Celeste got up early today in order to be present at Roosevelt High School for Green & Gold Day, also known as Freshmen Orientation. Now, technically, Celeste is not a freshman (she’s in 10th grade). But since she’s new to Roosevelt, it was recommended she attend the orientation. So she got up early and spent time learning just how big an American high school is.

Yes, Roosevelt is big.

Meanwhile, 180 miles south of Roosevelt High School in Seattle is Oregon Culinary Institute in Portland. And via text came this picture from Ella with a green and gold hue. The words that came with the picture in the text were, “Beer tasting today.”

That’s a class Ella’s paternal grandfather can get behind.

Last week we sent Ella a care package. Inside I included things like snack pudding and sugared cereal. Either that makes me a great dad or a horrible one. Maybe it makes me both. Anyway, now I’m getting text messages from Ella of images like these. I like this. A lot.

I just took this screenshot to capture Barack Obama in Seward, Alaska. He was visiting Seward to see the effects of climate change firsthand. Now what makes this even more interesting to me is that I lived in Seward in 1982, working there as an AM deejay. Ronald Reagan was the president then and I don’t recall him visiting…

First, let me reassure everyone by saying that our power is back on. It was out for 49 hours which, if my math is correct, is more than two days! That’s a long time to be without power. All of us, Melinda, Chloe, Celeste and I, were tired of feeling powerless.

That play on words out of the way, I can now tell you that Celeste had her first soccer practice today (the first scheduled practice was cancelled due to Saturday’s windstorm that left us, you said it, powerless). I had so much fun taking Celeste to the field. It’s been since 2009 that I drove a girl living in our house to a soccer practice. Fortunately, it all came back to me, even the ability to get the coach’s hint to take a hike, “Well, we’ll see you parents back here at around 8 o’clock.”

All the same, I came back at about 7:30 and secretly tried to take some pictures. This is the best of the lot, but there are others of the rainbow that watched Celeste at her first soccer practice.

Ah, fall soccer!