For most of the past week in I was in Wisconsin, spending time with my fellow quality department members at the company headquarters. One afternoon we had a team building exercise that was a car rally. This rally provided a few hours on a Thursday afternoon to drive a course that made use of some scenic roads, showing me places I had not seen nor likely would not have had the opportunity to see, as well as the team building intent: to rely on others to get you where you needed to go.
We were scored based on information found on the course. We counted signs, kept track of the number of T-intersections we came to, copied information onto our 
scorecard. No smartphones or GPS systems were allowed, and the largest part of the score was the accuracy of our mileage. We did not finish first nor last, but we did finish and enjoyed drinks and dinner after the rally, comparing answers to questions specific to the Wisconsin countryside.
The details of the first car rally I was in is lost in the wisps of memory. It was in Santa Barbara, that much I know for certain. I was not the driver or navigator, likely a whimsical back seat passenger in either a Fiat or a Porsche, depending on who was driving, watching for signposts, learning rally basics. We set out on the rally course separated from the car in front and in back of us by a few minutes, each convinced they were going to make the best time of the day.
The finish of the event included stories from other competitors. We found out where we had gone awry, what instructions we had misunderstood and where we had followed the course correctly. The results were announced and well, how we did that day is immaterial, especially as I don't remember that part either. I had become addicted to the process, trying to out-think the instructions, split the time clock right down the middle and be in the running for the overall best performance.
Time-Speed-Distance (TSD) Rallying was very different from how most people think of motor sports. Each car was given a set of written instructions and sent off at intervals, all on public roads. The goal was to follow the course, maintain the given average speed (always legal, of course), and arrive at the checkpoints where our arrival time was clocked, giving us a score based on how close we were to being on time.
It was not a competition of speed, but rather of precision driving and navigation. The driver relied on the navigator to provide the instructions while the navigator relied on the skills of the driver. It was exciting, sometimes frustrating and always fun.
I started driving and my best friend became the navigator. At first, both of us mainly concentrated on staying on course and following the directions, more by feel than anything. I added a tachometer to the car for more accurate tracking of speed. As we gained experience, the difficulty of instructions (sometimes purposely misleading) and timing became easier to overcome. We soared to the top of the Novice category, winning the March March rally. Winning as a Novice meant we had to move up to the intermediate group, which is where we stalled and remained until we each moved away.
What mattered then and now is that the rally concept requires people to work closely together while doing fundamentally different things. Communication, trust and interdependency, building relationships and learning about one another, the foundations for the success or failure of a team.
In this day and age, families generally live hither and yon, many miles apart, and this subset of the Tabacchi family is no exception. This weekend we are fortunate that our relatives have traversed the many miles and arrived in Bellingham by plane and by ground. Words escape me when I try to thank them for making the journey.
It is a vital time for everyone, reconnecting, talking, eating, laughing loudly, updating. Most importantly we are together again and can pay tribute to those who caused us to be, brought us to where we are and made us the people we are today. Memories are the diary we keep in our heads, an instance, a thought. We carry in our hearts their smiles and joy, their tears and sorrow. We carry around their love for us, but most importantly we carry around our unconditional love for them.
Together, we are better.
As child of the space age, exploration beyond our atmosphere defined my childhood. As I wrote last year, I somehow convinced my parents while I was in grade school to allow me to take our television to school on days when Saturn rockets would launch carrying men into space or when capsules carrying those men would plunge through the atmosphere and splash down on the blue waters of the Pacific.
On April 12, 1981, we were again glued to the television as the Space Shuttle Columbia became the first shuttle to orbit the Earth. We watched history in the making as the first spacecraft intended to be used more than once lifted off from Complex 39 Pad A at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Since the late 1960s, Pads A and B at Kennedy Space Center's Launch Complex 39 have served as backdrops for America's most significant manned space flight endeavors - Apollo, Skylab, Apollo-Soyuz and the Space Shuttle. The shuttle raced off the pad, literately taking off like a rocket, especially compared to the lumbering Saturn rockets that slowly built up speed, lifting heavy payloads to Earth orbit and beyond.
On July 8, 2011, I watched the the Space Shuttle Atlantis lift off, the last shuttle to orbit the Earth. Dragging a television into my office wasn't necessary, as the all-knowing and ever-present Internet provided the images. The world has changed dramatically in the last 50 years since Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space, and much of the technology that has changed it was born of the space program.
Ear thermometers, smoke detectors, hand-held vacuum cleaners, water filters, ergonomic furniture, portable X-ray machines, programmable pacemakers, concentrated baby foods, freeze-dried instant mixes, biofeedback techniques used to reduce stress, kidney dialysis machines, reflective materials used to insulate homes, water purification technology, flame-resistant textiles, telecommunications and the Global Positioning System (GPS)...the list goes on and on, and almost all of these items pale in comparison to what some consider the single greatest result of the space program: microprocessors.
During the 1950s, computers were the size of a supermarket. Traveling into space required computers that could fit into a much smaller footprint, the now practically non-existent phone booth (see telecommunications in the paragraph above). Companies experimented with ways to reduce the size of computers, eventually resulting in the microprocessor. Every one of the tiny computer chips found in personal computers, commercial airplanes, automobiles, washers and dryers, cell phones and tens of thousands of other products trace their beginnings back to those integrated circuits first developed for the space program.
Times are tough and many of us don't have the money we need to live on; the government isn't funding much in terms of space exploration and there will be a several year gap before NASA puts its own astronauts into space. The roar of millions of pounds of thrust putting men and women into orbit will not be there to inspire the next generation to study math and science, so if there ever was a time when more investment in science education was necessary it is now. Scientific growth means economic growth and there is still much to discover.
The future of manned flight looks to depend on private companies like SpaceX, Lockheed Martin and Boeing for low earth orbit vehicles, while NASA aims to solve the next step in exploring ever further in space. It doesn't matter who works on what, but rather that the work continues, that dreams are dreamt, that the impossible is sought to be made possible, that we continue to look to the new frontier, wherever that may be.
These are the salad days of summer here in the Northwest. Not quite warm enough for most items in the vegetable garden, lettuce continues to be main harvest, at least for the moment. As they say, when life gives you butter leaf and iceberg, you make salad.
The cold and soggy spring, served up by the current La Niña, produced one of the chilliest months of May on record, pushing strawberry harvest into mid-June. The early varieties are late and the later varieties are on time, so strawberry season has been compacted into a short period. 
Just-picked, sun-ripened strawberries, loaded with natural sugars that rapidly convert to starch once the picked. The fresher the berry, the sweeter the taste.
I have not always been a fan of strawberries. As a child, strawberries and shortcake for dessert meant I was having shortcake. I did not appreciate the complex volatile flavors. Turning down strawberries always produced unusual looks in others; who turns down that scarlet exterior, filled with the flavor of summer sunshine?
It was during my first job in the food industry as a product developer that I was introduced to strawberries from the Pacific Northwest. Picked, sliced and packed at the peak of their flavor, they were different from the berries available in Southern California. The flavors were deeper, the core wasn't white, the juice deep red. The names of the varieties were just as intoxicating: Shuksan, Totem, Rainier. And they were packed with sugar, which is always an added bonus.
High tea would be incomplete without strawberry preserves along side scones and clotted cream, traditional lemonade is better with with the addition of fresh sweet strawberries, fruit salad is naked without the deep red color of sliced strawberries. Today strawberries are a welcome addition to my plate. I still need them to be sweet, as for me it embraces and enhances the flavor.
Too soon we will pack summer away for another year, carefully storing it in boxes and photographs, dreaming of when we can unpack it again. For now, we relish in it being here, living for and in the moment, taking in all that summer can supply, placing some strawberries into the freezer to open when need to feel the warmth of summer on our back.
scorecard. No smartphones or GPS systems were allowed, and the largest part of the score was the accuracy of our mileage. We did not finish first nor last, but we did finish and enjoyed drinks and dinner after the rally, comparing answers to questions specific to the Wisconsin countryside.
