We spent our 2010 Christmas and New Year Holidays at Vovo's beach house in Xangrila' in Brazil. It was great to see family and friends there again. One of the highlights for Daniel was a rainy afternoon that just he and me went to the beach and we got invited to join in an "all-ages" pick-up soccer game. With my non-exhisting soccer skills playing that game on the rain for 1.5 hours was torture. But Daniel was having so much fun that it was worth it.

Two days before Christmas Leonor, a very good friend (and mother of my college mate Beto, suddenly passed away in Porto Alegre. Thus I dashed from the beach to Porto Alegre to be with them during the overnight vigil and then drove back to the beach to bake cookies for Santa with Daniel. I was very saddened with Leonor's passing but felt fortunate that I could be there to share this moment with my close friend Beto, her only son.

After Christmas we took a couple of days with my sister Salete to go to the hill towns where we got to see "Gramado's Christmas" a great show put on the streets of a very nice touristic city in the South of Brazil. It was a great event, but Daniel was puzzled as to why they would create artificial snow in the middle of the Summer. When we came home from the beach in Brazil to Edmonton we found about a meter of snow accumulated on our walks. A week later we kept our family tradition of a "Christmas-after-Christmas" celebration at home with a few friends.

In February we got a phone call from Daniel's half sister, Mak, to let us know that their mother, Belinda, had passed away in Calgary. We learned later that she had had sudden major bleeding in her brain and had suffered a very quick brain death. She still survived a week after that, but there was no hope of recovery. She was only 38 years old. It took several months for Daniel to comprehend what had happened because he only had contact with her once a year. In May, when we went to visit Mak and their other half-sister, Emily, Daniel saw Mak without Belinda for the first time. That is when it was clear to me that he realized that his mother was gone. I am glad that Daniel and Belinda had had such a nice visit the year before and I got pictures of them having fun together.

In November Emily came with her family from Calgary to Edmonton to visit with Daniel. Daniel was very happy to share some of his greatest passions with her: we went together to an Edmonton Halloween Symphony for Kids (Daniel loves symphony concerts) and Emily's family came to see Daniel play a hockey game.

In March we got busy traveling. I went on two trips to Europe and Scott went on two trips to Florida. On my first trip I went to Karlshure and also visited Stuttgart for a weekend. On the second trip I briefly visited Frankfurt, then went to Saarbrucken, Muenster, Rheine, and Cologne in Germany, then to Chamonix in France and a brief stop in Geneva in Switzerland before flying back home. I went to Rheine to visit with my friends Matthias and Anja. They are a couple that I met on a flight from Houston to Amsterdam in December of 2009. We have kept corresponding regularly via email, and they invited me to come and visit during my trip to Germany. They were very gracious hosts and I had a wonderful time visiting that part of Germany, took a cruise in the Rheine river, and went up the stiple in the great cathedral in Cologne with Matthias.

The week in between my two trips to Germany Scott went to Florida for a meeting on the project that he was working on. Then he came back just in time for me to leave again. But this time, while I was traveling in Europe, Scott and Daniel went on a trip to Orlando with Scott's parents, aunt Diane, and Daniel's cousins Laureen and Lexi. With three kids of similar age, they kept busy going to amusement parks and having fun at the pool in the condominium where they stayed.

In April I managed to make a brief visit to my alma-matter school in Austin (I was an invited speaker at the Computer Architecture seminar at UT Austin) before going to Toronto for a regular research meeting at IBM. It was great to stay overnight at Joydeep Ghosh, my Ph.D. supervisor, and to visit with his family. Too bad I missed seeing Egidio in my brief visit to Austin.

We had two major home improvement projects this Summer. The first was to replace the roof of our garage. It was a great family project. Daniel was a great help throughout the project and Scott worked very hard with me on that too. The second one I did by myself. It was to open up all the soffit around our house to cut larger vents to allow better ventilation in the attic. The goal is to prevent ice damming from melting snow by keeping the attic cooler during the Winter. It was a lot of work, but when I was done putting everything back into place, no one could tell that I had done anything! While I worked on the soffit Scott was busy with the garden. He did some new landscaping and planted a nice vegetable garden. This Summer we also hired a company to redo the concrete for our garage and driveway. Then we got a very nice basketbal hoop for Daniel to play in the driveway.

In the mid of July I went on a small academic tour to Brazil where I visited three universities. I was very well received by Liria Sato at University of Sao Paulo (USP); Edson Borin and Sandro Rigo at Unicamp, and by Alba Melo at University of Brasilia (UnB). It was whirlwind tour with a talk at a different university on a different city each day, but it was a great way to reconnect with some of my colleagues in Brazil. My dear friend Gloria took a bus from Santos after work and went to Sao Paulo so that she could treat me to a very nice and special one-on-one dinner on my only night in Sao Paulo.

On that trip I also got to visit with my whole family in Brasilia where we celebrated by brother's 50th birthday. After the celebration we went on an overnight trip to Chapada dos Viadeiros, a beautiful place with a rugged landscape and many water falls in the state of Goias. Another highlight of this trip was to reconnect with Joao Campari, a dear friend that I had not seen since our Austin graduate school days. It was also great to meet Otavio, Joao's partner for many years. Thus, this year I got to see most of my friends from my years in Austin Texas

The traditional two birthday parties for Daniel in August were a great success. We had such a beautiful day for our garden party at home and everybody was in a great celebratory mood. For the kid's party at the park a friend organized a soccer game and we got commemorative t-shirts printed for all the kids that came. My friend Silvia made one beautiful theme cake for each of the parties. As per tradition Gaga and Grandpa came to Edmonton to help organize the parties and to celebrate with us. At our Garden party we toasted Juana and Scott's 50th Anniversary which took place in June.

Late in August Scott, Daniel and I went on a trip to a lodge in the Mountains. In previous years Scott and I had gone to back-country lodges that can only be accessed by +/- 10 Km hikes. This time we wanted to take Daniel along with us and we were not sure that starting with a 10 Km hiking was a good idea. Thus we went to the Cross River Wilderness Centre, a lodge to which we could drive. It is in a beautiful spot with very nice hikes nearby, and they had a wonderful chef that prepared great meals. The three of us went on a day hike. Daniel was very excited because he did very well and enjoyed very much hiking. He wanted to know when we would go back to a place like that. Our hike was along the Cross river, we walked by a large canyon with some beautiful waterfalls and stopped for a picnic at a nice river beach where the Cross river meets the Kootenay river. The water was extremely cold. Nonetheless, being a Canadian kid, Daniel stripped to his underwear and waded into the water for a while.

Throughout September Daniel had hockey try-outs to establish in which tier he would play, and then early in October we met his coach and team: "The Silver Bullets." They were a tier 8 team (tier 1 is the highest, tier 10 is the lowest). We were very fortunate, Coach Mike is outstanding and we all like him very much. Daniel ranks Coach Mike as the best teacher that he ever had. Having a child in hockey is a very big commitment and we had no idea what we were getting into until we became "hockey parents." There is a practice and a game every weekend. Even though there are more than 35 skating rinks in Edmonton, ice time is a very scarce resource (there are also more than 60,000 kids playing hockey in the province of Alberta). Therefore, the times and locations for practices and games vary a lot. One Saturday morning we had to be at the arena at 6 AM for a hockey practice. Plus, there is all the equipment to keep track, carry, put on, take off, etc. For safety reasons, if one piece of equipment is missing, the child cannot go into the ice. Also, if you want your kid to have fun on the ice, he needs to improve his skating skills. So, we started taking Daniel some evenings during the week to "public skating," which is one-hour in which an arena is open to anyone that wants to come and skate around the ice. That led us to discover this entire Canadian culture to which we were oblivious until then. In a way it is similar to Spanish or Italian villagers going for a stroll around the Piazza after dinner. The difference is that Canadian lace up their skates and loop around an arena.