As government agencies are embracing remote work and full time telework, there’s a lot to consider for folks who might toy with the idea of relocating just because we can.

My boss mentioned that Houston is the perfect location because it has the 3rd highest locality pay, Texas has no income tax and there are some really amazing schools there.

Only seven states have no personal income tax:

• Wyoming.
• Washington.
• Texas.
• South Dakota.
• Nevada.
• Florida.
• Alaska.

Taking a look at this locality pay interactive map, you can see that the whole eastern coast from DC through Connecticut has some kind of locality pay: https://www.federalpay.org/gs/locality

Highest Paying Locality Pay Areas

• San Francisco: $113,431.
• New York City: $107,448.
• Houston: $106,919.
• Washington, DC: $104,641.
• Rest of the U.S.: $92,988.

All parents have a limited amount of resources whether that includes time or money or family support. If our daughter had her way, she’d probably be in every sport and activity. But we don’t have unlimited resources. So we have to prioritize.

My husband and I have often talked about making swimming a priority and the number 1 reason is drowning is a leading cause of death for children ages 5 to 8. While I’m still trying to figure out this parenting thing, I think one principle of parenting that is probably indisputable: Keep the Kid Alive! With that in mind, Vee has been in swimming classes since she was four months old.

In general my husband I are are indifferent to sports as long as our daughter has some form of fitness. For a while, she was obsessed with soccer until she wasn’t. Then she was obsessed with basketball. Until she wasn’t. Then back to soccer. Those are great forms of fitness. But we aren’t negotiable on swimming. Swimming provides prevention against drowning which can threaten us at any point in our lives. It’s a critical skill that I didn’t have when I arrived at Marine Corps boot camp. And it’s a skill that Vee’s paternal grandmother still doesn’t hasn’t mastered. It’s a skill we want our daughter to have. She will likely not be a champion swimmer. She’s probably going to be too short. But we don’t mind.

Swimming is also a great lifetime fitness skill. Please feel free to post comments, but my understanding is that unlike other sports that destroy the body, swimming is kinetically kind to our body and allows us to maintain a lifetime of fitness without damaging joints or causing injuries. So we have dedicated a lot of time and energy to establishing her as a swimmer.

As a Marine, I helped train some folks who struggled with swimming. One of the techniques we used to help establish confidence is wearing a wetsuit. It’s important to understand that a wetsuit is not the same as a U.S. Coast Guard certified life preserver. The advantage to a wetsuit is buoyancy. While it won’t help you swim, it does allow you to float higher while you try to figure it out.

Step 1 – Get a wetsuit and learn to blow bubbles and bob. The focus at this stage is to ensure breathing out while under and in while on top of the water. Although this seems obvious, intellectually. It’s something you want your body to do automatically and effortlessly. Whenever your face feels air, beathe in.

Step 2, spread your body out like a 5-star starfish and float. You can do this in as little as 10 inches of water. Even a backyard wading pool. Just gain the confidence and knowledge that if you get tired or get out where you aren’t okay, you can roll over on your back and breathe easy.

Step 3, convert your floating on your back into slow smooth movement for a backstroke.

Build up endurance with the backstroke

Use tools like a floating barbell to practice swimming freestyle strokes. These take a while to get the hang of. It’s complicated. Don’t give up. Keep trying. Deep water is not required. It’s fine to try this in water where you can touch the bottom. It’s better if you can touch the bottom. And use the wetsuit to help stay up.

Work on other complicated strokes like the breaststroke.

One of the 1st surprising events was our daughter’s 1st vaccination. I had to google infant vaccinations and it looks like the 1st shots are at 2 months. The doctor told us if she cried for 2 days to call. It was a Friday. She cried for 3 days. I kept wondering if I should take her to the ER or urgent care since it was a weekend, but she didn’t appear to have any physical symptoms. There was no skin rash or difficulty breathing. I was at a loss for why she could be effected for days after the vaccination.

Afterwards, we changed our approach to infant vaccinations. Rather than just one more errand to conduct in a busy day, I took the day off. We went in the morning and planned a day at the zoo afterward. As soon as they gave her the shot, dad whisked her immediately outside – even before the nurse had time to put the band aid – in her favorite daddy back – chest mounted baby carrier. I stayed inside handling the close out paperwork. By the time I got outside, she had stopped crying. We focused on a wonderful day at the zoo, casually walking through the San Antonio zoo on a weekday so there were no crowds.

Very soon thereafter, we went for a long walk in one of our favorite mountain hiking trails. We used a backpack that I think of as the Cadillac of baby carriers – an Osprey. Dad carried her because he’s more sure of foot than I am and I worried if I stumbled and fell, she might get hurt. After about 30 or 40 minutes, we stopped to check if she wanted a drink or a snack or needed a diaper change. Once dad took off the pack and we got her out and sat her on a thick tree root, she burst out crying. She was inconsolable. We were both at a loss. There didn’t seem to be any reason for her to cry.

Also in the Cadillac of baby carriers, I took off one evening around sunset to get some fitness with baby on my shoulders. When the sun went down, she burst into tears and I think it was simply the fact that she had never seen night set in before that moment.

This is the Cadillac of baby carriers – Osprey brand backpack.

Frequently our daughter was aware of sounds I didn’t register. One days she was fascinated by the “music” of the swing set at the playground. I had no idea what she was talking about. Eventually I came to understand she was talking about the squeaking of the chains as the moved against the frame as the swing moved. Even in utero, she danced when I played music for my belly every evening before sleeping. She still raves about the soundtrack of movies, TV programs, video games. Sound is of particular fascination for her. So we got her into piano at age 2.

https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/2945855/austin-orders-fort-stewart-armored-brigade-combat-team-to-europe/

I’d like to talk briefly about the idea in national defense of domains. While Information Technology people think of domains as website addresses, the national defense thinks of domains as one of 5 specific areas of warfare. As we all know from elementary history class, the Americans fighting the British used lanterns to tell if the British were coming by land or by sea.

http://www.paul-revere-heritage.com/one-if-by-land-two-if-by-sea.html

Later, beginning with WWI, but really getting standardized in WWII, air became a domain for warfighting.

Most recently, we’ve added cyber. Most people accept that cyber is a real threat as far as warfighting domains.

Lastly, space. This is where many people aren’t fully convinced. However, it’s not a complicated concept. Our modern world relies heavily on satellite technology. Per the NASA website, “Satellites provide information about Earth’s clouds, oceans, land and air. They also can observe wildfires, volcanoes and smoke. All this information helps scientists predict weather and climate. It helps farmers know what crops to plant.”

https://www.nasa.gov/audience/forstudents/k-4/stories/nasa-knows/what-is-a-satellite-k4.html

Most military strategists have been thinking in terms of “multidomain attacks” meaning coordinating an air attack with a land attack or a sea assault with an airborne operation. Think of D Day at Normandy – air, land and sea forces all converging on the same point. Then add the next two domains – cyber and space.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/russia-just-blew-up-a-satellite-heres-why-that-spells-trouble-for-spaceflight

This note is just a little context for the announcement that happened 10 minutes ago on the defense dot gov website.

https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/2945855/austin-orders-fort-stewart-armored-brigade-combat-team-to-europe/

Disclaimer: these are my personal observations

My 6yo has been studying piano at Neville Ottley’s school of music in Hyattsville, MD since she was 2 years old. Today, she got her first bank account and asked me how to put some money in it. I suggested she create a YouTube channel to earn money. She agreed to teach piano online. This is her channel. Please subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8FmxF-WlAkW8d1sm-OtfoQ

She follows the Little Mozarts music book series. https://www.amazon.com/Alfreds-Music-Little-Mozarts-Books/dp/B07QQCRSYJ

She started with a touch sensitive keyboard from Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Casio-61-Key-Portable-Keyboard-CT-S300-dp-B07WN7NG5H

History:  

100 years ago – the most common job in the USA was farmer or farm labor

100 years ago, the cultural expectation of health was simple the absence of illness 

Now, we our culture has a very different idea of physical health. It’s a continual, active pursuit. How do we pursue physical health on a daily basis? 

Eating right, hydration, physical fitness, avoiding toxins (tobacco, caffeine, alcohol) , regular checkups – data cholesterol levels, vitamin D level, complete blood count BMI, body fat percent, bone density, etc., etc., etc. 

Fundamental paradigm shift: Mental Health is an active, continual, aggressive pursuit of health rather than the absence of illness 

How do we pursue mental health? 

#1 SLEEP!!!! Like your life depends on it 

1. Sleep hygiene – blackout curtains, a lower room temperature, a shower or bath within the hour before bed, silence,  
2. Sleep aids – generally avoid, but … melatonin 
3. white light is the enemy – screen night mode, sleep setting on all devices – computers, tables, smart phones, 
4. Sleep opportunity 
5. WHY? Why does sleep matter?  
6. Taking out the trash – brain feces 
7. Sleep experiments comparing sleep deprived behavior patterns to debilitating mental illness 
8. Like food and water, sleep is a physiological need 
9. A standard routine every night – kids too.  

#2 meditation.  

1. Used as a sleep aid 
2. Used as brain booster 

#3 Mindfulness –  

1. sky, nature 
2. walking teleconferences 

#4 Emotional intelligence – make it a point to consciously think about, even document your mental/emotional state 

1. Note your own emotional state 2 or 3 times per day. Write it down 
2. Share your emotional state with people around you to get their feedback. 
3. Note the emotional state of people around you 
4. Share the emotional state of people around you with them to get their feedback.  
5. Note group emotional states 
6. Share group emotional states 
7.  NOTE: Be aware of explosions – if, in your own estimation, you overreacted to something, it’s time for a mental health day off. Same as waking up with sour throat, congestion, headache indicates you need to stay in bed for a day. An unexpected emotional burst indicates you need a day at the spa, a hike in a national park, or whatever heals you. 

#5 Open mind –  

1. Thank you for being late Thomas Freedman 
2. random connections 
3. 5-minute breaks every hour  
4. “Sitting is the new smoking” 

#6 the power of breathing 

Conclusion: The inner world is a real world – James Baldwin 

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/9837911-though-we-do-not-wholly-believe-it-yet-the-interior

This is a book review about Love Both, Keep Both by Ken Reiman.

Ken’s book resonates deeply with me because I bought home a foreign spouse and while Asian spouses are common for men, dating back to the Korean and Vietnamese conflicts, a woman bringing an Asian husband to the US is a relatively new social phenomenon. My Beijing-born beau and I are raising an Amerasian daughter, a German-Chinese-American daughter. We have worried about racism and bullying since before she was born. My husband worries incessantly about whether she will be face higher than standard barriers for entry into the nation’s best universities based on recent articles about Ivy League universities putting higher standards on Asian students.

Like all parents, we worry about just about everything.

Ken’s story gives me hope. I’m amazed and inspired by the way his mom was able to give him access to his Japanese heritage. And I assume his parents did the same thing we did with our daughter. We gave our daughter a name that would fit easily with the Anglican world, Ann, and a name that would fit easily in China, Japan and Korea: The Chinese word an – 安 – ān. (peace in Chinese). For readers who are not aware, the famous Japanese Hollywood Actor made famous for movies like Memoirs of a Geisha and Flags of our Fathers and to me, most intensely Memories of Tomorrow (明日の記憶, Ashita no Kioku, Ken Watanabe, did not select an anglophile name, Ken. He was born WatanabeKen – in a corner of the world where family names come first. Ken is a syllable in the Sino ideograms that characterize the written elements of most of far east Asia. So, I assume that Ken’s parents also selected a Chinese character for Ken Reiman’s personal name that wouldn’t make him stand out in either the western world or the Asian world.

Like Ken’s parents, I hope to gift my daughter as many skills and as much access as I possibly can. I have been sitting with her in Chinese language classes for 2 hours every Saturday since she was 2 years old. And it has paid off. Now, at 5, she’s quite conversational, although, like Ken, she had the advantage of her grandmother, who lives with us and speaks only Mandarin.

I’ve taken parenting inspiration from Ken’s writing and from the extraordinary success of my Pentagon pal, a Black man from the rural south of the US, who, like me, joined the middle class by joining the military. He also brought home the ultimate souvenir in a foreign spouse from South Korea and his wife ensured their son spoke fluent Korean language. Additionally, thanks to a military tour in Germany while the young man was in his middle school years, he is currently on a study abroad program in Germany. He is studying abroad from the Air Force Academy because he was accepted into all three service academies. Yes, you read that correctly. He was accepted into West Point, the Naval Academy, and the Air Force Academy.

Of course, once I learned about my colleague’s son’s amazing acceptance letters, I wanted to know how they did it. One, their son was raised multilingual, like Ken. Two, their son was raised internationally, like Ken. They also ensured he participated in some of the most valued experiences for the military academies such as the Civil Air Patrol. Obviously, I added an Eagle Scout in Scouting and civil air patrol to my daughter’s to-do list in addition to language and foreign experiences.

What is most painful about Ken’s book is that it seems logical that the culmination of his career would have naturally been a tour as the U.S. Ambassador to Japan. And as he points out, this isn’t something that would only benefit his mom’s braggadocio but would be most beneficial to the United States.  Leveraging kids/people with these kinds of inclusive and comprehensive minds would logically improve our ability to clearly understand the pain points and priorities of our partners and gives the optimal advantage to achieve the maximum potential from our international relationships.

While I feel disappointed at the irrational regulations barring Ken’s best contributions to our country, I’m excited about what I see in our country today. Another one of my colleagues at the Pentagon, a Latino, was so excited that his children, already fluent in Spanish, were accepted into a Japanese immersion program at a public school in Great Falls, Virginia. And my daughter started kindergarten in Paint Branch Elementary School in College Park, MD, where a partnership with the University of Maryland provides a partial immersion program for Mandarin Chinese. What’s more, we met children from Berwyn Heights Elementary School while participating in a Prince George’s County Parks archery program and we were stunned to hear them speaking Mandarin Chinese. Berwyn Heights Elementary School apparently also has a Mandarin program.

We considered whether to apply for the lottery for a Blue Ribbon elementary and middle school in Beltsville that provides a French immersion. And our daughter attended a Spanish immersion summer camp in Springfield, VA where she came home with all manner of stories telling us about the history and details of Ecuador, the Galapagos islands, Chile, and other South American countries. It wasn’t just language, she was learning, she was learning culture and history.

Lastly, it isn’t necessary to be genetically unique like Ken or my daughter, anyone can and should participate in the global world. I was raised on welfare, but still managed to encounter the world by joining the Marines. My first and final assignments in the Marine Corps were in Okinawa and Tokyo and I studied Japanese at both locations. After the Corps, I returned to Japan and worked for the University of Maryland, Asian Division where I completed my bachelor’s degree. Since it took me 13 years and I was the first in my family to get a degree, I was happy. But Dr. Ted Franck suggested I consider India for a master’s degree. I didn’t speak Hindu, I argued. It’s Hindi, he corrected, and you don’t have to. There are hundreds of English-speaking universities all around the world. I searched and considered the American Universities in Paris, Bulgaria, and Beirut before settling on the American University in Cairo. After 3 years in Egypt, I studied Spanish in Santiago, Chile before I was hired by the State Department and served in Panama, South Korea, and again in Japan before serving my final overseas tour in Guyana. Along the way, I tested 3/3 in Spanish, 2/2 in Japanese, and 1+ in Arabic and Korean.

The world is out there for all of us to participate in, and I hope we all take a call to action from Ken’s work.

We think today of White Supremists as fringe weirdos or at least I do. But in fact, 100 years ago, this idea was mainstream. This from the book Sapiens, “According to the Nazis, Homo sapiens had already divided into several distinct races (read species, like Neanderthal as opposed to homo sapiens), each with its own unique qualities. One of these races (species), the Aryan race, had the finest qualities – rationalism, beauty, integrity, diligence. Other races, such as Jews and Blacks, were today’s Neanderthals, possessing inferior qualities. If allowed to breed and in particular to intermarry with Aryans, they would adulterate all human populations and doom the Homo sapiens species to extinction. Biologists debunked Nazi racial theory. In particular, genetic research conducted after 1945 has demonstrated that the differences between various human lineages are far smaller than Nazis postulated. But these conclusions are relatively new. Given the state of scientific knowledge in 1933, Nazi beliefs were credible. The existence of different human races, the superiority of the white race, and the need to protect and cultivate this superior race were widely held beliefs among most Western elite. Scholars in the most prestigious Western universities, using the orthodox scientific methods of the day, published studies that allegedly proved that members of the white race were more intelligent, more ethical, more skilled than Africans or Indians. Politicians in Washington, London and Canberra took it for granted that it was their job to prevent the adulteration and degeneration of the white race, by, for example, RESTRICTING IMMIGRATION FROM CHINA or even Italy to ‘Aryan’ countries such as the USA and Australia. Hitler not only dug his own grave, but that of racism in general. When he launched WWII, precisely because Nazi ideology was so extremely racist, racism became discredited in the West. The change took time. White Supremacy remained a mainstream ideology in American politics until at least the 1960s.” Then the civil rights and the sexual revolutions in the US helped us begin moving past the Nazi era.

Hitler did us a favor and started the long downward spiral of racism. Who knew?