September, september, where forth art thou, September? September came and went with nary a photo taken. What did we do on this solsticish month? Our calendar includes visits from Grandparents Roger and Myrna, a lovely day spent with Aine and Olivia, Al Bing's birthday, visitations from Jenn and Alan, and Silly Grandma, Luke's birthday and a visit to the Legion of Honor to watch the weekly battle of the wedding parties. Oh yes, and Ada got pneumonia and then got better. Lots of events, few pictures. Alas.

We have a bit more to show for October. At the beginning of the month, Kirsten went to San Luis Obispo to teach at the Centeral Coast Writers Workshop. From the sound of things, the classes went very well. I uploaded over 30,000 images from AntWeb to the Wikimedia commons. We had a million doctor and dentist appointments for everyone. I lost a filling. We got some pictures of baby #2, and Ada had her first dentist dentist. Oh, the excitement. Most exciting, however was Ada's third birthday, which was celebrated at Children's Fairyland. Ada went on stage with all the party people and received her birthday crown and later had cake. Then the galavanting commenced. Many folks attended and a fun time was had by all.

I'll close this entry with today's grand event, a visit to the Arata Pumpkin Farm. There were hay rides, gladiators, gorillas and monkey bars, slides, a jumpy house and, what pumpkin patch would be complete without a Minotaur.

And that sums up our September and October, except, of course, for more pictures of Ada.

Happy September! Summer is nearing its untimely end, and August went by much too quickly. Ada finished her first year of preschool, Dave proved he was a capable single dad, and I spent half the month in Vermont at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference where I was a fellow. But, before I get to all that, a few highlights from the start of the month: Dave and Mark's urban hike between Rutledge, the nice neighborhood garden, and the end of Joy street, and an evening of delicious Cantonese food at Shanghai House on Balboa Street before Dave Egger's and Vendela Vida's Away We Go.

And then, I took off for Boston, where I saw Daphne briefly, and then carpooled to the Bread Loaf campus, which is green beyond belief and full of mosquitoes. Many blamed the size of the blood-sucking population on a previously "unknown species of the fungi genus Geomyces" (a white, powdery-looking organism) that is "decimating" the mosquito's main predator, hibernating bats. None of the human participants bit, however, and I met a lot of really great people, including my roommate, Vicki Forman, whose memoir, This Lovely Life is out now. It would take pages and pages to record all of the great readings, classes, and lectures I attended there, not to mention the many wonderful conversations. In the interest of getting this posted, I'll just say that I'm very grateful that I had an opportunity to go.

While I was away, Dave and Ada kept busy seeing cousin Donovan, Julie and his folks, who converged on San Francisco. they headed out to the zoo, to Fairy Land, the Maritime Museum, and other fun SF haunts that I got to hear about when I met up with them.


I went straight from Bread Loaf to Yosemite, where I met up with Dave and Ada (who were doing just fine without me). Dave had packed up all the supplies we needed for a week at a comfy cabin at the city-run Camp Mather. We had great weather, three meals provided for us each day, and access to the fabulous lagoon and grassy beach where we spent most of our days. We discovered that one of Ada's friends from preschool was also there, so Ada had a friend to play with until Matthew and Emmett arrived to share our cabin for a couple nights.


The camp was just a few miles from the Hetch Hetchy reservoir and O'Shaughnessy Dam dam, which we visited because we wanted to see where all our water comes from. The place has some pretty dramatic water spouts and some good hiking which we hope to return and do on another trip.

That's the news here! As always, some pictures of Ada.

Ah, it's come to this, our first two-month blog. Let's just say we spent about half the last two months with at least one of us sick. Phooey!

Let's start from the top. The first half of June, one of the big highlights was the 6th Annual Robogames where we saw lots of people tinkering, some nice bar robots and some cyborgs. As always, the robots are getting more and more uncanny. Outside robogames was preparation for the Escape from Alcatraz triatholon which involved numerous pizza and beer stands. The next week was spent mostly sick, which gave us a great opportunity to potty train Ada and to drive around the city aimlessly looking for derelict buildings.

The following week we celebrated our 7th year anniversary - woo hoo! (we saw Spamalot) and Father's day (we paddled around stow lake.) At the end of the month Eve came over and read to us and we all went to the always grand gay pride parade.

Thus ends June. July was yet another slowish month punctuated with lousy illnesses. Ada started swimming lessons, which is great fun. We went down to Santa Cruz where Ada and Michele boated around the boardwalk. We had Danielle, Jen, Julie, Liz, Mike, Mike, and William over for pasta dinner. We cruised around Tomales Bay with Jonny. Toward the month's end, I volunteered at the California Academy of Science's nightlife where I channeled the ant spirits to answer important personal questions at the Love Picnic.

And that, friends, is that. We've all been pretty healthy lately, so hopefully next month we'll be back on our usual once-a-month-ish schedule. Until then, if you have any questions for the ants, feel free to ask. And of course, here are some more pictures of Ada!

Greetings! May was an event-filled month, starting off with the making of butter (using the recipe in Karen Solomon's awesome cookbook, Jam It, Pickle It, Cure It), which we brought to Marco's 40th birthday party.

We also made a brief trip to the panhandle to watch Bay to Breakers, which had more drinking and less running than I remembered from previous years. Don't know that we'll make a point of going next year, but the costumes are fun to see.

Speaking of costumes, the Carnival parade was fantastic as always. Ada didn't see too much of it, because it was bitter cold (well, 50 some odd degrees) and she was still recovering from pneumonia, but we strolled the length of the forming parade and took some nice pictures. Despite the cold, thongs abounded, and pirates walked the streets with decked-out mini Bart cars.

Grandma came down and joined us for the Maker Faire, which was awesome and inspiring as always. The cupcakes were out, the art was fantastic, we got to see Karen make marshmallows and Julie and Craig tout the Speed Vest. Ada played on some great red pillows, and the t-shirt fashion was amazing. We left with a cheese-making kit, a pair of pirate socks, a couple new t-shirts, and plans for future projects that we hope to carry out.

We also made a trip to Children's Fairy Land, where we ran into some friends, played in tunnels, and took the train around and around the food court. Other highlight's include: game night with Julie, Dave's trip to see Star Trek, a picnic with all our old sharecare friends, a night of great readings at the WOMBA tour, and the gala fundraiser event for Ada's preschool. We also, as always, took some nice pictures of Ada.

Ah, April, and Spring was in the air. Well, some days anyway. Luckily, it was warm and sunny
on the day of the Annual Golden Gate Mothers Group
Easter Egg Hunt, which was well attended by terrifying bunnies and hungry yolk-thirsty mobs. If you think I'm exaggerating, here's a picture of one of the bunnies who took too long to cough up his eggs. Lucky for all involved, George, Cate Oscar and Edward our visiting cousins from across the pond came a bit too late to witness our San Francisco Easter. They stuck around for a few days and we had a grand time wandering around town with them.

April held other excitement as well. Kirsten and I got gussied up for the Northern California Book Review's Award ceremony, where Kirsten got a certificate for writing one of the five best fiction books of 2008 (she's second from the left, as always, I offer my excellent photography services at a reasonable price).

Other adventures were wine tasting and picnicing in Sonoma, and a visit to Zeum which is a great place for kids interested in creating media. They have a room where you can make stop-motion movies with clay figures, you can record yourself doing kareoke, you can morph a picture of yourself, or you can slide down a green screen and see yourself surfing on a nearby tv. Outside Zeum is an awesome carousel, which has a long history including being the first carousel that Ada has ridden on her own. And speaking of our big girl, here are more pictures of Ada.

February and March have come and gone, and this post covers both months because we were all sick for pretty much all of February. Plus, February is a short month. The high point was Dave's talk out at UC Merced, where he got a reserved parking space. Other events: I cut my hair (before after) and Ada brought the Valentine's Day spirit.

On to March and our visits to Pie Ranch, a "is a thriving, hands-on farm and food system education center located on the California coast, between San Francisco and Santa Cruz." They have a great barn with kids bikes, little tractors, and cool guests. And good pie, of course.

We made it to the Conservatory of Flowers' train exhibit, which was great. The exhibit runs until April 19th and incorporates potted plants, model trains, and SF landmarks fabricated from recycled materials.

We also made it down to Children's Fairy Land for a brief visit with the puppets, the pig people, the big bad wolf, and the giant turtle thing. We also enjoyed a visit from my dad and myrna, who came up to see us and Wicked, which was a pretty spectacular production. Other highlights include: dave's birthday, which we celebrated with a steak dinner, a trip to the top of the Marriot for a cocktail and a late night showing of Watchmen; Dave's demo and little talk at the AAAI Spring Symposium in Stanford to these qualitative spatial reasoning experts; a trip to the zoo; Coraline (the movie); a picnic in Golden Gate park; good news about Olaf (nominated for the Northern California Book Awards in fiction); a night of mortification, and a trip up to Uva, a nice wine bar in the Haight.

Finally, as always, I'll sign off with some pictures of Ada. Hope you're doing well!

Happy 2009! This first post of 2009 is going to be short! There were just a few highlights in 2009 so far. As usual, we all started the year off sick. Seems the diseases we had at the end of 2008 rotated around and mixed with others so we all got a fresh start in the New Year. Happily, it gave us plenty of time to play with legos.

In between building lego houses, we celebrate the inauguration of President Obama! Three weeks into the administration, I still have to quash my learned cynism. San Francisco celebrated by renaming Bush street to Obama Street.

Later in the month we celebrated a belated Chanukah with ma and pa Thau and Julie. And somewhere in between we played with our new mopping robot, had a visitation from our pals Kirsten, David and Max, and celebrated our friend Julie's birthday by dressing up as tourists and wandering around the Civic Center. See if you can identify the real tourist in that picture.

And that is pretty much that for January, except, of course, for pictures of Ada!