Thanksgiving 2024
Started: 2024-12-28 12:23:20
Submitted: 2024-12-28 16:39:17
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Visiting my parents in Walla Walla for Thanksgiving
Our family holiday rotation this year sent us to visit my parents in Walla Walla for Thanksgiving. Neither of my siblings could make it, so it was my family plus my parents for a cozy family holiday. We ended up flying from San Jose to Spokane on Wednesday before Thanksgiving, the first day the kids had off school. This was a a new-to-me route, and I've never flown to Spokane by any route. (This was easier than flying to Walla Walla and much less expensive than flying to Pasco, and faster than flying to Portland.)
While we were in the airport in San Jose I noticed that all of the shops were selling sweaters and shirts and other merchandise branded with "California", not anything more specific to represent the city of San Jose (or Silicon Valley or the Bay Area or any of the cities and towns that surround San Jose, or the famous universities and companies accessible via the airport). This is probably because San Jose is America's most forgettable major city; despite having a larger population than San Francisco (and the third-largest population in the state) it's not the most famous or most recognizable city even in its own region.
The one local thing that San Jose airport was selling was keychains and socks and other merchandise with drawings of baby chickens dressed up in various outfits appropriate to airport and airline workers. According to their story the airport's first passengers were a shipment of baby chickens that were unloaded from a plane, so to celebrate the airport's anniversary they were promoting the event with a large inflatable statue of a chicken in the airport lobby next to baggage claim, posters around the airport with human-sized drawings of baby chickens, and merchandise at the shops in the airport.
At the airport in Spokane the shops were selling shirts and merchandise with the city's name. Despite being much smaller than San Jose, Spokane is the largest city and most important in its region, which was clearly represented at the shops inside the airport.
We stopped for a snack at a coffee shop inside the airport concourse. Everyone else got their snacks while I was still waiting for my chai. Kiesa went ahead to pick up our bags at baggage claim, and I followed when my chai finally arrived. Only at baggage claim did I realize that I had left the kids inside, sitting at a table I had walked right past, still eating their coffee shop snacks. We were less than a hundred meters away but we were on the wrong side of a one-way corridor. Calvin had his phone, but he hadn't yet turned off airplane mode, so we couldn't contact him. Kiesa went to find airport information to help while I picketed the exit in case they found their way out. The airport paged Calvin "to a white courtesy telephone", which they figured was the best they could do; but this involves Calvin figuring out what a "courtesy telephone" is or where to find one. (I am not sure I could find a "courtesy telephone" on demand.) The message worked; Calvin couldn't find a courtesy telephone but did figure out that he ought to turn on his phone and call us. He and Julian left left the secured area of the airport concourse and met us just outside at baggage claim.
With that excitement resolved we picked up the rental car, which turned out to be a plug-in hybrid Jeep Wrangler. It had the four seatbelts we needed, but it was clearly optimized for its rugged appearance, not internal comfort. It barely managed 20 miles per gallon on the highway, and on battery power its range was 22 miles. It only supported level 1 and level 2 charging (not level 3 DC fast charging like the pure-electric cars I've driven). The manual said there ought to be a level one plug in the trunk (plugging into a normal household 120 volt circuit drawing up to 15 amps), but it would 12 hours to charge so I didn't bother. A level 2 charger (available at home with a dedicated 240 volt circuit at 30 amps, or at a commercial charger) would take two hours for a full charge. There were a couple of level 2 chargers in Walla Walla, but none of them were convenient for places I wanted to go, and I wouldn't get very much charge out of it anyway so I didn't bother.
By the time we left Spokane it was late afternoon and the sun was setting. We drove west I-90 then turned off onto US highway 395 towards Pasco. By the time we passed Wallula on US highway 12 the fog intensified; visibility was minimal and I had to drive carefully in the fog.
On Thursday we had our traditional Thanksgiving dinner, including a choice of pumpkin and apple pie for dessert. I found the puzzles stockpiled in the closet and worked on a puzzle of Prometheus at Rockefeller Center. It was hard to distinguish the pieces of the statue, and it was basically impossible to tell apart the pieces of the lights in the greenery in the backdrop, requiring a brute-force attack once they were the only pieces of the puzzle that remained.
On Friday afternoon we got out of the house for a tour of the engineering labs at Walla Walla University. (My father retired a couple of years ago as dean of the school of engineering, and he still occasionally teaches a couple of classes.) My father took us through a couple of labs, mostly on the ground floor of the Chan Shun Pavilion, that I didn't use as a student (several different structures labs dedicated to building things and then seeing how they broke; robotics/manufacturing; and EMEC). We saw one lab on the third floor where I took one of my classes (electronics) and the adjacent lab where I spent most of my senior year (digital electronics) working on my classes and final project. The lab benches looked the same, 24 years after my time here as an undergrad student. The circuit boards on the lab benches looked like they had been updated but served the same basic function. The lab equipment (scopes, power supplies, logic analyzers) might have been updated as well, but looked basically the same.
In one of the ground-floor labs there was a historic relic from my engineering career: an XY table, built by my first employer out of college, ITI. This was a piece of industrial lab equipment intended to assist in the development of industrial ink jet printing (really, "material deposition") applications. It's a solidly-built piece of equipment, assembled out of black-anodized aluminum tubes the size of 2x4s supporting a large slab of granite (intended as an inertial mass) and a pair of linear stages mounted at right angles to provide a precision motion control under the statically-mounted print heads. I think this specific unit dates from after my time at ITI, but the design is unchanged from the units I assembled, debugged, and wrote the control software for. I learned a lot at that job (PID control loops for motion control; how to recognize common US and metric machine screws by sight; how to bootstrap a software organization as the first software engineer as a new grad; how to manage tech debt without insisting on rewriting everything from scratch); but most of all the importance of a respectful engineering culture (demonstrated here in its absence), how to be skeptical of the promises of startup greatness just around the corner, how to smell bullshit from managers, and the impact of doing negative work in overtime. (This is why I eventually left the company, trading up to a better job and then a startup before finally getting a real big-tech job, a couple of years before ITI ultimately imploded under its own weight.)
It's fair to say that I have complicated feelings about this artifact from my engineering career.
On Saturday we went to coffee in downtown Walla Walla while my parents were in church. (I had coffee; the rest of my family had hot chocolate.) In the afternoon we went to Whitman Mission and walked up the short loop trail to the hill east of the visitor's center above the site of the mission. While we were at the top of the hill next to the obelisk I staged a recreation a picture I took five years ago (at Christmas in 2019) of Julian walking on the wall at Whitman Mission with Kiesa.
Inside the visitor's center we watched the watched the interpretive video explaining the history of the site. This looked like the same video we saw the last time we visited Whitman Mission in 2019; it provided the context of Whitman Mission in the colonial expansion of white Americans in the nineteenth century, and served as a stark reminder of the impact that well-meaning white Christian couples can have on the genocide of Native Americans.
Back at my parents' house I assembled a literary cat puzzle. This puzzle had more small sections of color that were easier to sort and assemble individually. The pink background, especially around the cat at the top of the puzzle, still required a brute-force approach, but overall it was more satisfying than the Prometheus puzzle had been.
On Sunday we drove back to Spokane to fly back home to San Jose. On our approach into San Jose we flew right over San Francisco before landing. It was nice to spend the Thanksgiving holiday with my parents.
