2021 was a year of recovery for us, and some adventure.
Rocio completed radiation therapy and miraculously made a 99.9% recovery from the neurological issues she developed really suddenly in October of 2020. For more specific details on what happened in the fall of 2020, please read Rocio’s blog.
We also all have been mourning and recovering from the loss of Ernst’s father, who passed away unexpectedly in December of 2020.
But - with the kids still in online school and Rocio’s radiation therapy completed - we made good on our pandemic-inspired idea of getting an RV and touring the country with it for an extensive period of time. Playing to our respective strengths and interests, Rocio purchased the RV and Ernst found a used pickup truck in excellent condition to tow the RV (it is a fifth-wheel trailer).
Our inaugural trip was an easy one: just a few hours to the north along the coast of California… except it turns out that this was probably the most difficult route we could have chosen to learn how to drive with a long and heavy thing. It is a beautiful road, but steep and curvy and narrow. We saw breathtaking Redwoods, coastline, and many many elk.
We figured out how the RV works - or how RV-ing more generally works - including how we can all be working on our laptops at the same time during the trip and how taking the dogs was a really bad idea.
Having survived that trip, it was time for the bigger one. Over the course of 104 days, we roughly visited: Las Vegas, the Grand Canyon, Painted Desert / Petrified Forest, Santa Fe NM (check out Meow Wolf, it’s great!), Amarillo TX, Oklahoma City, Little Rock AR, Jackson MI, New Orleans LA, over to Montgomery AL, then up to Birmingham AL, Nashville TN, and then due West again via St Louis MO, Omaha NE, the Badlands in South Dakota, Mt. Rushmore, the vast expanse of Wyoming and Yellowstone, up to Montana, back down through Yellowstone to the Grand Tetons, over to Idaho Falls, by which time we could smell home (for real: we could smell the wildfires) and made a beeline for home with the last stop in Reno NV.
Ask the kids what their favorite thing was and they’ll say something like: “Amarillo because it had good steak and a theme park!” Or they might say “It was terrible. We drove forever. I just wanted to go home.” But the pictures tell a different and hopefully more lasting story of seeing some impressive natural beauty, seeing things that cannot be unseen in Las Vegas, learning about the Civil Rights movement(s), the difference between Creole and Cajun, subtle but real differences in local customs and cuisines from state to state or city to city, meeting people you’ve never met before and getting along, the cute prairie dogs in the surreal Badlands national park, the stinky Yellowstone geysers, the times when dad would run the RV into some low hanging thing and we’d spend an hour getting an ice cream while he handled the insurance paperwork…, or that time we spent a week in a wagon [LOOK UP NAME] at a dude ranch with a hundred horses in Wyoming and saw five (!) bald eagles (they’re not bald by the way, total misnomer) along the river that runs through the Grand Tetons… and so on.
We reached home in time for the start of the new school year: all in-person with masks on at most times. It was a relief for the children to be around more children, and it’s also interesting to see how they got so used to wearing the masks that they think nothing of it.
Anna Sofia turned twelve this October, and she went to middle school - so the kids are no longer at the same school and we think this is actually best for both of them. Anna Sofia also decided to join the Aquanuts - a synchronized swimming team here in Walnut Creek where we heard one coach proudly proclaim “We don’t make friends, we make champions”. They train four times per week, two or more hours per training. Anna Sofia was already a bit of a fish in how much she loves to swim, this is just making it official. Here is a video of what those girls can do.
Liam needed a hobby beyond the iPad, so we gave him a week to make up his mind about what sport he might want to do. (His initial choice for a hobby was welding, which is great, but Ernst’s welding skills are non-existent and training programs start at older ages). We chanced upon a YouTube video of judo, he saw thirty seconds of it and proclaimed that was going to be his sport. He enrolled the next day, and has been absolutely loving it so far!
Rocio joined Latinas in Tech full-time in 2019. During the pandemic, there was as much or more of a need for the things we do at Latinas in Tech and it was growing like crazy. With the help of an amazing team of colleagues, board of directors, and advisors, the organization managed to live through the pandemic as well as Rocio’s health issues and tons of growing pains. Today Latinas in Tech has chapters in 20 different cities and has touched more than 18,000 lives around the world. The organization has almost 12 people working on it as well as over 90 volunteers and 47 corporate partners.
Ernst shifted from a Product Management to a Strategy role at Sila Nanotechnologies, the company he joined back in 2018. Sila focuses on making new materials for lithium ion batteries. 2021 was a great year for Sila as it celebrated its 10th anniversary, and the first (!) market launch of their silicon-dominant anode material in the Whoop fitness tracker. Now it’s all about scaling up so that the next EV you purchase has more range and better performance, using Sila materials in the battery.
With all of us up to date on our COVID shots, life had a slight sense of returning to a sort of new normal. So - with COVID rapid tests at the front door we managed to throw our traditional Halloween and Posada parties again.
We are now heading to Mexico to spend Christmas and New Year’s with Rocio’s side of the family. We are looking forward to an uneventful 2022.
Please tell us what is going on in your life?