had time to sit down and look at the pictures we took.
I was even getting the pictures together from January and it turns out I’ve only taken about 30 or 40 this month and don’t really have anything to put together for this month.
2009 Year in Numbers – Part 2 – Everything Else
Jan 9th
Continuing along with my ocd 2009 year in numbers moving on to the year in swimming.
In 2008 I went 290,000 yards, 162 miles, and this year I set myself a goal of going at least 200 miles. I didn’t want to set the goal too much higher then 2008 since I knew that at the end of February we would be having Caroline and I wouldn’t be in the pool to much after that.
Things went much better then anticipated and I managed to go 387,000 yards, 240 miles.
January and February were really strong months and as expected after Caroline was born I didn’t get in the pool for over a month. Then things picked up again and in July I managed to post an all time high of 32.9 miles. October through December were pretty slow months starting with a week off for Amanda and Ben’s wedding, then I got sick in November, and finally the holidays in December.
In addition to keeping track of yards swam I also kept track of hours in the pool. I swam for a total of 112.5 hours or 4.69 days. Holy cow that’s a lot of hours in the pool. If your doing that math that works out my average swimming speed of 2.14 miles per hour.
The other thing I kept track of was the break out of swim vs kick, vs pull.
Obviously the swim is going make up the majority of the yards but I was surprised by the 46,000 yards kick. You can see that I’m not a real big fan of drill since it barely registers on the graph.
Other numbers for the year.
- Netflix movies – We rented 52 movies this year. Certainly no record based on how many I hear other folks go through but that works out to one a week which isn’t too shabby.
- Jen drives about 1,400 miles a month, and since I’m now working much closer to the house I only drive about 650 miles a month.
2009 Year in Numbers – Part 1 – mfdc statistics
Jan 7th
Last year was a record year for web site traffic with 117,263 hits. Compare that to 2008 were it was only 79,870 hits.
By month it broke out like:
It was on a steadily increase right from January through July when then things just fell off a cliff. I’m not exactly sure what happened there but it picked up again in October and then went right back into the toilet to end the year. I can understand the December numbers since there were really no web page updates or blog entries to speak of so the site got a little stale.
If remember last years summary I was giving my Canadian friends a hard time since I had more people from France, Poland, and Mexico visiting the site then from Canada and I’m glad to say that this year you didn’t let any other countries beat you. Unfortunately it wasn’t a matter of you beating anyone else but rather a rather large drop in the amount of traffic from every other international country.
Last year Canada accounted for 744 hits but this year it was only 364. I’m not sure what caused the huge drop in international visitors other then it’s possible that they are not being correctly accounted for. Last year there were 5,466 hits that couldn’t be attributed to a specific country or domain and this year that number was 11,098 so I have to believe that somewhere in this number here were countries not being accounted for correctly.
This year I added Google Analytics to the site which helped me track how people actually find there way to mfdc. Like I would expect the vast majority of visitors are coming directly to the site either by bookmark or just typing in the web address and most of those people or repeat viewers. This really isn’t surprising since the audience is really family and friends and since I don’t allow search engines to index any of the main site it limits what your going to find using a search engine.
None the less there are still what I would consider a large number of people who get to the site by coming from other locations like:
- blogger.com
- facebook.com
- google.com
- images.google.com
- twitter.com
- images.google.ca
- notebooks-brazil.blogspot.com. (Beats me. When I saw this a couple of months back I tried to hunt it down but couldn’t find anything.)
- images.google.co-uk
The other interesting thing is look at the search terms that people typed into a search engine that lead them to the site. As you would expect “mceachern family” and variations of peoples names with “mceachern” show up frequently but here’s a couple others exactly as they were typed into search engines that sent people to the blog
- alex matisse
- don’t forget your lunch box
- antique bobsleds
- sesame place secrets
- sesame princeton
- abe’s log cabin
- canada trip family pictures
- rhyming words with hiatus
- pictures: “hello. anyone home?”
- pictures of you, pictures of me.
- picasso baseball pictures
- zee zed canada
Some of these I can tell exactly where they ended up but others make absolutely no sense. I mean really, picasso baseball pictures, rhyming words with hiatus?
And now for the mfdc Top 5 most popular pages of the year, drum roll please…
- Caroline’s first pictures (http://www.mceachernfamily.com/2009/caragrace/index.html) Was anyone surprise by this?
- Alex’s 7th Birthday Party (http://www.mceachernfamily.com/2009/alexparty/index.html)
- Caroline’s 2nd set of pictures (http://www.mceachernfamily.com/2009/caroline/index.html)
- Amanda and Ben’s Wedding (http://www.mceachernfamily.com/2009/amandawedding/index.html)
- Andrew’s 4th Birthday (http://www.mceachernfamily.com/2009/andrewparty/index.html)
Touching the Dissected Cow Eye
Dec 31st
Here’s the photographic evidence of eyeball touching from yesterdays trip to the Sci-Tech Discovery Center.
Beauty Is…
Dec 12th
Every October or so the PTA at Alex’s school runs an art contest where students create a piece of artwork related to some theme. This year the theme was “Beauty Is…”, last year it was something like “Wow!”. They can choose from composing a song, choreographing a dance, painting, multimedia presentation, drawing, photograph, and the list goes on. Each year Alex has decided to do the photography and frankly I much prefer that since its much easier option then the other choices.
We went down to the Dallas Arboretum because they have a big Halloween setup each year and we figured that it should be easy to find something related to the “beauty is” theme there.
We got there, gave him the camera, and told him to go ahead and take as many pictures as he wanted that he thought related to the theme. About 60 seconds later I find he’s wandered off the path and has found his first picture….
Very nice. Not exactly what I think the contest promoters had in mind.
He eventually decided on the picture of the koi pond since the white fish had a red mark that look exactly like a question mark.
We heard this week that he received an honorable mention.
Andrew is really into taking pictures and for being only four years old he seems to have quite the eye. This is one that he took of the pumpkins and gourds that were on display.
