2018: Life Keeps Changing

Our 2018 end-of-the-year blog is also available in Portuguese. Click on any picture to see a larger version. Previous editions are found here.

This year's blog starts with our wedding picture in 2005 and with our Christmas 2017 PJ picture by the tree. This is a nice reminder of how much has changed over time and how much has changed this year. Christmas 2018 is a lower-key affair in Oklahoma. But, before that, lets start with January which was focused on Daniel's Christmas 2017 present. You see, after intensive lobbying, Daniel got an X-box from Santa Claus. Along with that he got from his Papai a promise for a new Daniel's space in the basement, which consisted into a complete remodeling of the play area to create a teenage-friendly space for xboxing and hanging out (before pics on the left and after pics on the right above). Thus, January and part of february was dedicated to sanding, repainting, shopping for big screen TV, lighter and better-designed furniture.

Daniel inherited the trusty old brown leather couch which moved to his basement space. With that we had the opportunity to redecorate the living room upstairs with more adult-oriented furniture.

There was also lots of excitement around soccer in the end of February and early March. Daniel's team, the Windsor Park, did very well in the regular season, and went to the City finals and also qualified for the Alberta Provincial finals. The finals for the province were in Lethbridge, a town in the South of the province. The issue is that we had already bought tickets to go to Brazil prior to the days of the tournament. Daniel finished the season with the record as the best goalie in his age and playing-level for the community soccer. Actual statistics bear this assessment. Other teams that qualified for the finals had scored more than 100 goals each while the Windsor Park total goal scored were in the mid 50s. Thus, it was a strong defensive team for that season and Daniel's role in their success was recognized by all. Thus, when the qualification to the finals was confirmed, I was in Vienna attending a conference and started receiving messages in all my communicating devices from various parents and coaches to see "if something could be done" about changing Daniel's travel plans so that he could play the in the provincial finals. Thus we changed the tickets and Scott and Daniel delayed their departure to Brazil so that Daniel could play as goalie for the team. I heard that they had a great time at the tournament. Soccer was intense during the Winter months with many weekend tournaments, sometimes with driving out of town on heavy snowfall. A special moment of joy in the Spring was a backward lunch with Daniel's friends, Denis and Sinan. They have known each other since their daycare days.

After the provincials, Scott and Daniel joined me in Brazil for a week of rest and relaxation in Xangrila, the beach town where my family has a Summer house. We had not been there for years and we had not been all together for a while. We spent lots of time cooking, eating, and walking along the beach. Daniel got immersed in Brazilian soccer and went to a Gremio (the blue team) game in the Gremio's new stadium, his observation was the soccer stadiums in Brazil are "massively big". His allegiance, was divided because he also has a jersey for International (the red team), Gremio's arch enemy because some of his cousins are Inter supoorters.

I went directly from Brazil to Belfast to present at a conference and from there to Berlin. It was very interesting to visit some places in Belfast with very interesting recent history such as the Belfast City Hall with all the pictures of the Lord Mayors of Belfast, interestingly even the female occupants of the position are called Lord Mayor. It was my 8th visit to Berlin and it is good to have the opportunity to simply enjoy the city. It was also very nice to have an opportunity to visit with Sarah, Albrecht and their new addition Clara Elin. We had met them during our previous visit with my Mom in 2017. They took me to a tour of the Gärten der Welt (Gardens of the World), outside Berlin. A beautiful site that most first-time tourists to the city do not have time to explore. I also had my first visit to the Reichstag, which was organized by the conference that I was attending. A lost connection in Rejkavik led to an airline-sponsored 24 hour visit to the capital of Iceland, and to my first time experiencing a Dragking show!

May was busy soccer season again, this time it was outdoor soccer. The team won medals in championships again, but did not get to post-season play. My personal Summer projects included completely stripping about 60-year worth of painting off our wooden garage and repainting it. We also had a good time growing our two vegetable gardens. Besides ours, we are also the caretakers for the next-door garden that we kind of inherited from our long-term neighbor Dorothy when the house was sold and became a student house - the students are too busy and transient to care for a garden.

My other Summer project was to research and test recipes for our traditional Summer Garden Party on Daniel's birthday in August. I choose Morrocan food as the theme this year. After extensive research and recipe adaptation, I created a menu that contained lots of new and interesting dishes, and I was also very pleased with the execution. Some of my pleasant flavour discoveries include Harissa and the Essaouira Chermoula marinate for fish. I have added all the new recipes to my From Nelson's Kitchen recipe collection. We had to move the party to the Community League building because of the weather. Juana, Scott Sr. and Scott did a great job decorating the Hall to bring out the Morrocan team to the decoration.

I was very pleased with the success of some of my M.Sc. students, we managed to develop new compilation technology that was very relevant for the performance of the Summit and Sierra supercomputers, these are currently the fastest supercomputers in the world. These achievements were celebrated by the Faculty of Science at the University of Alberta and also by our IBM collaborators at SuperComputing 2018 in Dallas in November. SuperComputing is a combination of conferences, workshops, and a major trade fair for high-performance computing. It was specially pleasing to walk into IBM's expo display there and spot one of our collaborators using our own slides to explain the compilation technology delivered by IBM to the Department of Energy in the Summit supercomputer. We also received praising for our work from respected colleagues in the Nvidia compiler team. In February we attended Taylor Lloyd's wedding in Jasper where I took a picture with some of my current and former graduate students. Taylor is one of the students in this project. We managed to organize one more of our "Cooking Together in Nelson's Kitchen" parties as a farewell party for Taylor and Maddy in May before they took off to Seattle to work for Amazon. I was pleased to spend time with Artem Chikin, the other student in this project, both at SuperComputing and Edmonton. Artem taught several of my classes in the Fall allowing me to attend a conference in Lyon in France and to travel to Brazil to give a keynote talk at a Brazilian workshop in Sao Paulo. It was a joy to play the mentor-mentee relationship in many ways with Artem - more often than not I was benefiting from his advise, as was the case with Taylor - and to develop the connection into a friendship. Artem is now off to Toronto to work on interesting projects with Intel.

In August my nephew Tiago visited us in Edmonton with his wife Tatiana and their two boys, Theo and Gael. All Summer long I had sent them pictures of the growing vegetable garden. Thus, they had a great time helping harvesting potatoes, carrots, beets, tomatoes, and salads for dinner. Daniel had fun playing with his little cousins and we had a good time showing some of the Edmonton sites to them.

This past year, with Daniel turning 14, we also had the initial sample of the emotional roller coast that the teenager years are. I know that all of you with grown children read this with a saged smile on your face. We have already been through many crisis. Daniel continues to study in the Edmonton Academy, a school that is able to offer the small-group teaching environment that he needs. But in a close-knit groups the dramas of adolescence are amplified.

We got to have two visits with Daniel's sister Emily -- in Calgary in the Summer and then when they visited us in October. And one visit with his oldest sister Mack and her son Leo in June. Daniel wanted to go see the remembrance plaque that lists their mother's name in the South of Calgary. In November we sadly learned that Leo's father, Luke, was one of the victims to the fentanyl epidemic in Canada. We had met Luke in a some of our previous visits to Calgary and we feel for Mack and Leo.

We had a long-before scheduled trip for me and Daniel for November. I was attending SuperComputing 2018 in Dallas and Daniel was to spend the week with his grandparents in Dallas. Just a few weeks prior to our trip we learned that Juana, Scott's mom, had to do a surgery to remove a growth that had been found in her adbomen. It turned out to be a 3.5 pound benign cist, but it had grown into her intestine and the surgery was more complicated than had been expected. There were serious complications after the surgery when she contracted hopital-grade pneumonia. There were many days of uncertainty. Daniel insisted that he would still go there to help take care of his grandma. The day that we arrived her health had taken a turn for the worse and she was very weak. I left Daniel there while going to my conference. During the week she recovered some and after a few more weeks she was able to go to rehabilitation and then to home. On the Friday I picked up Daniel to take him to a Boston Bruins vs Dallas Stars hockey game in Dallas. Artem also came to the game.

Grandma is still weak and in recovery but is at home. Thus the incredible preparations and gift shopping and wrapping that she usually does for Christmas had to be significantly scaled back this year. Still we are enjoying a quiet low-key holiday time at their house this year.

Leaving you with our wishes for holidays and a great 2018.