Eric T. Hennenhoefer

2009 Letter and Pictures

To all my friends, associates, and people who send me Facebook updates:

Welcome to the new year which means it’s time for the 2009 Hennenhoefer update:

According to family lore, Hennenhoefer loosely translates to “chicken farmer”. Now given that we’re about as German as the Olive Garden is Italian, I never took this very seriously. But it seems you can only avoid your destiny for so long.

The Year of the Chicken started with a phone call at 6AM. “This is the Post Office, come get your box. It’s making chirping noises.” It turns out that all you need to start a farm these days is the internet and a credit card.

The plan that I got pitched was for 4 hens living peacefully in our backyard, no noise, no mess, just free eggs. Now I didn’t quite buy it, but since I’m not a voting member of the household, what can you do?

I have to admit that I was a bit surprised to come home to 11 peeps living in my bathroom. 8 of them were baby roosters that were sent along for “free” as packing peanuts to keep the rest warm. Now you really can’t have roosters in suburbia, so I guess they expected us to eat the packing material at some point. For a while I thought the cats would solve this issue, but they refused to acknowledge the peeps. I guess my wife forgot to get their prior permission.

Still we have little boys, so I was thinking the first batch would last about a week. So to hedge our bets, the first rule was that the kids could only play with the packing roosters. Nate loves animals and spent weeks carrying around a pile of roosters in his little bucket, playing racecar with them down the slide, and strangely walking around with a chicken on his head yelling “CHEEP”.

A few weeks later the hens moved outside when the coop was delivered. And as we told the kids, the baby roosters went to live on the “farm” with the coop delivery guy to live happily ever after, and no we’re not going to visit. Now the thing that’s not obvious about chickens is they really are “chicken”. Mostly, they walk around the yard clucking and don’t wander off. But when spooked, they PANIC and sprint in a random direction until they get stuck in a corner like some malfunctioning Roomba.

So why did the chicken cross the road? Lawnmowers. Yep, suburbia is a dangerous place. Besides free ranging chihuahuas and the occasional hawk, it’s the yard service that’s the top predator in town. Since I can’t speak Spanish, the exact details remain a mystery. I suspect chickens have an innate fear of spinning blades and ran off into the greenbelt, but one cannot rule out that they were bagging that day. Anyway, after the third incident I think the mowers understood, no more trying to mow around chickens. So 15 chickens later we have 4 hens in the backyard.

Ethan started kindergarten this year and broke mommy’s heart by insisting he’d ride the bus home. Now there was an incident which my wife keeps repeating in public, so we might as well get it out in the open. Consider this a public service announcement for all the other spouses winging this.

Suppose you’re waiting for your kindergartner at the bus stop and they don’t get off. This means?

a) He didn’t get on the bus, he must be at school

b) You need to jump up and down while flailing your arms and chase the bus down the street.

c) It’s time to call your wife

d) You have to wait another 15 minutes so go ahead and get out the iPhone

Now as in most crises, you tend to go with your first reaction which for me was obviously A. It turns out that despite the fact all the kindergartners sit in a special section in the front of the bus, the bus driver only pays attention if they end up with extras at the end of the run. As for Ethan himself, well he says that he’s only supposed to get off the bus if he sees Mommy standing in the special place. Humm…

So perhaps you think C is the right answer. Again wrong. Your spouse expects you to maintain constant contact with them at all times when children are involved. So if you have to dial, you’ve already screwed up.

Now for most people it appears the best answer is B. It’s common to hear of such feats as B as a sort of rite of passage toward a parenting merit badge. Bus drivers are apparently trained to recognize the behavior resembling escaped mental patients and will immediately stop the bus and let you on to pick out the small child of your choice.

So in my case, I went with A and then C at which point she called the school which recommended D. If a bus driver discovers a stowaway at the end of the run, they just attempt redelivery. So all’s well that ends well, right?

Now that the kids are wrapping up 3 and 5 years, there are glimmers of hope that my wife and I will not be institutionalized in 2010. We can now travel without diapers and both kids can bathe, dress, and play together unattended on weekend mornings until it gets light outside.

The boys and I have even become regular campers and joined the YMCA Indian Guides. Technically it’s now called Adventure Guides, and while we Texans are fine with a secession from the Indian Nation, it really seems like too much of a hassle due to our investment in our Indian names. Ethan goes by “Screaming Goat” and Nate settled on “Dancing Penguin” although he was tempted by “Stinky Pig”. Since it’s a father/child camping group, we can’t disclose our actual activities or our spouses will insist on coming to supervise.

Ethan loves taking karate. Alisa wasn’t so sure about sending him to a class where they teach them to yell, but fortunately early karate is more like running around in matching clothes. Which combined with a cute instructor seems to have swayed her over.

Ethan also announced that he’s really good at art which caught me off guard. I was expecting something like “using the force” or “climbing trees”. Kids these days do art several times a day and it generally resembles a Jackson Pollock rendered in finger-paints combined with some type of vegetable matter like leaves or corn mixed in. I wonder if I can start selling his early work on eBay?

Nate announced that he’s a vegetarian at Thanksgiving dinner. Now that’s a pretty big word for a 3 year old; so even though we talked about it for 5 minutes, he might really be a Unitarian. Anyway, once we explained that the turkey was a vegetarian too, he was happy to eat it.

Nate also had a run in with TSA at the Austin Airport. The boy won’t travel without his milk, penguin, and a dozen other things. The more you bring, the more you can leave behind as you go – kind of like breadcrumbs. Anyway, Nate was a bit concerned putting his backpack of prized possessions into the jaws of the x-ray machine. So when the officer opened up his backpack and took out the milk, Nate made it very clear whose milk it was and the officer had better give it back. Unfortunately raising your voice in the airport security line makes you a potential terrorist. So while Nate escaped being placed on the no-fly list, he was pulled out of the line for a search and pat down. After getting the “do something” look from my wife, I took a picture of the incident and posted it to Facebook.

In addition to operating an illegal chicken farm, Alisa has become addicted to Twilight, sewing stuffed animals for nieces and nephews and playing Star Wars Wii with Ethan. As for the Star Wars part, concerned am I. Clearly they have both turned to the darkside since they not only prefer the prequels but they also like Jar-Jar Binks.

As for me, it was an entertaining year. Alisa threw me a semi-surprise birthday party for my 0x28th. I walked 452 miles while deleting emails on my treadmill desk. My dad got married and had a week long wedding in Jamaica. Not only was the week adults only, but the villa had faster internet access than home, a pretty good week. I also spent Easter Sunday at a Morrissey concert and finally made it to the Nine Inch Nails / Jane’s Addiction concert. As for page-turners, I’ll go with Outliers and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. For those who don’t have extra airport time, Outliers lays out the logical argument about why it comes down to luck and Zen was a great story but it left me confused. Perhaps not getting Zen is Zen. It did bring back memories of Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid which is the only Pulitzer Prize winning book I’m aware of that includes hundreds of pages about formal mathematical systems.

On the professional side, I’m still very active with Entrepreneur’s Organization (EO) as Texas Area Director. This year’s activities included visiting Portland OR and touring the Nike HQ, being in a parade with a police escort in New Orleans, spending three amazing days at the EO Texas Roundup in Houston, and attending my first graduation ceremony ever upon completing my 3^rd year at the EO/MIT Entrepreneur Master’s Program.

My other activity was the Design Verification Club (www.dvclub.org), so if you still have no idea who I am, perhaps we met at a meeting in Austin, Boston, North Carolina, or Silicon Valley.

As I reported last year, I continued to wade into the fight over Texas science standards. Basically a number of religious fundamentalists quietly got elected to the Texas State School Board of Education (SBOE) and have decided to censor anything in the science curriculum that conflicts with their personal views. The SBOE started with a curriculum drafted by scientists and educators and proceeded to remove parts of evolution, the age of the universe, and global warming. Strangely some internal disagreement within their ranks managed to keep radioactive decay in Texas science by 1 vote. I know, it’s hard when you can’t decide if the Earth is 6,000 or 10,000 years old.

I ended up testifying in front of the SBOE and argued we should adopt the standards as drafted by the experts. I may have also mentioned this whole debate is making Texas look ridiculous and perhaps even that politicians should do what’s best for our children’s education and not their personal agenda. It seemed to strike a nerve as my 2 minute testimony turned into 13 with Q&A. I followed up a few months later in front of the Senate Education Committee and ended up quoted in the New York Times.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/22/education/22texas.html

Obsidian Software is wrapping up year 13 and I think it will end up being a pivotal year when we look back from a safe distance. We took advantage of the downturn to pull in new talent and found a great sublease in a much nicer office building for less money. For most of our customers, the decision to use our software is a make versus buy and the recent cutbacks made companies reevaluate making their own paperclips. The upside of the downturn is it opened a lot of doors, and we’ve managed to land more new clients than expected.

My Obsidian partners Rob Gowin and Becky Cavanaugh had a good year and both have window views of downtown in the new offices. Becky continues to obsess about her iPhone, Facebook, and her baby Charlie. Rob’s working on his running and spends his free time shuttling around his 3 kids.

Happy New Year,

Eric – at – Hennenhoefer.Org