My Happening Blog

2012-01-06T21:57:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year! You can guess our New Years Resolution... blog more frequently! Yes, it's been months since our last entry. It's unclear if that's a measure of how busy we are, how uneventful our lives are, or how wiped out we are, but it's probably a combination of all three. We'll let you be the judge of that based on our... Fall blog!

Let's start off with a bang - Ada's 5th birthday! We celebrated at the children's pleasure palace, the inflatable party zone, Pump It Up! The usual suspects, including Grandpa Roger and Grandma Myrna, gathered for an afternoon of sliding, bouncing, batting, eating cake, and Ada adoration.

Next up, Halloween! The two girls in the middle are our neighbors Barbara (10) and Cindy (2). Halloween also marks the birthday of Ada's old friend Emmet, which was celebrated with mustachios. And, we went to a real performance, hosted by evil clowns titled Shevil Dead. It was an all-woman parody of the Evil Dead movies. As stated in the ad for the show... "Unlike other theater companies with blood shows, we do not charge extra for sitting in a blood section. Everyone will be covered in blood... although there will be a small Dry Seats Section." Good times. Good times.

October also held a visit from our friend Jen S. from New York, a visitation from Ada's friends Aine and Olivia, and Ada's new friend Ryder's birthday... also at PUMP IT UP (the inflatable party zone)!

Onto November, where our house was party central. November began for me with a trip to Sao Paolo where I did a training on SAD online which does deforestation detection in the Amazon. The weekend after I got back, we had a big fiesta with Ada's friends and family where Asher got a lot of love.

Then it was Thanksgiving. Grandma Eve and our nephews came, as did Aunt Lenore and Uncle Ali, as well as Grandma Vera, Grandpa Bob, Aunt Julie, Grandpa Roger, and Grandma Myrna. There was much feasting by all, and sundry. And then came digestion.

And that's November! Onto December. We had some holiday parties - Google's and the Grotto's, and then... vacation! Yes!

We went to Kauai! The plane trip over was relaxing, the condo we stayed in was lovely, the beaches were magnificent and profuse with cocks. We drank many, many, many fruity drinks, and saw many, many, many, many rainbows. We visited caves and showed off our San Francisco beach style. We also ate very well - a special mahalo to the Fish Express where we had incredible poke and macadamia nut encrusted ahi. Ono!

And that brings us the the year's end, which we spent thanking ceiling cat for a splendid 2011, and closing out the year with a trip to the Santa Cruz Boardwalk.

So, welcome 2012! We look forward to writing about our antics within your span. And of course, let us not forget additional
pictures from the lives of Ada and Asher.

2011-10-17T22:28:00.000-07:00

Happy Fall! Soon, Halloween will arrive with all its dragons and princesses, but for now, we're enjoying summer weather, warm light, and a few consecutive weeks in which dave has no trips! But, I see that he last wrote over a month ago, so I'll start back then, with our sleepover at Children's Fairyland...

On the Saturday after Ada's first week of school, she, Asher, Dave, and I brought our tent, sleeping bags, and one (ultimately unused) pack-n-play into the Land and set up camp. It was cozy camping; our tent was so close to our neighbor's that I thought the dad in the tent two yards south of ours was actually snoring *in* our tent. Asher was one of the youngest guests, but he slept like a star (perhaps the only one in the whole park who made it through (most) of the night. The night was a lot of fun. We all had a fabulous time hanging out on benches, meeting some new friends, sailing the seven seas, eating al fresco, riding rides late into the night, watching puppet and magic shows, and hanging out with even more new friends.

The next week our friends Jill, Gideon, Kali and Milo arrived. I'm sorry to say that we were having too much fun to take photographs! Henry was also visiting from London, so we had a full house. In fact, we would probably have suffered some sort of empty nest syndrome after their departures had not Sven stopped by to visit. We also had some fun times with Ellen, Keith, Julia, Amy, Kai, Al, Marco, Heather, and Jon.

Ada started gymnastics and swim classes, both of which she claims to enjoy. While she tries out the trampoline and cartwheels, Dave and Asher wander around San Francisco taking pictures of interesting houses.

And suddenly, it's September, with Back to School Night and a volunteer-to-clean-up-the-school-garden day. The highlight of Labor Day weekend was Lainey's tie-dye party, where everyone got dressed up and dyed shirts. Asher spent most of his time off-roading.

September was also when Dave went to Indonesia, where he rated the bathrooms and spent hours in what appears to be the most beautiful airport in the world, complete with butterfly garden. He was there for the Governors' Climate and Forests Task Force conference, which took place in Borneo.

While he was away, my mom and I hung out in San Francisco. I helped serve on the faculty of the Spend the Day at the Grotto School, which was a fundraiser for 826 Valencia.

And suddenly, October, time for the school fund-raising walk-a-thon, where Ada surprised us all by walk/running 5.5 miles. I was awed. We all were. Lots of fun was had by all.

The last thing I'm going to talk about is the sand castle contest, which was awesome. We didn't participate, just admired the castles and tomb-like structures, and giant turtles and such.

Well, the sand castles are not the very last thing. I couldn't sign off without first linking to some pictures of Ada and Asher.

2011-08-31T21:08:00.000-07:00

Well, it's been a long time since our last post, but we've been busy! Much and more has transpired this summer, including a great deal of travel. Let's just start with a list of the places I'll talk about here: Santa Cruz, Vienna, Rwanda, Monterrey, South Dakota, Big Bear, Children's Fairyland, Portland, Shasta, and… Scandia! You can see why it's been so long between posts.

Life started peacefully enough with a trip to the Santa Cruz boardwalk and Ada's dance recital. Ada's the third from the left in the "recital" link. If you can't tell, the teacher is stage left, giving the girls tips. The first half of June also marked the maiden flight of the baby collared dove who was born at our threshold.

Soon after that, I started my next round of travel. It started with a meeting at IIASA in Laxenburg, which is a suburb of Vienna. The meeting was about validating global land cover maps - exciting stuff. If you want to learn more, here's the program for the meeting. I gave a talk there, and as a side benefit got to see the first lunar eclipse of 2011.

From Austria, I went to Rwanda. First, to the capital city of Kigali, where I presented at a conference on forest cover mapping in the Hotel Rwanda - the focus of events described in the excellent movie of the same name. The hotel, it turns out, was not the ostentatious hotel in the movie, but it was beautiful, and had a fantastic restaurant. I only spent a day in Kigali, so I didn't get a very good sense for it. One thing that surprised me was how clean the city is. One contributor to this is Umuganda, a long standing tradition held the last Saturday of every month during which everyone 18 or older spends from 7am to noon cleaning up public spaces and doing other public works.

After my day in Kigali, I hopped on a bus and drove two hours past teams of people, small towns, and houses to Ruhengeri. The main thing that brings tourists to Ruhengeri is Volcanos National Park where people can go on treks to hang out with the rare Mountain Gorilla. I did not go on a Gorilla trek, but I did trek into the park to measure trees with a group of people from the workshop (and our armed guard). The workshop was organized by the Woods Hole Research Center and was a great success.

That covers June. After Rwanda, we had a quick trip down to Monterey for 4th of July weekend with the cousins, and Ali and Lenore. We hung around the Monterey aquarium, drank wine, and read books.

Next, it was back on a plane for me, this time to exotic South Dakota. There I sent some time with Matt Hansen and his team at the Geographic Information Science Center of Excellence, and then headed to the Earth Resources Observation and Science Center. EROS was amazing - it contains the largest civilian archive of remotely sensed imagery in the world. This includes recently declassified spy satellite data, and racks and racks of terabyte tapes. It's also where much of the satellite data are collected. We were lucky enough to be visiting the control room when two satellites were beaming down their data. EROS also houses a large number of scientists, many of whom were interested in what we had to say about Earth Engine. After that I had a quick little visit to the musty Northwoods Resort in Big Bear to present at the Society for Conservation 2011 Annual Conference, and I've been home ever since. Hooray!

The end of July brought an exhausting visit to fairyland, and a visit from cousin Donovan, Grandpa Bob, Grandma Vera, Aunt Julie, and Doris, who was the person who originally introduced my parents to each other.

And now we're into the first two weeks of August. They were big weeks! August 5th was Ada's last day at Big City and on following day she had her graduation ceremony where she said goodbye to her teacher, Miss Evelyn, partied hard, and cleaned out her cubby.

Right after graduation, there was a party at Claire's house, and then into the car to drive up to Portland (with a quick night in romantic Weed). There we stayed with silly Grandma, played with water at the Portland Children's Museum, and splashed around city fountains.

On the way back home we spent a few days around Mount Shasta, staying at our favorite inn there - the Railroad Park Resort where every room is a cute caboose. There's lots to do around Shasta. There's a nice (though somewhat gothic) park in Dunsmuir where much romping occurred, the original Black Bear Diner, the awesome Sisson Museum near Dick Bliss Park which houses old firetrucks, creepy dioramas, a fish remote, and a nearby hatchery swarming with trout that we fed pellets from little fish food vending machines. We ended our trip with a quick visit to Scandia where we spent most of our time in their extensive house of tubes.

Finally, we made it home in time for Ada's first day of kindergarten! What a big girl! And as usual, we end with copious pictures of Ada and Asher.

2011-05-31T20:37:00.001-07:00

Happy May folks!
Although this blog is mostly about May, a little April creeps in due to the 44th San Francisco Cherry Blossom festival. We had yummy Udon from Ada's soon-to-be grade school and bounced around inside Hello Kitty. Most of the rest of the month was spent swinging, sliding and sleeping (or not).

The most auspicious event of the month was egg painting with Rossana and Julian, followed by a big egg hunt. Kirsten developed a complicated set of rules which captivated the hunters. Considerably less auspicious, though interesting, was Google I/O where I mostly lurked, but helped out a little during Geo office hours.

And that, my friends, wraps up May (except for pictures of Ada and Asher). Hope yours was as (relatively) smooth as ours.

2011-04-17T20:58:00.000-07:00

Happy March! And happy birthday, Asher! Hard to believe that the little guy is already a year old. Here he is in his birthday hat, and here is his special birthday cake, made by his first babysitter, Allison. What can I say? We had much family, much wine, and much fun.

In honor of Asher's first birthday, we converted my office into his bedroom, a place where no one can ever slam the door closed to keep him out (at one point, he was going to move into Ada's bedroom...). We hired a painter to cover the walls (paper intact) with joint compound, then paint, and I spent a couple days moving my things down to the basement while dave moved his things to make room. A huge project! But well worth the time and effort. Asher loves his new room, and we've all been spending a lot of time hanging out there.

This month's highlights include a trip to the NASA Super Special Space Event Day (um, not the formal name, but that's the gist of it), where we got to hang out in a space station capsule; a trip to Fairyland; hanging out on the beach; bike rides in the neighborhood; the bay Area Discovery Museum, where Asher hung out in a cave and Ada made prints; Piggyback rides; more piggyback rides; trips to our local parks; some sidewalk art; and a visit from Al and Marco, who dressed to match our house.

Ada also got her official school portraits. Three different poses!

That's pretty much the news. Dave, too, celebrated a birthday... we went out for a protein-rich Brazilian BBQ at Espetus Churrascaria. The kids stayed home, but you can see pictures of them here and here.

2011-02-20T19:53:00.001-08:00

Happy 2011! We've been spending the year enjoying the splendours of San Francisco (when I'm not traveling, that is). Much of these first six weeks of 2011 has been spent touring and discussing the merits of schools for Ada. San Francisco has a crazy lottery system wherein we list 10 or so schools that we want, and may well get none of them. Happily, we've submitted our form and now can clear that part of our minds up for other matters. In March we find out where the city says Ada should go. Keep your fingers crossed for us.

Now, as I said, we've been exploring the splendours of San Francisco. This includes gazing upon orbs at the Exploratorium, hanging out with friends at the post-apocolyptic Metreon, eating fine foods in elegant establishments like the Rainforest Cafe, and checking out the art and cake at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

There has also been a significant amount of ballet, as well as some goats.

We also celebrated a couple of firsts for Asher: his first dim sum, and just today, he started walking. Let the games begin!

The beginning of the year was a lovely respite from my crazed traveling towards the end of 2010. However, February kicked of traveling season for me again. I had two trips in two weeks. The first was to the National Science Foundation where I had the pleasure of serving on a grant advisory panel. I spent the weekend home, and then went to the second science and data meeting for the GEO Forest Carbon Tracking task which was held at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations in Rome, where I slept in lovely Italian twee and ate many good meals, with great company on the roof.

And with that I close the first blog of 2011. Oh wait.. no! I close with pictures of Ada and Asher. Happy New Year!

2010-12-31T19:38:00.000-08:00

Here it is, New Year's Eve, and I'm racing to finish documenting November and December so as not to start off the new year catching up on the old one. Overall, 2010 was a good year, full of stress, but also tons of good things: Asher, Dave's new job and degree, and life in general in San Francisco. In terms of the last couple months... I must start with Halloween, where Ada broke out her mermaid costume, Dave dressed as sea weed, Asher was a tiger, and I donned my cape and paraded around Fair Oaks street as "the dark lord." This was the first year we went to a part of San Francisco famous for its trick-or-treat scene, and we had a blast. Four of five blocks of Fair Oaks were blocked off to traffic and the entire neighborhood was out with candy and impressive decoration.

November and December are already a blur, but here's what I recall: We met the chief of the Surui at a party in his honor (he and his people are doing very cool things with technology and preserving rain forest down in Brazil). And we had a nice Thanksgiving down in Santa Cruz with my dad, Myrna and Enzo. Ada started ballet class once a week, which she loves. And Asher started to crawl/stand/push chairs around as he tried to walk, which is his ultimate goal.

Dave spent the last couple days of November and most of early December down in Cancun for the climate change conference, where his team launched the project they have all been working hard on, the Google Earth Engine. We'd considered all going down as a family, but the logistics were too complicated (and Dave was working too hard!), so Ada, Asher, and I stayed in San Francisco with my mom and later Daphne, who was in town promoting her fabulous novel, Russian Winter. We had a great time chatting about her book with my book group and throwing a book party for her at our house, where Daphne read and the kids made their own books in the book lab.

The holiday season was already in full swing by the time we swung by our favorite holiday house, where Ada and Asher made friends with a gorilla. We had a lovely Hanukkah celebration with the Thau folks, as well as a bit of ballet (the Nutcracker), which inspired Ada to write a letter to Clara (still not sent or written, but she still speaks of it).

Asher got a new car seat just in time for our big road trip down to Disney Land and Lenore, Ali, Cyrus, and Gus's house, where we celebrated Christmas. It rained two of the three days that we were in Anaheim for Disney Land, and I have to say that the weather was a wonderful thing. Sure, we had to wear rain coats, but we walked right into the happiest place on earth. No line, none whatsoever. We didn't realize how great it was until our last day, when it was sunny, and even walking between attractions felt like waiting in line.

We had a great time with Lenore et al in Vista. In addition to many amazing meals, much opening of presents, and general merriment, we made a trip down to Lego Land and ear-candled ourselves. On the trip back, we stopped off for a night with Dave's folks, which was nice.

It's nearly time for dinner, new year's eve dinner, so I'm going to sign off in a minute. Aside from a fun trip to the Bay Area Discovery Museum, where Asher got to hang out on the water beds and Ada ran around and made forts, I think I've touched on all the recent highlights. And, of course, as always, pictures of Ada and Asher.

2010-11-13T21:51:00.000-08:00

Oh, it's been busy, busy times here at myhappening! Ada's birthday, Asher's starting to eat, lots of traveling for me, San Francisco school madness, and demolition pretty much sums up the past two or so months.

Starting with demolition, we said bye-bye to the toppling gazebo in our backyard. It was just a matter of time before that thing fell on someone. Luckily, Grandma was around to keep everyone entertained while I tore that thing down and dragged its remains to the dump.

After the destruction, we treated ourselves to some creation - gigantic prints made with the help of a steamroller. Also, smaller prints, made with the help of Ada. And, about a week later, we went to Fog Fest where Ada and Jordan bounced around in jumpy houses and starred agog at the Fog Fest belly dancers.

The next week I spent in Woods Hole talking about the Earth Engine and digging up sea sludge at the Taxonomic Databases Working Group meeting and the Woods Hole Research Center (WHRC). The WHRC is housed in this nice green building, and pretty close to my favorite Woods Hole hangout, The Knob.

Back home, Big City had its annual picnic, we had a visit from the Kissils and then… Ada's birthday!

Ada's birthday was a blast. A princess (who oddly enough was dressed like Ada) performed magic, which impressed everyone. Kids were everywhere, and there was much mayhem.

October (and this post) ended with a crazy trip for me. I presented a paper at the Third International Workshop on Ambient Data Integration in Hersonissou, Crete at the Aldemar Knossos Royal Village Night Club and Conference Center, where I spent one night. Then, via the Dubai airport with its Flying Spaghetti Monsters and Irish Pubs, and Nairobi, Kenya, I ended up in Bagamoyo, Tanzania to meet with various NGOs in a meeting organized by the Jane Goodall Institute. It was a six day trip during which I spent only one night in a bed, and due to some lost luggage, spent 4 days in my one in-tact suit.

Ahh… it's good to be home! Hanging out with Kirsten, Ada, and Asher.

2010-09-10T21:23:00.000-07:00

Well, this post will be brief because I'm exhausted. But the photos are piling up, and time is passing, and if I don't write something now, no one in this household will know how the last month has zipped by, and we'll never remember that Barney finished painting our house (it looks lovely), or that we pulled up the green mat in the jungle after Doppler destroyed it, or that we threw away a truck load of junk, or that we spent one of the sunniest, most gorgeous summer days in San Francisco watching ice hockey down in Yerba Buena because Ada was insistent that we observe the game.

In exciting news, we finally had our big party to celebrate Dave's PhD, Asher's birth, and the fact that we're staying in San Franisco. Ada and I baked cupcakes, we ordered in burritos from El Metate, and we got to observe just exactly how a bouncy house is inflated. Ada tested it out. She also tried out many new things this month, including a pony ride at the Google picnic (where Dave also rode the mechanical bull) and the ferris wheel at Fairyland.

We took several great trips in August as well, starting with a weekend in Tahoe (or "Taco", as Ada called it) with Karen, Matthew, Emmett and Desmond. We spent some time near Donner Lake and hanging out in a tremendous house full of all kinds of wacky old artifacts. The drive prepared us for our next trip (or at least helped set expectations): a road trip down the coast. Our first stop was Santa Cruz, where we spent some quality time at the Board Walk (Ada rode her favorite ride, the whales, as well as her first roller coaster) before staying at what was probably the shadiest inn in Santa Cruz. I chose it on Friday because it had a room available Saturday night and was cheap, but the guy walking around with his plastic cups and half bottle of Chardonnay at 9 am, as well as the tweaker sitting on the cement pillar near the parking lot made me realize that it probably wasn't the best environment for kids. Still, we all had a great time and took off (if not refreshed at least) excited for our next stop: Big Sur.

We had a wonderful time in Big Sur hanging out with the trees and building camp fires. We tried out our new tent--a six person one--which had plenty of room for the three of us and a pack-n-play, though Asher didn't spend too much time in it. He seemed to enjoy his first camping adventure, and we didn't have to break camp early, as we did the first time we struck out into the wilderness of car camping with baby Ada.

After we packed up the tent, we headed down to visit Dave's parents, and we had a lot of fun feeding ducks, reading books at the library, and catching up. I had a chance to meet their book group, which read Olaf last year, and that was very nice.

The final stop on our tour was Vista, where Ada, Asher, Cyrus and Gus got to hang out for a few days doing fun things like Lego Land, where Gus fought off Darth Vader and Ada hung out with a princess, and we all rode leaf boats through a landscape of lego beasts. We also got to help celebrate Cyrus's pizza-themed birthday, where the kids made their own pizza creations and we enjoyed some house specials like bacon eggplant. We also had a lot of fun with balloons and bubbles.

Wow. I've gone on longer than I expected. Time for bed. But first, as always, some pics of Ada and Asher.

2010-07-22T07:06:00.000-07:00

Ah Spring. Ah, Summer. Ah the transition between Spring and Summer. The Spring and Summer of 2010. What a time it has been. Ah....

June started with my finishing up my Ph.D. at UC Davis. We celebrated by going to the orchards around Sacramento and picking cherries and peaches. That was pretty much all the break we got before I started full time at Google. I'm working on the Google Earth Engine primarily helping out with the part where scientists and others can contribute algorithms for analyzing satellite and in situ data. During my first five weeks there, I was sent to attend two week-long conferences where I hobnobbed with the satellite cognoscenti.

Before heading off on the first of those big trips, we packed in plenty of little trips. These included two trips to the zoo, where Ada rode Little Puffer twice, pet some sheep and dodged voracious seagulls. We also went to one of our local parks and went to see The Sippy Cups in Dolores Park.

My first big trip was to Guadalajara, to attend a workshop on monitoring, reporting and verifying deforestation. The workshop was in the hotel, so I spent almost all my time in that building listening and talking. I did get out a bit when I visited the offices of Conafor which is the National Forestry Commission of Mexico, where I was introduced to many people and encountered their environmentally sound urinal technology, PISS. I took a crazy flight out of Guadalajara that led me to spend the night in Mexico City where the back of the door to my hotel room was full of admonishment. While I was gone, Kirsten, Ada, and Asher visited Grandparents Roger and Myrna.

The trip spanned our 8th wedding anniversary so we celebrated when I got back by attending the Great Gatsby Ball which was held at the historic Palace Hotel. Everyone was decked out in their finest 1920's garb, and we got to lounge around in the hotel's fancy furniture.

Soon after this, the next trip commenced. The whole family drove up to Portland to see silly Grandma. On the way, we spent the night at the Railroad Park Resort in Dunsmuir. The park is a series of old train cars. We stayed in this caboose, which was nicely refurbished inside.

On July 4th, Kirsten, Ada, and Asher stayed and played in Portland, and I continued on to Victoria, Canada for the next meeting. I took a ferry from Port Angeles. The drive was a bit hazardous because people on the Washington peninsula were buying fireworks at roadside stands of ill repute and lighting them off on the spot. When I got to Port Angeles, I had just missed the 4th of July parade, so I instead wandered around looking at all the Twihard propoganda. If you want to know more about Twihards, read Travelers enter the 'Twilight' zone in Forks, Wash, Forks is right next to Port Angeles.

The meeting in Victoria was swell. As before, I mostly hung around the conference spending pretty much every day from 8am to 11pm emitting my own greenhouse gasses while discussing global carbon emissions. On the last day much of the group took a hike through rainforest to a beach and then had pizza at our host's house, which has astonishing views across the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

That's about it for this span of time, except for a visit to Yerba Buena park, where Ada decided she wanted to go inside to watch ice hockey instead of lounging around in the sun. Speaking of kids, I'll finish up with the traditional closing pictures of Ada and Asher.

2010-05-30T21:41:00.000-07:00

Greetings! It's been an action-packed month here at Casa York Street: Maker Faire, Wine Tasting, and Carnaval, all in one month! But I'll start at the beginning of May, since that's where the last post left off.

We started the month at the Alemany Farmer's Market because it's getting on delicious fruit season and we suspected that we'd find some berries. Didn't expect to discover such tremendous strawberries, but we were thrilled all the same. We also decided to take care of a few house projects (finally finishing the floors we started before Ada was born, fixing the backyard fence, and pulling out six-months worth of weeds--all of which are now done--as well as the big one: painting the house. We're thrilled with the painter we hired, Paradigm Painters. Right now, our house is shrouded in gauze and scaffolding.

Another early highlight was a mother's day trip to Terra Mia ceramic studio, where Dave and I each painted a salad plate (with hopes that we will one day complete a set of unique designs) and Ada painted a ceramic cat statue. Dave also took some photos around the California Academy of Sciences since he'll be leaving his post at Antweb.org at the end of the month.

We also spent a couple days in the Russian River valley--Asher's first trip into wine country! Ada helped serve, we hung out on the grass, and posed in a picturesque portion of Jim Town. Only managed to taste at one winery (Bella, which was great!), but I think the trip was a great success. Ada, a seasoned pro, knew what to pack and did so all by herself. Oh! And we also made a quick stop at Traintown, where Ada fed some goats.

As always, the Maker Faire was fantastic. Grandma Eve came down to join us for a day of making bacon with Karen Solomon, watching puppets sing, seeing Tesla coils spark, and passing noteworthy vehicles, diner dogs, and giraffes.

This weekend, Carnaval came to the Mission and we saw the usual collection of glittery finery and feathers. This year, for the first time in quite some time, the weather was perfect and I didn't fear for the health of the more scantily clad dancers. I was happy to see the book mobile out and the trash and recycling folks.

And finally, pictures of Ada (who is writing her name very well these days) and Asher.

2010-04-27T22:16:00.000-07:00

Well, it's been over two months since our last update, but what a big couple of months it's been! Let's start with the biggest news, the birth of our new family member Asher. He's healthy and happy and relaxed. Now, let's start at the beginning. We begin the span with birthday parties galore, including a combination Kumbaya and butt kicking at a martial arts studio for Ada's friend Nathan. Later that week we spent some time at Habitot where Ada practiced washing babies. We figured we'd put her to work immediately upon her brother's birth.

After that, I took a trip to Marist College in lovely Poughkeepsie, NY for a tenure-track faculty job interview. Marist is in a beautiful setting right on the Hudson river. As you might gather from the pictures, I arrived on the day of a major snow storm, resulting in an amazingly low turnout for my job talk and subsequent interviews. They offered me the job anyway, but more on that later. February ended with a nice visit to someone's house to see my friend Adam Levy play a couple of sets.

In the beginning of March, Asher grew, Ada and I swam, we visited an elephant seal at Chrissy Field, and it hailed. The middle of March held many birthdays, including Rell's, mine and of course Asher's. Ada immediately starting taking care of Asher, and getting used to having him hanging around. March ended with Asher's bris (I'll spare you the pictures of that!).

April is not yet over, but it's been exciting enough. It started with an Easter egg hunt, which was rapidly followed by a trip to the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in glorious Troy, NY, for a postdoc position with The Tetherless World Constellation there. It looked like they were going to offer me the position, but I cut them off. More about that soon.

Then there was Ada's music recital, which was too chaotic to capture on camera, a couple of visits to the Googleplex and then ANOTHER INTERVIEW TRIP, this one to luxurious Laramie, Wyoming, for a interdisciplinary research scientist position with the geography department, biology department, and the Wyoming Geographic Information Center. Laramie is small, but it has its own airport, where I took this Beech 1900D to and from Denver. I really liked the job there, and the people there, and I especially liked that they have a statue honoring the Flying Spaghetti Monster on campus.

As luck would have it, I got snowed in and had to wait about 24 hours before I got back to SF. During that span stranded in Laramie, I got a call from the Googleplex offering me a job as an engineer on the Google Earth Engine, an application of Google technologies to the global-scale analysis of satellite imagery for the purposes of monitoring the environment. And, I took it!

And there ends this latest entry in the myhappening blog, except, of course for pictures of Ada and Asher. Happy Spring!

2010-02-12T20:39:00.000-08:00

Happy Valentine's Day! Although it's mid-February, I'm here to write about January, which was a wonderful month if only because this year, for the first time in three years, we spent the entire month in good health. No pink eye, no flu, no throat aches, no weird measles-like rashes. Good times!

We started the month off with a trip to San Jose's Children's Discovery Museum, where Ada and her pal played with water, painted kitty faces, and dressed up in "dragging dresses."

Early January also brought us downtown for several exciting adventures: a trip to the Jewish Museum for the Sendak exhibit as well as a trip to the ice-skating rink, where Dave skated a few laps, and Ada stood in her skates for a moment or two (albeit not on the ice). We also visited the Oakland Zoo for the first time, which was a lot of fun and a great place for a birthday party. They even have elephants!

Dave headed off to Gainesville, Florida to do a job talk and check out the neighborhood. In addition to meeting a lot of people at UF, he tooled around Duck Pond, spent a fortune in parking meters, and checked out the butterfly collection at the natural history museum.

His flight back landed in time for him to catch a couple hours of sleep before he, Ada, and I piled into the car for a trip down to LA, where we celebrated a belated Hannukah and I attended a couple events with PEN USA's Emerging Voices program, which I'm mentoring for this year.

Early February took Dave to Woods Hole, where he gave a lecture and met with some folks while Ada and I held the fort down in San Francisco. He stayed in an ominous-looking dorm with beautiful prints for those brave enough to enter. The main building was more like what I imagined the place would be like, complete with old lecture signs and a friendly map of tourist attractions as well as a map to "the knob" and a building with a boat sticking out the front.

Last weekend, we met up with some old friends in the Fitzgerald Marine Reserve down near Moss Beach. Had a great time checking out the tide pools, flying kites, and just hanging out and catching up before heading to a local pub, where we discovered that it was Superbowl Sunday.

The cherry trees are blooming now, one of my favorite times of year here in the Mission. We even made it out on a date to see Wade Davis give a talk, followed by Avatar, both great. Hopefully, we'll have coffee again soon. Here's the current state of our machine. And finally, as always, some pictures of Ada!

2010-01-02T21:06:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year!!!!

December 2009 was party party party! It began with working a huge mosaic at Ada's preschool. Then, on Kirsten's birthday we went to the Exploratorium, where Ada was fascinated by the dissection of a cow eye. I know, watching a cow eye being dissected is everyone's idea of a perfect birthday, but I decided to go one step further and took Kirsten to see Jonathan Richman at the Great American Music Hall.

Later in the month was Ada's dance recital where they had the kids performing such feats as jumping over a fierce blue bear.

Then the holiday season went into full swing, with Liz and Mike's traditional Hannukah party, dubbed Lehman-ukkah this year, a visit to the amazing house of Tom and Jerry on 21st street, and a visit from George, Kate, Oscar and Edward. They wanted to see some of the San Francisco Holiday spirit so we took a tour through the city at night which took us to the Fairmont hotel to see their amazing gingerbread house: 4000 pieces of gingerbread, 700 pounds of icing, and 1,000 pieces of mint ribbon candy.

Next, we had a big kid fest where we force fed the little tykes cookies and put them to work making art.

The year came to a close with a visit from the Menger and Anderson branches of the family. We tortured the cousins, rode little puffer, worshiped the god of music in Sonoma where the cousins tortured me, and eventually everyone settled down for a nap.

And on that, we close 2009, except for more pictures of Ada. Happy 2010 everyone!

2009-12-05T20:02:00.000-08:00

November has come and gone, but I'm going to start with Halloween, which was a lot of fun this year. Ada, aka Tinkerbell Princess, and I went trick-or-treating for the first time. Our neighborhood was full of Halloween spirit, and we only turned for home when the candy bag got too heavy for Ada to carry. Next year, she has decided that she'll be a Tinkerbell Princess, and I'll be a Tinkerbell Princess, and Dave will be a Tinkerbell Princess Skeleton.

Dave spent the first half of November in Europe: first to a conference in Vilamoura, Portugal at an off-season beach resort with a full English breakfast and a ton of shoes. And then to Montpellier, France for the TDWG Annual conference. He presented, moderated, and demonstrated tons of stuff, which I'll let him jump in and talk about. Not a lot of time for sight-seeing, but there was a cool park and other attractions in the vicinity of the conference, along with a thau rock. The hotel was pretty twee, too. While Dave was away, my mom came down to keep Ada and me company. We also got visits from my dad and Myrna and Al.

Decided to spend Thanksgiving in Big Sur, where we stayed in a little cabin at the Ripplewood Hotel, thanks to a cancelation. The days were short and chilly, but we still managed to get in some hiking at Pfeiffer State Park as well as several good games of Pooh sticks and a stroll through Cannery Row. Highlights of the trip include a visit to the Monterey Bay Aquarium and to the Denis the Menace Park, which had some fabulous slides, though you had to park at your own risk.

Other highlights of the month were a trip to the Legion of Honor, lunch of Delphina with Al and Diane, a visit from Aine and Olivia, Ari's birthday at Madrone, and Marie Mockett's fabulous talk on Japanese fairy tales. And, of course, photos of Ada.

2009-10-25T20:19:00.000-07:00

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.

2009-09-19T20:09:00.000-07:00

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.

2009-08-03T20:51:00.000-07:00

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!

2009-06-18T20:04:00.000-07:00

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.

2009-05-11T20:34:00.000-07:00

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.

2009-03-31T20:29:00.000-07:00

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!

2009-02-10T20:35:00.000-08:00

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!

2009-01-11T16:16:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year!

But, before we get to 2009, I have to write a bit about December '08, to which this post is primarily dedicated. December was full of festivities, starting with my birthday! Dave and I celebrated with a shabu-shabu dinner, a glass of wine at the Sundance Kabuki Theatre bar, and then the late showing of Quantum of Solace. Neither of us had seen the previous film, and it was only after the movie began did we realize that it was a sequel. Still, we enjoyed the adventure, and bumped the prequel to the top of our Netflix list.

We also celebrated Eli's birthday at Sky High Sports, the largest trampoline I've ever seen. At orientation, our tramp monitor advised us not to jump when a "small child" was nearby, or we'd send the kid flying. In addition to a large horizontal surface, the trampoline was encased in trampoline walls, so anyone trying to "jump off" would bounce right back into the action again.

To prepare for my appearance on West Coast Live, Jonny and I headed over to the Freight and Salvage in Berkeley to catch a live broadcast show. Got to see Anne Lamott, Spain Rodriguez, Allison Lovejoy and other artists. I loved watching a live broadcast in action and plan to catch more shows in the coming months. Dave went with me for my appearance, and we had a great time watching the show and then heading to 4th street in Berkeley for lunch.

To kick off the holidays, we baked some cookies (some pictured at the top of the blog--I encourage you to click the photo to see the whole series), which we distributed far and wide. Grandma Eve arrived on the first day of Hannukah, just in time to try Dave's latkes and apple cake. She was one of the few to escape the snow up in Portland, and we were glad she made it (even if it did take a full day to make the one hour flight). We celebrated x-mas, too. Ada had a great time decorating the tree and feeding Caga Tio, who took the place of honor on the mantel, though he was obscured by hanging stockings for a couple days.

The day after x-mas we packed up the car and grandma and headed south through Big Sur to Cambria to join Lenore, Ali and the boys for a week of hanging out at the rented beach house, wine tasting, elephant seals watching, and other fun pursuits. Ada had a great time with her cousins.

We went to two famous buildings: Hearst Castle, which we took a tour of, and the Madonna Inn, where I one day hope to stay. In the meantime, I am content to dine at the restaurant and admire the stairwell leading down to the toilets. I also got to celebrate the fact that I had pink eye in the hotel famous for being pink. Woo!

In keeping with the architectural theme of the trip, we wandered the wine caves at Eberle winery (we loved their Cabernet). We also visited the straw bale home of two architects who gave us a tour of their fabulous dwelling. Here is a link to some of their projects.

We all rang in the new year together in Cambria, and this year, everyone over the age of four made it up past midnight. And here, as always are some extra pictures of Ada.

2008-12-17T21:26:00.000-08:00

Welcome to near-Winter Solstice! November was a month of socializing and Dr. Olafizing. The reviews have been rolling in for our favorite Doctor. There was the Washington Post review at the end of October, the San Francisco Chronicle review in the middle of November, and the New York Times / International Herald Tribune review at the end, just to name a few.

Our first real outing in November was Dr. Olaf related. We all went down to L.A. to visit Grandma and Grandpa Thau and watch four of Kirsten's stories acted out at the New Short Fiction Series. Happily, it was filmed, and some great excerpts have been uploaded to YouTube.

The day we came back from L.A., Kirsten had another reading at the M is for Mystery bookstore. The next day we took a nice little hike along the California Coastal Trail. Then the next day we went down to Santa Cruz where Kirsten did a reading at Bookshop Santa Cruz. This reading was special because Kirsten was born in Santa Cruz and this was her first bookstore. In fact, Ada got to ride the same horse that Kirsten rode when she was a kid.

That was most of the traveling we did in November. Keeping closer to home, I had some fancy shmancy cocktails at the Epic Roasthouse, Kirsten had various phone interviews and authorly meetings, and we went to cousin Stephen, Annie, Samuel and Sarah's for Thanksgiving. After Thanksgiving, Stephen, Samuel, Sarah, Ada and I visited the Cal Academy of Sciences, which was swamped.

We closed the month off with game day at our friend Ellen's, game night at our friend's Mikl and Danielle, brunch with Karen, Matthew, Al and Marco, and a visit to Sky High Sports for Eli's birthday where all had a great time.

And that brings us to the end of November, except, of course, for more pictures of Ada!

2008-11-19T19:21:00.000-08:00

Once again, far too much time has passed since last we blogged, and though it is now mid-November, I will only be covering October in this post, as October was full of big events: Ada's birthday, a book signing at NCIBA, the official release of Doctor Olaf (according to the date printed on the advance review copies, at least), presidential debates, Halloween parties and pumpkin carvings, brunches and dinners with friends, my first reading (ever) at Kepler's bookstore, Dave's talk at ONISW 2008. It's hard to believe that the month is long gone!

For Halloween, we dressed up as nature, and headed over to Moses and Lucy's house to see the Harry Potter-themed hosts. Ada was set to be a tiger, but the day was too warm for her big furry suit, so we saved that for evening trick or treating. All the excitement wore her down, and we didn't manage to hit the streets on the big day, but she still had a chance to dress up and frolic.

We spent quite a bit of time preparing for the big book/birthday party on November 1st. At the left, Dave is pictured paper mache-ing what would become the brain pinata. We also constructed a scan-your-brain device with a user friendly interface, and shared the secret rules of that all time favorite, Hunt the Neuron. In our spare time, we prepared radium tonics and brain-related arts and crafts for young and old alike.

The party was a lot of fun, with appearances by the Mesmerizer, a number of distinguished doctors, many brain scans, and a rainbow of jello brains, which Dave enjoyed very much. All the grandparents made it down to celebrate the two big events, as well as an aunt, a great aunt and uncle and some cousins. Ada was showered with attention! And I was happy to send Olaf off with a festive home event.

As always, more pictures of Ada.

2008-10-04T20:47:00.000-07:00

Welcome to Fall, 2008

September was a month of many firsts and beginnings. Kirsten has started her speaking engagements for her book, Doctor Olaf van Schuler's Brain which is now for sale, Ada has started at a new day care, and the new California Academy of Sciences has opened.

The month started with a nice social weekend: going out to Alameda to Imber and Joe's son Michael's first birthday, and then breakfast with Wendy, Nadav, Eli and Walker. Later that week, I spent a little time at The San Francisco Dorkbot which was held right in our neighborhood at the Million Fishes Arts Collective. There I saw Rachel McConnell, author of the Big Warm Fuzzy Secret Heart instructable, among other things. She taught us about making switches out of felt and conductive fabric from LessEMF

Later that week, Kirsten, Ada and I went to a sneak preview of the new Academy. There we saw an albino alligator, a swamp, many fish, the sky from under water and through a rainforest, and a 58 year old gar. Ada was amazed. So amazed in fact that her head exploded and we left before checking out the roof. Luckily, I'm working there now, so had a chance to get a shot or two of the green lawn up there.

The next weekend we visited the Embarcadero to take part in Sunday Streets San Francisco which was well attended and entertaining. And later that week, on the 16th, Kirsten went to Portland to be a course in the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association "Feast of Authors" where booksellers dined as they grilled Kirsten about her book.

That fun was followed up by a trip to Crissy Field for coastal cleanup day, where we stomped around the dunes armed with rubber gloves and a claw picking cigarette butts out of the sand, rocks and scrub. We ended the day with a visit to one of San Franisco's beautiful staircases.

Finishing the month off, we had a visit from Kirsten's step-brother Ken, a quick stop at Baracktoberfest, and for Kirsten, a brief visit to Manhattan to attend the wedding of Alicia and Gordon. As usual, the month was action packed. Stay tuned here for further adventures!

2008-09-02T19:43:00.001-07:00

Labor day weekend is over and school has begun... where did the summer go?

Let's see. July passed so quickly, I can't remember all the details. I know we harvested the first tomato from our home garden (a pot placed just outside our window where it could catch the only backyard sun). We said good bye to Jenn and Alan at a forth of July BBQ. We met our neighbors' new baby, bought some new chairs for the kitchen, and ventured into wine country for a day of wine tasting that didn't work out quite as planned, but was fun anyway. Other activities, including clearing out the garage (or at least a chunk of it) were not as fun, but were necessary.

In August, we were visited by Grandma and Grandpa Thau and Julie and Donovan. The kids had fun playing at the Bay Area Discovery Museum, and we all had a great time celebrating grandma's birthday. Later in the month, we ventured down to Santa Cruz to introduce Ada to the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk. She won a ball at an "everyone's a winner" frog-fishing game and enjoyed a couple rides before she got tired and we left the boardwalk as quickly as possible. Dave and I saw Juana Molina at Yoshi's (fantastic show), and also joined Miguel and some other neighbors for a great night of wine and cheese. I also got a chance to meet up with some new and old writer friends at One Market Street.

We spotted this hellfire truck on the way up to Portland, where Ada and I spent a few days with Grandma while Dave headed up to Seattle to see Brian et al and Devon and Inger. We made a quick stop outside Ashland, too, where Ada picked up a lot of rocks.

Before we left Portland, Ada and grandma played with some rocks at the SakeOne factory while Dave and I took a tour and did some tasting, and then we all played with rocks before heading off in search of llamas (sadly, dave did not bother to upload a picture).

On the way back to San Francisco we stopped at the Trees of Mystery to take a walk through the redwoods, check out Babe, and the other sculptures along the trail. Some unexpected rains led us to scrap our camping plans in favor of a motel, so we got a chance to check out the Eureka zoo and children's museum, which were both lots of fun. We stopped by to visit our friend Kristin, and saw her new house, which isn't finished but is gorgeous.

Last week, Ada said good-bye to Rosario, who has looked after her three mornings a week for the last year. And then we celebrated labor day weekend with two bbqs (one of which involved taking the Blue and Gold ferry out to Angel Island) and a trip to the zoo. That brings us to September!

2008-08-07T20:45:00.000-07:00

I'm back from the rain forest! Quite a trip: from San Francisco to Miami to Quito to a hotel for a few hours sleep, then a half hour flight to Coca, a two hour boat down the Napo River to Pompeya (where we passed through a military checkpoint), a two hour drive on a private oil road (where we were not supposed to take pictures), and a two hour boat ride along the Tiputini River to the Tiputini Biodiversity Station, where I was very fortunate to spend a few nights with a group of monkey and beetle people, a couple touring professors, a group of undergrads from the University of Wisconsin, as well as the staff of the station, who managed to make life many miles from the nearest convenience store (or house for that matter) feel very comfortable.

Mostly, I was doing research for the novel I'm working on (called, for now at least, "Beneath the Canopy"). The book is set at a scientific field station in a remote part of the Oriente (as that region of the Ecuadorian Amazon is called), and so I was very interested in the rainforest and in the people who were studying various aspects of its ecology. Many of my photos are a bit dull, I'm afraid, since I was documenting the station for my own purposes, but I did manage to get some nice shots of the forest litter, understory (more), canopy (at day break, mist rising), as well as the canopy tower itself, which was built around a Ceiba tree (a tremendous tree that can live hundreds of years). I saw quite a few monkeys (woolly, howler, and spider), though they were hard to spot in all the green from the trails.

A Coleoptera team from Louisiana had set up a number of traps, and I took some photos of a few of them. Whenever I had a question about the identity of a bug, they knew the answer. They even ID'd the beetle printed on one of my favorite shirts (Lucanus cervus). Next time someone asks, I'll know. The traps in the photo to the left were hanging from the newly rebuilt Tower 1, which uses metal instead of wood, but still sways enough to make an ascending or descending observer uneasy.

Our guide, Meyer, was incredible. He could identify birds by their calls, spot herons many, many meters away, and find monkeys like they were sitting across the table from him instead of high up in the leafy canopy. He also found a coral snake and decided to pick it up and put it in a zip lock bag so we could all marvel at it and the fact that he decided to do that. When he released it, I managed to get a photo in the wild, but it didn't come out too well.

I got some nice photos of fungi, bridges, the dry box where we stored electronics so they wouldn't die, a walking palm (that can move up to six meters over its life time), a dead Caiman with butterflies (this will go in the book!), a ceiba tree, my room, sunrise, and right after sunrise (around six), a very blurry monkey, some (also blurry) lepidoptera, a map of the station, as well as details like the generator, a storage shed, and the lab.

On the way home, I took a couple pictures of some hotel wild life (monkeys that lived on the grounds of the hotel where we passed a couple hours between boat and plane journeys. Those are the only decent "wildlife" pictures I captured. I saw a lot more than I could record with my little digital camera. By the time I zoomed in, I either lost the animal, due to my own incompetence, or the animal had moved on. All in all, the trip was amazing; I'd go again in a heartbeat, I have all the vaccines (yellow fever, hep a, typhoid), afterall. To see all the trip photos, click here.

2008-06-29T22:45:00.000-07:00

Well, it's been more than a month this time, and a lot has transpired, so I'm just going to get right to it. We start with Carnival. It sets up right around the corner from our place, so we just have to roll out of bed and we're right there. This parade was excellent as always. We saw demons, skulls, huge back disks, Zorro, hula hoops and stilts, pirates, and armadillos, great ensembles, and .... how does someone walk in this feathered fish dragon mouth thing?

Next, we have Harvard, where I attended a meeting with many of the leading experts on ants, including E.O. Wilson and Brian Fisher. I was there to represent www.antweb.org, which everyone there knew and seems to like. Some Encyclopedia of Life people were there too, and it looks like antweb will be a content partner for the Encyclopedia of Life, which I find very satisifying. The meeting coincided with the 100th anniversary of the Harvard ant collection, as well as E.O.Wilson's birthday, which was celebrated with a cake covered with ants. Here's Dr. Wilson blowing out the candles. I'd never been to Harvard before - it's an interesting place. Many of the buildings have plaques describing who in the 1600s donated money. Much of Harvard seems to have been built with Massachusetts state lottery money. The natural history museum there has a great collection of glass flowers from Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka. And, can any of those Harvard readers out there tell me what this contraption is?

Ok, now back to San Francisco, where someone has lost their lolcat. Let's pray to ceiling cat that someone finds him. The end of May found us at the birthday part of Scott Beale and his site Laughing Squid. It was a big to-do including beer serving robots and biancanauts from bianca.org.

And then to Costa Rica, where I taught some ontology stuff at the Pan-American Advanced Studies Institute and got to meet two more of my heros, Dan Janzen and Winnie Hallwachs (here's wikipedia on Dan and Winnie It was a great trip, mostly at the La Selva biological research station, which is where two rivers meet. Here's a bridge over one of the riviers and a warning. I saw lots of critters there, including leaf cutter ants, and poisonous frogs. I also got to spend a fair amount of time at the San Jose airport, which has many nice gates.

Then back to San Francisco for a visit to Robogames 2008 where R2D2 chased Ada around. And then to Chicago, where we attended Kirsten's grandmother's 100th birthday. Ada had a great time foisting a stolen ape onto her 9 cousins. Here are four generations of Menger women.

And finally, back to San Francisco where the 1100+ forest fires are making the sun red and high gas prices are forcing gas pumps to set limits. Luckily, that didn't put a stop to the 38th San Francisco Gay Pride parade, which was awesome as usual. Lots of balloons, some from Google. The Charos were there, and so were the anti-circumcision folks. A particular highlight this year were the many newly wedded couples and of course, bonds of other kinds.

Let's see.. what else. We had a visit from Grandma Eve, birthdays of Alan and Evany, a reading by Donna George Storey, and our 6th anniversary dinner at Spork. It was a big month plus some, and to finish it off, of course, more pictures of Ada!

2008-05-19T20:03:00.000-07:00

Hello! Much has happened since last we wrote--primarily a big, family trip to New York City, and other things, closer to home, as well. But I'll start with today, May 19th, because it is a very exciting day for me: Ploughshares accepted my short story, "Salk and Sabin." I am very honored (and thrilled!) to be included in the pages of what I and many others consider one of the top literary journals in the country. The story will be in the Fall issue, coming out in August. Woo!

In other news: We had a great time in New York! The flight over--Ada's first since she started walking--went smoothly, and we rented an "economy" car (evidently, Dollar Rental Cars considers a PT Cruiser an economy vehicle) and made our way out to Brooklyn where we spent a couple nights with Jill, Gideon, and the very adorable Kali. It was great to hang out, catch up, and drink lots of good wine.

Dave headed down to Philadelphia for Josh's wedding, while Ada and I remained in Brooklyn. She and I were sorry to miss the festivities. The wedding took place very near my alma mater and the reception was held in a beautiful stone building. Oddly, a number of my old college roommates happened to be in NYC while we were there: Marcia was in from Sweden, Chris from Philadelphia, and Ala and Laurie, who live just blocks away from each other. So we had a small reunion before Dave, Ada, and I headed to the apartment we rented in Chelsea.

In addition to catching up with a lot of good friends, we spent some time knocking about the city. The apartment was just a few blocks away from Chelsea Market, where we discovered a very cool fountain, some fabulous cupcakes, and a lot of tasty food. Ada loved the Museum of Natural History, where we saw lots of critters, including some live butterflies, and caught up with our friend Karen. The Children's Museum was also a big hit. Ada was tired by the time we got to the Central Park Zoo with Mer, Jonas and Ava, and by the time we got back to the apartment at the end of the day, she was ready to sleep.

Also not far from our apartment was Google's big promotional event for the launch of the new iGoogle designs, which were created by famous people and then projected on buildings. Very striking.

I made a trip down to Algonquin (which is not in this building) to meet my editor, Antonia Fusco, while Dave and Ada hung out and made shadow hands through the glass bathroom door. And Dave made a trip out to the Brooklyn Museum to check out the Murakami show. And then we flew home! Fortunately, there were plenty of Kosher snacks at the airport.

We returned just in time for the Maker Faire, where we were too overwhelmed to take pictures. We did manage to get one of a cool mosaic car and another of a sculpture but, alas, none of the robot giraffe or motorized cupcakes.

Other fun events include a trip to the Bay Area Discovery museum with Judy and Coretta; dinner and drinks with Karen and Matthew, El Metate with Amy and Sue, a visit from Aunt Rose and Uncle Dick and grandma, and a mother's day picnic in Golden Gate park.

I'll sign off with the usual: More pictures of Ada!

2008-04-13T22:53:00.000-07:00

Ahoy!

This end-of-March to middle-of-April began with a visit from Grandma Eve who came down to keep Kirsten and Ada company while I split town for a week. Among other things, we all went to the Bay Area Discovery Museum and played with trucks.

My week away was spent attending and presenting at the the Extending Database Technologies (EDBT) conference in Nantes, France. The conference was swell, and I didn't get much chance to explore the city. I showed up a day early, but couldn't see much, as France had a vacation that day, and most places, including my hotel, were closed. Luckily, they couldn't close the outside, so I spent some time wandering around the gardens, churches, sidewalk cafes and Las Vegas. The main cathedral in Nantes has the biggest stained glass window in France. The city also has a place in the center called the Duke's House which is more like a castle containing several other not-so-little houses.

Nantes is famous for many reasons. It is the home of Lu crackers and cookies (which I think started in this cool tower.) It's also the birthplace and home of Jules Verne. I took loads of photos at his house. Here are his clock, plates, chair on wall, desk with artifacts, puffer fish, globes, and organ.

Perhaps most excitingly for me, Nantes is also the home of The Machines de l'ile. The best way to describe this place is with pictures. Here is the gigantic elephant which can carry 30 people. Nice, eh? Here is the elephant again. And here's the elephant head on. If that's not enough, here's a big (88 MEG) movie of the elephant roaring and blowing steam from its trunk.

Giant mechanized elephants don't do it for you? How about a giant wooden squid? It's a flame throwing squid. There's also a manta ray, tree branch, and a fish that reminds me of the Flying Spaghetti Monster's jolly fish. If you want to build your
own flame throwing squid, here are the plans.

France was nice, but I'm very happy to be back home with Ada and Kirsten. I'm also glad to be able to get back to work. The ant master Brian Fisher is back from a harrowing journey to the Comoros (during the recent rebellion and its quashing) and gave me a little preview of the new California Academy of Sciences building - the greenest museum in the U.S. It is gorgeous! There's still a ways before it's open, but they already have a growing reef in place. The inside feels a bit like a space station. The living roof is growing in, and gives a great view of the De Young. Here's more information about the Cal Academy's living roof.

Let's see... The month also held visits from Grandpa Roger, Grandma Myrna, and Devon, birthdays for Nadav and Ada's share-care pal Milo, and a book reading by the great Mary Roach who kicked off the reading tour for her new book Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex.

And that wraps it up! Fun fun fun! More in May!

2008-03-27T20:27:00.000-07:00

Greetings! This month was full of exciting news and adventures. First off, we adopted guinea pigs! Two brothers who are already six years old, which is about the average lifespan of a guinea pig... Ada loves to feed them lettuce, carrots, and (in particular) hay, and we all enjoy hearing them squeak.

We also attended an egg hunt at the SF zoo. Imagine hundreds of supervised children collecting plastic eggs and jars of bubbles. Ada found three eggs, though nothing was all that well hidden. She actually found more than three, but she gave a couple away. The line to take her picture with the Easter bunny was way too long, so we settled for in front of the bunny.

The weather has been great, so we crossed the Golden Gate Bridge to spend some time hiking around the headlands and hanging out at the beach. We happened to be there the second Sunday of the month when the park service gives tours of the old military stations--a crazy underground world of concrete, no smoking signs, and old graffiti that once housed a great big gun. Where the gun once stood is now only a concrete pond, home to several newts, and some fake ammo.

We celebrated Dave's birthday, twice (and the fact that he successfully defended his dissertation proposal): first, on the actual day at Zeitgeist with friends, and later at Acquerello, where we had multiple courses of amazing Italian food. I was particularly fond of the "Delicate Parmesan budino topped with shaved asparagus salad," and the dessert cheeses, of course.

Lots of family visits this month, too: Aunt Julie came to bbq with us and several neighbors, Grandpa Roger and Grandma Myrna came for a trip out to the Discovery Museum, and Grandma Eve came to help out for a few nights while Dave is in France. He'll post more about his travels when he returns. I hear he's run down the camera battery already...

2008-02-25T19:10:00.000-08:00

Hello and happy leap year! I just looked at the calendar and figured out that we get a whole extra day this year: Feb 29, this coming friday. Perhaps we'll head back to the Bay Area Discovery Museum where, in addition to viewing the Golden Gate Bridge, we got to play on giant lily pads, crawl through caves, and fish for tennis balls. The museum is right on the bay, surrounded by a cluster of old military buildings.

This month's big news is that Dave turned in his dissertation proposal! At over ninety pages, single spaced, the proposal reads more like a dissertation to me. He has to defend it in a little over a week--and then we will really celebrate. In the meantime, he is hard at work on his presentation.

In other exciting February news, the cherry blossoms are here. For about one week in February, the cherry trees that fill the Mission's urban forest have no leaves and tons of blossoms and the air smells super sweet. Soon, the leaves grow in, the trees bear fruit, and all the neighborhood kids spend afternoons picking and eating cherries. I have yet to try one of the local cherries, but I'm guessing they're pretty good.

We made a trip over to the zoo for Chinese New Year celebrations, and though we arrived too late to see the scheduled performances, we did see satan owl perform his tricks. Ada enjoyed walking through tunnels and exploring by foot, her latest talent.

Otherwise, we've been wandering the streets of San Francisco--spending time at the Makeout Room, Latin America Club, Spork, and our local tapas joint. Dave has been capturing some of his favorite houses and bars on film. And, ofcourse, we have some new pictures of Ada.

2008-02-03T15:11:00.000-08:00

Welcome to February!

First order of business, Kirsten has a new website!: http://www.kirstenmengeranderson.com/ It's devoted to her soon to be published book, Doctor Olaf van Schuler's Brain. Check it out, and be sure to ask Dr. Olaf your most poignant questions.

This January started off a bit slow, and alas, continued to be a bit slow. We did, however, see plenty of family and went on a few outings. Let's start with a visit to the Palace Steak House. When Kirsten called for a reservation the person on the other end of the line asked "are you looking for the Palace Hotel?" No reservation was needed, it's an order your steak at the counter kind of place. Excellent steak, nice people and lots and lots of cows.

A few days after that we meandered down to Santa Cruz to celebrate Kirsten's Dad's 65th birthday. Many people came, everyone had a good time, including Ada who got to wear a new dress she got from our neighbor Miguel. The day after the party, we all went down to the Shadowbrook for brunch. It's a beautiful wooden multi-level building down by a creek. You need to take a funicular down to it, or as they call it a "hillivator."

Back in San Francisco, a week later, we celebrated a belated Chanukah with the family thau. Chanukah was swell, Ada got to spend some quality time with her grandparents and her Aunt Julie and we all ate a ton of good food.

Later in the month, we took two little trips. One to the SFMOMA to see the Olafur Eliasson exhibit there. We took Ada and she was pretty into it. There were many other pieces we hadn't seen there before, including this enormous curtain of flowers by Jim Hodges.

This brings us to today's little voyage to Fisherman's Wharf. Being Superbowl Sunday, it was just us and people from abroad. Really, the place was basically empty except for the Russians, Japanese, French, and other folks we encountered who probably didn't realize what they were missing. It was a great time to go. We saw the Forbes Island ferry, many sea lions and, to satisfy Ada's love of fish, we visited the Aquarium of the Bay. The aquarium has a small selection of non-native species, but the highlight of the place is the two clear tunnels they've run under the bay. The little white blur in the thumbnail above is a school of anchovies that swirled around at that spot the whole time we wandered around. You can stay down there as long as you like, checking out the reef and assorted fishies. They also have plenty of sharks, and you can pet baby sharks and rays there too. It's a pretty nice place.

And that wraps it up! Hope you have a swell February!

2008-01-06T19:10:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year!

Hope that 2008 is off to a great start for you. We're just now getting over our pink eye and accompanying colds, which made for a very quiet new year's celebration. Spent much of the first day of '08 in the ER waiting to see a pediatrician (nasty ear infection). But now that we're all feeling better, we're ready to welcome the new year appropriately. Woo!

Christmas in San Diego was great. You'll have to take my word that Ada and her cousins Gus and Cyrus are the cutest kids in the universe because we lost our camera somewhere between San Diego and SF. I was bummed to lose the pictures; the camera has already been replaced (we ordered immediately because Ada is threatening to walk on her own any day now). The shots in this post were all taken with our new Canon. Except for the one on the right, which is of a weedy seadragon from the Birch aquarium--situated in a beautiful location and a great place to spend the day.

The road trip down and back went pretty smoothly. We broke up the southern trek with a stop at Motel 6 in San Louis Obispo. On the way north, we stopped to visit Dave's folks in Thousand Oaks. We strolled around the Oaks Mall and the incredible local library. I wasn't prepared for how cold it can get in southern California!

This weekend we braved the rain to visit the Exploratorium. Ada loved all the moving exhibits as well as the toddler play area, where she made some new friends. We also stopped by our local playground.

Today, we headed down to the Academy of Sciences because it is closing--from now until Fall 2008--in order to move to its new facility in Golden Gate Park. We heard a short presentation about the new building, and it sounds amazing! Living roof, solar panels, rain forest, two-story tanks, glass walls. I can't wait to take a tour when it opens, though I can't imagine how they will transport all the giant tanks and their inhabitants.

Otherwise, things are quiet. Dave and I are very busy with work. Ada is doing well. Here are some pictures.

2007-12-20T20:16:00.000-08:00

Hello! We're about to head off to celebrate holidays in sunny San Diego, but wanted to post so that the halloween pictures weren't reminding us that it's been too long since we've recorded our progress (if living can be referred to as such). The most important news is that Caga Tio is well and in full form, gorging himself on oranges, cookies, and sweet wine. We're looking forward to beating him.

Ada is loving the holidays, or at least the EGG NOG. She loves egg nog. She's also into her new car seat, which arrived just in time for our big road trip south.

Things are great and very busy. We celebrated Thanksgiving here with my dad and myrna and our friends William, Jen, and Mark before I headed up to Portland for a few days. If you like flying in empty planes, try a seven am flight the day after Thanksgiving. Dave and Ada survived colds during their special time together, and we celebrated my return with officially signing Ada up for preschool. She'll start next September. That's right. Here in SF, we "apply" for preschool a year in advance. We're all very happy with the program, though, and looking forward to starting when the time comes.

San Francisco is decked out for the holidays. We made a quick trip downtown to the Westfield Center with Jonny to appreciate the dome and buy chocolates. Normally, we would not go to a mall in December, but Cocoa Bella chocolates are really good. Other events of note include: several birthday parties that featured crawling, toddling, and cupcakes; a movie night (Omega Man!) with King and Gwen; Beowulf (in 3D)--I thought I'd forgotten the story, but soon learned that no, in fact, the movie took some major liberties (still an enjoyable story); Marco's opening at Mission 17; a trip out to Oakland to see Heather and Jon; brunch in the panhandle with Jenn and Alan; dinner with Julie; and mom's group here at our house, with tons of little ones roaming around. We also checked out Feria Urbana, a crafts fair at the Oakland Museum, where our friends Jennifer and Grace were showing and selling their awesome stuff. There were tons of great performances (song/dance/talks) in the museum as well--and not enough people to appreciate them. I hope the museum gets the word out next time.

Otherwise, just pictures of Ada. Happy holidays!

2007-11-25T21:47:00.000-08:00

Happy almost December,

In this month's post we have Halloween and Fairyland! First, Halloween. This year, our little family went as global warming. See it? Kirsten's the warming sun, I am the Earth, and Ada, dressed in white and carrying a polar bear, is the melting polar ice cap. Well, if you didn't get it, don't worry, nobody else did either. We strutted our stuff at a party at Moses and Lucie's where Ada rode a bike for the first time. Then, a couple of days later, while Kirsten was visiting her mom up in Portland, Ada and I went with Wendy, Nadav and Eli to the Potrero Hill Halloween Parade. There we saw peas, pumpkins, big pumpkins, scary monsters, and cute dogs. There were also jellyfish, raccoons and gorillas, but they were all moving too fast to catch.

After Halloween, not too much transpired. Ada has been doing the two-finger tango like a manic for the past few weeks, so we've been tuckering her out with some long strolls. We took one such constitutional by the Ferry Building where we encountered the recently installed crouching spider by Louise Bourgeois. Here's more about the crouching spider.

Now that Ada is somewhat walking, we decided that it was high time she experience one of the finest child-centered extravaganzas in the Bay Area: Children's Fairyland! Children's Fairyland is so hip that it even has fairyland.org as its domain name. Children's Fairyland opened in 1948, as their site says "pre-Disneyland, pre–Disney World, pre-Nickelodeon—a truly prehistoric era for children’s entertainment." Children's Fairyland is definitely my idea of a good time. There are book-eating worms, tree-hugging dragons, other less petrified critters such as Gideon the donkey, and, perhaps not surprisingly, there are lots of magic mushrooms. If you get a "magic key" you can stick it in the working subset of "magic boxes" to hear tales such as Alice dropping through the rabbit hole, and Robinson Crusoe's shipwreck. We will definitely be going back!

And that, my friends, sums up this episode of thau, Kirsten and Ada's romp through life. Oh, yes, and of course, more pictures of Ada!

2007-10-28T11:22:00.000-07:00

Hello! And happy almost end of October. This month was dedicated to Ada, who celebrated her first birthday mid-month (all month) and has now officially survived her first year under our care. Three sets of grandparents arrived to help celebrate, as well as aunts, uncles, cousins, and friends of all ages. The day was beautiful--perfect for wine, cheese, chocolate, and celebration, all of which were enjoyed in great quantity. We made a special trip to Bogle to stock up the weekend before.

In other very exciting news, our solar panels are now in place! The Borrego team did a great job. We threw a couple of switches to test them out, but now must wait for PG&E to come and install a new meter. We're looking forward to monitoring the power and will post some updates once we see how the system does.

We also checked out a couple of preschool-related events this month: Preschool Night, where representatives from 80-plus SF preschools gather in the Hall of Flowers in Golden Gate Park to talk about things like whether their waiting lists start when children are in utero, or how all the tours are booked until next year. Well, okay, not all of them mentioned endless wait lists, but I'm still amazed by how few schools/school spaces there are for the number of kids in the city. When we showed up at an open house for Katherine Michels, a local preschool, the ratio of the number of interested parties to the number of total spots (I'm not sure how many, if any, are currently open) was close to ten to one.

Also: our roses are STILL blooming. We're gearing up for Halloween, which gets an extra-long celebration this year since it falls mid-week. Ada (the bunny) headed off for a halloween potluck with Carrie, dave (the lol-cat-thulu) made a stop at the dungeon to pay his respects, and later today we're all dressing up as global warming in honor of the times.

Tomorrow, I leave for Portland for a couple days, leaving Dave and Ada to take on the trick-or-treaters. He'll report on all that soon! Happy halloween! and,or course, pictures of Ada.

2007-10-09T01:42:00.000-07:00

Hello Everyone,

September was an odd month for us. Much of the time was spent dealing with the aftermath of our great vacation in August. Somewhere along the way, Ada caught something that made her very unhappy and lead to many doctor's visits. She's all better now, but it took a while to work out the kinks.

And, September was odd for more reasons. Early in the month, I looked down from our bedroom window and saw this odd bird in our alley, pecking away the grass down there. I thought it would eventually take off, but four hours later it was still there, pecking away at the paint on the neighbor's house. It was acting like it couldn't fly, so I finally called animal control to figure out what to do with it. They sent someone over who told us that the bird was a chucker - a game bird that was sometimes sold in stores for meat. Sometimes one got away, or the people who bought it started feeling sorry for it and let it go. The animal control person said that they would try to find someone to "adopt" it, which sounds like a euphemism for "roast."

We managed to take a few good trips, like one to the new kid's park at golden gate park. It's huge, and has many different areas, like this wave sculpture and a carousel with unusual animals like tigers and roosters and cranes.

We also attended (briefly) an event called "Raise, Raze, and Recycle" organized by our friends Jill and Rem. It involved lots of kids painting many cardboard boxes and eventually tearing them down. There was also a band and a taco truck. Ada passed out in the car over, and slept through our entire visit there.

Finally, we're please to report that our solar installation is under way. We had to reinforce our old roof, which has yet to be done. In the meanwhile Borrego has installed the electric components into our garage. Here are before and after shots. I always wanted a big throw switch in my house, and now my dream has come true!

And that, that. As usual, I'll close with a link to this month's pictures of Ada.

2007-09-09T20:37:00.000-07:00

Aloha! We're just back from a trip to the big island of Hawaii, which is named Hawaii but is never called that so as to avoid confusion. The island was formed by a number of volcanoes, several of which are active, and I've never seen such vast extents of black lava. Had we arrived a few days earlier, we might have seen lava flow, but a series of events involving forces beyond our control diverted the flow from the ocean to the mountains, where some fires popped up, but otherwise, all seemed in perfect (or at least the usual) order.

We started the trip in Kapoho, on the southeast coast, where we stayed in a little house with a great hammock. The house took me an embarrassingly long time to discover via online research. A search for lodging on the big island returns an impressive number of golf resorts, where one can rent a room or condo with either an ocean or a fairway view. We were just blocks away from Champagne pond, where the volcanic activity heats the ocean waters to a comfortable temperature, and a few minutes drive from Lava Tree State Park, several black sand beaches with brand-new coconut trees, and other thermal sea pools. Ada had her first ocean swim in one of them, which she seemed to enjoy as much as we did despite the DANGER. She was also quite fond of the zoo (where we saw a white tiger, many roaming peacocks, and much DANGER), the waterfalls, and the wild life. Most memorable was the Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, where we saw craters, steam, and several miles of stunning, lava coastline created during my lifetime.

The coastal road is still closed, thanks to the lava flows, but we took an inland road to the Southwest side of the island, where we ate lunch at the southernmost restaurant in the US, stayed with friends who had discovered Marlin House. Although named for a fish, the most common wildlife in the area was, without doubt, the mosquito. We had a great time hanging out, checking out a vanilla plantation (i.e., eating a vanilla flavored lunch--the food was great, but we didn't see much agriculture), Pua Mau Place (an amazing sculpture garden) and watching Ada and Emmett hang out.

From Marlin House with its lovely fish-festooned balconies and lush grounds, we headed north to the Sheraton, where we sat on our balcony and watched people slide down the island's longest water slide, hung out at Hapuna beach, floated Ada, avoided DANGER, noted the evacuation routes, watched the sun set, and did our best to completely relax before flying home.

Now we're home! Ada was a great flier. She's now recovered from her ear infection, we're recovering from it too, and the San Francisco summer marches on.

2007-08-23T20:00:00.001-07:00

hello!

August has nearly passed us by, but no so fast that I didn't manage to type up some record of the time. Since last we wrote, Grandma has visited twice (once to visit Ada, and once because she missed her flight), we transferred all the fifteen-year-old Regeneration the Show for the Restless and Easily Excitable cable access 3/4" video tapes of one am live broadcasts to DVD, we met with four solar consultants and decided to use Borrego to install some solar panels on top of our house, and we adopted a new family member, Grendel, the vacuuming robot. Now it takes the whole family to clean the house, or at least, we all sit around and watch Grendel do his robot thing. So far, we've been really thrilled with the robot, which attacks vacuuming with great enthusiasm, a digital war cry, and a light that goes on whenever especially dirty spots are identified. Ada is enchanted by it, too.

Last weekend, we were very happy to attend Mike and Liz's wedding, which in addition to a beautiful ceremony, had the longest dinner table I've ever seen in my life. We drank, we danced, we enjoyed catching up with tons of folks and hanging out in a tremendous space, and watching the fork lifts cart the bride and groom around.

In other social news showed up early (about 24 hours early) to Jenn's birthday party in the Panhandle by the new band shell constructed of recycled car hoods. At least the band shell was there, and we caught her at home when we wandered by with our bowl of pasta salad, so we had a chance to catch up--both then and the following weekend for video night, where one of the guests introduced us to this.

Otherwise, we've just been hanging out in the jungle, which we built downstairs. It's a work in progress, but coming along and one of my favorite rooms in the house.

That's the news here! Hope you're enjoying the summer. Here's some recent pictures of Ada, who was nearly abducted by aliens.

2007-07-23T22:37:00.000-07:00

Hello all!

This post covers many trips and much excitement. The first bit of excitement, for me anyway, is that I'm writing this entry on the macbook pro laptop purchased for my use by my lab at UCDavis. I am now one step closer to maximizing my San Francisco geek stereotype status. All I need are some ironic sideburns.... hm... well, anyway, lots of trips!

We start with a trip to Yosemite with our friends Wendy, Nadav and Eli. One of our first stops on the way to Yosemite was UC Merced. The school is less than two years old and it's still a bit empty.

Further down the road, in Oakhurst, we passed some other establishments of knowledge; right across the street from each other, Masonic Sierra Lodge 788 and a Christian Science Church / Reading Room.

Soon after touring those facilities, we reached Yosemite and our groovy cabin there in The Redwoods. The cabin overlooked the woods, and had some amazing lamps and other great furnishings. It also had a nice wrap around porch where Ada and Eli spent time watching the wildlife. Oh yes, we also saw waterfalls, from a distance and closer up. But probably not as close up as these rock climbers were going to get.

After Yosemite, I took a brief trip to Philadelphia to present at the Data Integration in the Life Sciences 2007 workshop (here are the slides plus extra goodies.) I was supposed to arrive in Philadelphia the night before the talk. But, due to bad weather I wound up spending the night at the Dallas airport and after some ado managed to get to the meeting about 20 minutes before I had to give my talk. What I saw of Philadelphia, beyond my swank hotel involved mostly placards; historic and mysterious. Sadly, I did not get to visit the humungous Grand Lodge of Free and Accepted Masons of Pennsylvania, which would have resonated nicely with the Oakhurst visit. It'll have to wait until next time.

After returning from Philadelphia, Kirsten, Ada and I had various wanderings around the Bay Area. Early in July, we followed this trail into Muir woods to visit with many pals who got together at the mysterious Tourist Club for our friend Jen's birthday.

Later in the month, Ada and I set out on a couple of trips. First we went to the Marin Count Fair, where we saw some topiary, dragons, assorted chickens, and some devices which either turned little girls into chickens, or zapped chickens, or zapped little girls... not sure which, but we didn't stick around to find out.

Next, we went to the soon-to-be-totally-different East side of San Francisco. It's like another world over there. Views of the Bay Bridge and downtown San Francisco look post-apocolyptic. The port is riddled with rotting piers. There are many weird entities. Lots of people live there, but only during the day. And, of course, there are the giant baseballs and other flying objects. It's a good thing for future archaeologists that the city has left historical information.

Oh, we're almost done. Just two more events, oh other than another visit to Borderlands Books to visit Ripley the bald cat, and a day at Dolores Park to watch the San Francisco Mime Troupe 2007 show"Making a Killing."

Final event 1 was a trip to Big Sur, where we were surrounded by big trees and stayed at a cute cabin by the Big Sur river. We did a little hiking, spent some time at the beach, ate fantastic food at the Big Sur Inn and visited the Henry Miller Library which was like a bookstore with a stage for plays and sculptures.

And last but not least, well, maybe least, but interesting nonetheless was a trip to... Costco! The Costco we frequent is down by the airport, where you can find such glories as Houlihan's and the South San Francisco Conference Center which squat on dull streets with fabulous names, such as Wonder Color Lane. This Costco also boasts a nature trail. It's true. Behind the big box is a wetlands. As you might expect, however, given its proximity to the airport (not to mention Houlihan's), the wetlands is currently undergoing some remediation.

Yikes! Better end with something more uplifting. I know! Here are some recent pictures of Ada to leave your mind filled with good thoughts.

Until next time!

2007-06-21T21:00:00.000-07:00

Greetings on the longest day of the year!

It's 9:00 pm and still light enough to make out color. We celebrated with sushi and beer and a toast to ourselves, since Dave and I met on the Summer solstice eleven years ago.

Since last we wrote, we have boldly ventured into the wilds of Northern California, where we camped for two nights at Patrick's Point with Ada, who slept in her Pack and Play, which we set up inside the tent. She loved the wilderness, or at least all the little bits of pine cone and twig that she managed to pick up and examine. Now that she can crawl, she manages to find all kinds of choking hazards.

We chose the Arcata region--a land of redwoods, independent grocery stores, and some crazy newspapers--for the kinetic sculpture race, a 42 mile race over highway, rocky hills, and icy cold bay water in human powered sculptures, such as the Deliverance Truck and the Armored Carp. The race takes three days, of which we saw one: the "water entry". Our camera battery died, but the local radio station, KHUM, blogged the race and posted some great photos.

Ada was a great camper, though night two dropped down to 45 degrees, which was too cold for her liking. We ended up making an early decampment, saving our fellow campers the task of glaring at us in the morning.

June has nearly passed in a blur of activity: gardening, childproofing, a visit from Grandma, a trip to the zoo, a bbq at our friend Jennifer's, Mike Amnasan's reading at Modern Times, Mark Luthringer photographs at 3A Architecture, family day in Bernal Heights, a college alumni event at Shoreline Park, a lovely brunch with our friend Ari, and coffee with Hal, Judy, and Coretta.

We spent Father's day at Robot Wars, where we saw robots battle and their creators mend the wounds. There was also a lot of robot art and some pretty amazing robots with very human qualities.

The second set of hummingbirds camped outside our window have been raising their little ones well. And, as always, photos of Ada.

2007-05-22T20:49:00.000-07:00

Welcome to mid-spring!

Since we last posted, Ada has had two month-birthdays. She's just over seven months old, and as of today, she's officially um... forwardly mobile. We can't *really* call it crawling, but she can, with a little bit of mucking about, cross vast distances to acquire objects of her desire; primarily electical cords. Last month we celebrated her first six months with half a birthday cake, which, despite her two teeth, she was not allowed to eat. Oh, cruel world.

Along other baby news, the hummingbird chicks outside our window look flight toward the end of April.

Judging from our pictures, we did not get out much in April, other than a visit to Golden Gate park on Earth Day. We didn't realize it was Earth Day, but after seeing visions like this bus, we soon got the picture. On that same walk, we visited the late Canvas Cafe. RIP.

We saw plenty of family in the past month or so: my sister, Kirsten's dad and Myrna, and Kirsten cousin Carl and his wife Hannah.

Our relatively sedate April was balanced out with a two-festival weekend in mid-May. We started with the Maker Faire which was astonishing. There were home made catapults, lots of art cars, many burning things, power tool races, mceed by our friend Mikl-M, a 102 bottle of diet coke, and mento fountain set off by the experts at EepyBird.com....

...breath......

We saw giant cupcakes - on the outside, on the inside, and in motion. We saw scary monsters, giant human powered nose pickers, laughing robotic giraffes, religious propaganda and best of all, we got to introduce Ada to a model of Babbage's Difference Engine #2. Ada Lovelace wrote what is thought to be the world's first computer program, calculating Bernoulli numbers using Babbage's subsequent machine, the Analytic Engine.

The next day we drove out to Calaveras county to check out the celebrated jumping frog thereof. The Calaveras County Fairground which hosted the Calaveras County Fair and Jumping Frog Jubilee (tm) has lots of frogs, more frogs, and dog carrying frogs. The festival starred many musical groups, cowgirls, bunny auctions (movie - big download), men in hats performing deeds with sticks, and, yes jumping frogs.

The game goes like this. Step one, drop frog onto green circle. Step 2, scare the hell out of the frog. Step 3, hope frog does not jump sideways. Step 4, get a lemonade.

Although we did not get to see the champion jump, we did see many flying frogs.

And that brings us all up to date. Stay tuned for the next installment of myhappening in which we will learn what happens to abandoned hummingbird nests.

2007-04-15T20:19:00.000-07:00

Hello! It's April. Mid-April. And absolutely beautiful in SF.

We started the month with a trip up to North Beach for the Saint Stupid Day Parade, which we nearly missed thanks to the fact that we arrived about fifteen minutes late. That didn't stop us from running *after* the parade, which led us to become part of the parade, which ended after a mere four blocks at Washington Square, right next to the mobile diner dogs. We spent some time checking out all the great, funky, fun, wigged-out, outfits, speeches, expressive signs, bikes, and music, and even a bike that matched Ada. We stumbled upon our new favorite Czech place, Cafe Prague, home of the North Beach Poetry series, which happens every Sunday at four. They also make a mean goulash. We chatted a bit with Mark Schwartz, who organizes the series, but had to leave before the readings began because Ada was intent on making her voice heard, too.

Turns out, Ada was celebrating the arrival of her first tooth. She now has two.

The next weekend, Easter weekend, we packed up our gear and headed down to visit Lenore, Ali, Cyrus and Gus. We broke the drive down into two days, and spent Friday night at Motel 6 in San Louis Obispo, where we could see Highway 101 from our room, but still slept pretty soundly. We left before the coffee was ready, perhaps for the best, and headed down to Andersen's for breakfast. I was pleased to see that they offered split pea soup for breakfast, too. All you could eat, though I settled on the much more boring scrambled eggs. Afterwards, we swung by Ostrich land and, though it was closed, we caught a few quick glimpses of the birds. Later stops were not quite as interesting.

Ada's first Easter outfit didn't go over so well, so we dressed her in something more comfortable and headed over to the flower fields, home of millions of ranunculus flowers, as well as some weird lego creations. We had some wonderful meals, some great Easter treats, and a lot of fun times hanging out, and all too soon, we had to head back to SF. We took the 5 up, and stopped at the wild west gas station as well as Harris Ranch, which promised to be an oasis and proved to be a totally wacko-disturbing place, which led us to picnic on the grassy green berm in front of a gas station instead.

Dave and Ada have been taking some great walks in Bernal Heights, where they walk up hills and check out murals. Ada and I have also been hanging out in Bernal Heights, where we spent a few fun-filled hours at Holly Park.

Other very exciting news includes Ada's first solids (rice cereal). She is already up to three spoons. Also: Ada's new hat, the baby hummingbirds that live right outside our window, and a visit from Dave's folks, who not only charmed Ada with an onslaught of attention and wonderful gifts, but babysat for her so that we could check out a reading at the Makeout Room as well as a brand new fav restaurant, Nihon. Other highlights include: dinner with Karen, Matthew, and Emmett, Nadav's birthday party, and Borat (on DVD). That's the news here! As always, more pictures of Ada.

2007-03-27T19:51:00.000-07:00

Ah, another month in the lives of Kirsten, Dave and Ada. Looking back at the pictures we've taken, it seems we spent the whole month in San Francisco's parks. Early in the month, we discovered the (recently?) reopened San Francisco part of the California Coastal Trail. The views of the Golden Gate Bridge and the bay are breathtaking. And, there are many surprising treasures, like this scapular.

We spent a fair amount of time in Golden Gate park, where the beautiful rhododendrons are blooming. We found some of my favorite genus, the Ranunculus, some of this plant and took many pictures of our old friend Doctor Frond. While at the park we saw the De Young on a clear day, some construction on the California Academy of Sciences, some crazy kid antics and a statue of John McClaren, the first caretaker of the park. The joke here is that McClaren hated statuary and fought against all the statues in the park. So, the first thing the next caretaker did was erect this statue of McClaren.

This weekend we went to the Presidio where the trust was giving tours of the old Victorians. What they didn't tell us was that although they're in great shape outside, they're trashed inside. The Episcopal Church is in pretty good shape, however.

And speaking of institutions, we all took a trip down to City Hall earlier this week to exercise our NIMBY rights and voice our opposition to a helicopter pad which is in the works to be installed two blocks away from our house. No thanks!

But, speaking of things that hover, a pair of hummingbirds has built their nest right outside our window. They're constantly zipping around, making it almost impossible to not zone out while gazing through the window.

And, while we're speaking of animals, I have some bad news. On the last day of February, our poor cat Beder had a coronary event called a saddle thrombosis. He was in really bad shape when we found him, and by the time we got to the vet, he was even worse and the prognosis was bleak, so we put him to sleep. RIP The Venerable Bede.

Ah, back to March. To close out the month, our friend Devon came down from Seattle for a visit. On Sunday we went to the Grace Cathedral to watch Elaine Pagels and Karen King talk about their book Reading Judas. We left Ada in the church nursery where (we think) she caught the awful cold she has now. I guess that's what we get for attending a talk on Gnosticism at an Episcopalian church. Or maybe the problem was that we sat on the cross. The next day, Devon and I went to see OOIOO at The Independent. They rocked!

March also brought the close of what I hope to be my last quarter of classes at UC Davis! Woo! Straight research for me from now on. One side effect of the quarter's end is that I got to spend a couple of days wandering around the Mission with Ada and taking many, many pictures.

And that's March, and a bit of February for you. Welcome to Spring!

2007-02-25T19:55:00.000-08:00

Hello!

It's Sunday night and I wanted to say hello and capture some of our latest adventures before I forget them--we're all super tired: Ada would rather gaze accusingly at us than nap, Dave commutes three hours to and from Davis every day, and I have been waking up for so many late-night feedings that I've forgotten what a full night of sleep feels like. That said, everything here is fabulous in that hazy, sleep-deprived way.

We took President's weekend off and drove down to San Louis Obispo. Stopped off in Santa Cruz to see my dad and myrna, and in Pescadero for the usual loaf of artichoke bread, which, for now at least, I can't eat. Ada was diagnosed with a milk allergy--something she will most likely grow out of--but it does mean that I must eliminate dairy from my diet. As someone who eats yogurt for breakfast, cheese and crackers for lunch, and cheese raviolis for dinner, I've found that giving up dairy is a HUGE thing. However, I have discovered a new love for soy milk, an appreciation of humus and baba ganoush, and an unexpected liking of Soy Delicious Awesome Chocolate ice cream.

We stayed at a Motel 6 (aka "the cardboard mansion"), which was fully booked. We got to hear our neighbor's tv, the two am arrival of a group of drunk co-eds, as well as their "fan", some older guy who was hanging out in front of our room talking about Amelia Earhart. Ada added her voice to the symphony as well, and though none of us got much sleep, I'd call the whole adventure a success. Not only did we break in the pack-n-play, we checked in on the elephant seals, spent a day at the Monterrey Bay Aquarium, and stopped off at the New Camaldoli Hermitage Monastery in Big Sur.

The cherry blossoms are blooming down here in our neighborhood and the air smells fantastic. We managed to pull ourselves away for a walk along the Coastal trail (between the Legion of Honor and the Cliff House). I wish we'd had our camera--next time we'll bring it and take pictures. For now, you'll just have to believe me when I say that the views of the coast and Golden Gate Bridge are absolutely exquisite.

Other highlights of the last couple weeks include: Pan's Labyrinth, which we saw at the new Westfield mall; a trip down to Thirsty Bear for some tapas; the latest edition of Whophin, a video magazine put out by McSweeney's; a visit from George, Bob's birthday, a dinner with Jonny, several fun potlucks with Wendy, Nadav, and Eli, cocktails with Karen, Matthew, and Emmett, and more pictures of Ada.

2007-02-09T21:25:00.000-08:00

Welcome to the February post!

Looks like we're down to one post a month. Ah well, it's just because we're too busy to post! Too busy doing... um... I'm not sure what. Well, let's see. Mostly we've been showing Ada around town.

We brought her out to Chrissy field again, where she saw the Golden Gate bridge and a weird elephant seal statue.

We went down to the farmer's market at the Ferry building where we saw the Bay bridge and some weird human being statues.

We went downtown to visit the California Academy of Sciences, which has a nice growing reef. We also checked out the relatively new Westfield mall, which has a beautiful glass ceiling.

Last week, we finally visited McLaren park. At 318 acres, McLaren is the second largest park in San Francisco, but it is visited much less often than Golden Gate park. We were there for a few hours, and I think we saw maybe 10 people and 10 dogs. We only saw a small part of the park, including a nice lake, and some pretty meadows. We also saw some odd industrial objects, like this water tower, these ... boxes? and this.... what the hell is it?

And last, but not least, we hosted a three month birthday party for Ada, where we had lots of food, and Ada got to meet all our friends. Speaking of Ada... here are more Ada pics!

2007-01-04T14:18:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year!

We're just back from a trip down to Cambria, where we saw some elephant seals (which are just starting to give birth to pups), wandered along the boardwalk that winds along the coast, checked out the bird life, and rang in the New Year with Lenore, Ali, Cyrus, Gus, and Grandma. We also took advantage of our proximity to Paso Robles to do a couple afternoons of wine tasting. Tobin James with its live music and free tastings was a favorite, but we also enjoyed Eos and Bianchi, where we hung out with the Coi, and a couple of family-run operations that had more intimate wine bars. Dave and I brought our pasta machine and made raviolis and some of Marco's great mushroom pate.

The drive up and down Highway one was fun, with stops at Pescadero and Nepenthe for lunch, and gorgeous views of the Pacific, which Ada finally saw. We've pointed it out to her several times before, but she's always been asleep. We had some *extra* excitement on the ride up when we blew a tire. Since all the tire stores were closed, we ended up driving back to SF at fifty miles an hour on the donut. More time for the views...

Christmas passed in a blur of holiday spirit down in Santa Cruz with my dad and myrna and the x-mas deer. The local bob cat was out and about and we watched it wander around the field next door to the house.

2007 is already off and running. Dave started school yesterday, I start work again next week, and Ada will get to hang out with her new sitter. Before my mom left, we managed to head over to Golden Gate park for a stroll. We stopped by the Academy of Sciences, still under construction, but looking good! I'm looking forward to seeing the finished building.

that's about the news here. Hope 2007 is fabulous for you! Here's to great things this year. And, as always, more Ada pics.

2006-12-23T14:23:00.000-08:00

Hello all,

Happy belated solstice and hanukah, happy upcoming christmas, hajj and kwanzaa. Life has been dense this past month or so. I finished up the second edition of the Book of JavaScript and its associated web site. Tech publishing moves so quickly, only 3 weeks passed between the time I finished the book and the time it became available on Amazon and at your local bookstore.

While that was going on, I went to Santa Barbara twice. First, to present a talk on logic and taxonomy at the Fifth International Conference on Ecological Informatics. Then back up to San Francisco to take a final. Then back down to Santa Barbara 3 days later to attend a meeting for the project which is currently paying my way through grad school, the Science Environment for Ecological Knowledge and then back up to San Francisco to present a paper on maximizing energy efficiency in sensor network devices. The drive up and down highway 101 is mostly beautiful and filled with fun pitstops, like Anderson's Pea Soup, home of lots of Danish stuff and scary dolls.

Like I said, it's been crazy and now it's OVER! WOOOO!! If all goes as planned, I have only one more quarter of classes. I can't wait.

While I was yoyoing up and down the coast, Kirsten was entertaining her mom, and Ada, and working on our friend Heather's website, Reel Time Color.

On other fronts, we sampled some of our first vintage - Ada Sophia Syrah. Maybe it will age well? We engaged in a variety of holiday events, such as visiting our local crazy holiday house and going to a bilingual holiday sing-a-long sponsored by First 5 a cool local parent-run organization. And, we've been feeding the famous Caga Tio all the foods he likes, getting him fattened up for his ceremonial whacking.

Media-wise, our consumption has been somewhat limited. I've been getting a great deal of pleasure from a new album by Boris and Sunn 0))) titled Altar and I've been reading the latest version of Kevin Kelly's True Films and a beautiful book titled World Changing: A User's Guide to the 21st Century. Kirsten's been reading Snow by Orhan Pamuk, and seems to be enjoying it. A couple of nights ago we watched Born into Brothels which was excellent.

And that, pretty much, wraps up December and.... 2006! 2006 has been an incredible year, and 2007 is looking poised to be similarly jam packed. See you next year!

2006-11-26T16:01:00.000-08:00

It's raining here in post-Thanksgiving San Francisco. Winter is coming! But not so fast that we didn't get a bit of wine tasting in over the weekend. We spent some time on the Silverado Trail, which seems to have a lot more mansions and castles than it did last time we made the trip about eight years ago. There's no use looking for wineries that don't charge for a tasting, so we decided to go all out and swing by the ones with the coolest features. Paraduxx gave us a small tub of almonds with our tasting, for example. As I said, we went all out.

We also stopped by Clos do Val, which has the claim to fame of being the first vintage of California Cabernet Sauvignon selected for the "legendary" 1976 Paris Tasting. Ten years later, that same vintage took first place in a rematch. Woo! We tried their 2003 vintage and liked it so well, we bought a bottle. Also checked out Rutherford Hill, where we hoped to tour the wine caves, but Ada was up and about, so we opted to settle for a quick tasting instead. And, most impressive, we swung by Sterling, where we were shuttled up to the winery in a gondola.

Otherwise, our Thanksgiving was quiet, with an untraditional, but delicious pot roast. We've been showing Ada all our favorite SF sites: the Golden Gate bridge, the various chocolate shops, the Allemany farmers market, and numerous parks around the Mission. We were thrilled that our local 24th Street Mini Park opened last week. Mayor Gavin Newsom and a number of other city dignitaries attended the opening festivities, and we managed to squeeze in and check out the mosaic Quetzalcoatl and the cool new jet fountains. We also labeled Ada's first beer!

That's the news here! And more Ada pics. And even more. Hope all's well!

2006-10-25T16:00:00.000-07:00

We are very happy to introduce Ada, our daughter, who arrived last week. She weighed in at 7 pounds 3 ounces and was nearly 20 inches long. According to the pediatrician, she is now 20 1/4 inches, which means that she's already growing out of clothes.

She likes to stay up late at night, eat decadent multi-course meals (also at night), and she loves being held. We couldn't be happier. She couldn't be cuter.

We've had a number of visitors. Grandma came down to help out, Julie and Lenore came over to meet their new niece, my dad and myrna came over to hold the little one, and a number of friends have all swung by to introduce themselves to Ada.

Here's some more pics:

We've been busy getting to know Ada, but not so busy that we neglected to bottle our first wine (which we're naming after the little one). Dave siphoned the wine a few times, coddled it for awhile, strapped it into the front seat, and brought it down to Brew Craft for bottling. The folks over there sent him home with a wine capper, and we ended up bottling the wine in our kitchen. Cheers!

2006-10-02T18:52:00.000-07:00

Welcome to October!

First, an announcement. There is a new member of the thau family! Introducing..... Plectroctena thaui! This stunning specimen from Cameroon was discovered by Brian Fisher, the Overlord of Antweb. He's discovered so many new species of ants, he must have run out of people to name them after. Lucky for me!

And now, to our regularly scheduled program.... September's projects. Here's the list:

Wallpaper

We pulled down the wallpaper in the soon-to-be nursery (no, not for the ant...). After seeing what was under there, we decided to hire professionals to fix up the crumbling plaster. Sadly, we'll be covering up some Victorian era curly-cues, but they're pretty faded.

Beer

Our latest batch of beer is brewing. Here's the trub. I just love saying that - trub.

Wine

Being equal opportunity drinkers, we could not forsake the grape. Our first venture into oenology is, in theory, a syrah. We purchased a box of Moments at our local grain and hops supplier, San Francisco Brewcraft. It comes with something like a sack of blood and a baggie of wood chips. Mix them together, and poof they're wine. As with any project, there's a good deal of fussing and checking. I needed to check the specific gravity of the concoction a couple of days ago and took a sniff and a swallow and here's the result. Keep your fingers crossed, especially if you think you might be asked to drink this stuff.

Exercise

We took a couple of nice long walks. One up to Crissy Field where we ate grilled cheese at the warming hut and saw many beautiful views of the bridge.

We also walked around our neighborhood a good deal, and visited one our local homies. That thing lives at Borderlands Books, one of the great bookstores nearish us.

Speaking of books and great bookstores, we also made a trip up to City Lights Bookstore to see Ben Fountain read from his excellent collection of short stories, Brief Encounters with Che Guevara.

Enculturation

On September 24th, a date some people celebrated as the start of Ramadan, much of San Francisco took another tack and celebrated buttocks. To be fair to the Folsom Street Fair, it's about more than flapping chaps. It is also a celebration of flogging bunnies, leather thongs, and of course Madonna.

Bringing it Full Circle

And finally, to finish September off right, we went to see "A Horror Horde of Crawl-And-Crush Giants Clawing Out of the Earth's Steaming Depths" in the Presidio. They invited us out to a picnic and released upon us.... THEM! But, before they unleashed the horror, we were treated to
some nice militaristic horn blowing, just to get us in the mood.

And that, friends, was September.

Happy Fall!

2006-09-09T15:22:00.000-07:00

Greetings! We're just back from a trip up north. I stopped off in Coos Bay for a work-related meeting, and Dave continued on to Seattle, where he saw Devon and met Jim Woodring, creator of JIM and Frank, among other things. We bought a watercolor from him and plan to hang it up soon. Dave found this. On the way back down, Dave also got to see my mom in Portland before heading back to southern Oregon.

Meanwhile, I was spending my days at the Oregon Institute of Marine Biology, near Guano Rock Lane, Davey Jones Locker, and Bird Lady's whirlygigs, talking about the documentation I've been working on for the past six weeks or so for Kepler.

We'd taken the 5 up because it is faster, but I have to say that the 101 is much more fun. We saw some pretty coastline, came across the Prehistoric Gardens, home of dozens of life-sized dinosaurs and numerous ferns, bridges, and amazing poems. The day we arrived, "Stabbin Cabin", an indie horror movie, was using the garden as a location, so we shared the garden experience with a film crew. Looking forward to finding the movie when it comes out, though I'm not sure how widely it will be released...

Also along the 101 were some great salmon jerky, pretty Redwoods, wineries, and smoked tofu. We got to stop by the Trees of Mystery, too.

So far, September has passed in a blur. Spent Labor day at Pritikin's Chenery House outrage. Dave dressed up in his wedding finery. The house has changed since last I saw it--lots of new art and a number of new rooms, but the party was the same over-the-top affair that I remembered from previous Labor days. The special guest performer was RatDog, Bob Weir's band. He was awarded the day (September 5, 2006) by the city of San Francisco, an honor that he did not know how to respond to, despite the fact that city supervisor Bevan Duffy was up on stage reading the proclamation to an audience that was more concerned with schmoozing and drinking. Also available were giant platters of Joseph Schmidt chocolates, copious amounts of bbq and booze, and Bob Pritikin's lovely saw music.

Dave also finished installing the kitchen floor, thanks to the help of Chris (my new hero), who spent the weekend in our kitchen helping out. It looks great! Next up: pulling down wallpaper... the projects never end.

Saw some good movies: Who Killed the Electric Car and The Great Yokai War, which was live action but felt like an animation, and discovered a couple new (to us) restaurants: Aziza, flavors of Morocco (they do amazing things with lamb), and a surprisingly good Indonesian place on Clement Street called Java Restaurant. We were also thrilled to discover that Brewcraft, our beer-making supply store, did not close while we were in Spain; it's on Clement and 17th, not 14th as we "remembered." This weekend, we plan to make a new batch of IPA.

That's about the news here. Hope things are going well with you!

2006-08-20T19:43:00.000-07:00

Hello, Friends,
August has come and has mostly gone, and I have no clear idea where it went. Time has suddenly accelerated for me. Ah, whatever happened to the summer which seemed to stretch on forever. Maybe it never was. Luckily, we have our handy calendar to tell us what we've been doing.

Early in the month, I got roped into going to a concert at Club Six by a colleague of mine who's living in San Francisco for the summer. It was a celebration of the San Francisco Guardian's latest Best of the Bay issue. The band that he wanted to see was The Extra-Action Marching Band. Here's what they say about themselves "An Extra Action performance is a bacchanalian, infectiously celebratory, inappropriate, transcendent, freaky spectacle that amuses, arouses, and intoxicates the audience. " They're not kidding. Smutty!

Sixth Street has gotten very slick these days. In addition to Club Six, there's the Anu bar and the Arrow bar, and the tasty but dicey, Tu Lan.

The next day, Kirsten and I went out to celebrate the
125th Anniversary of the Internet at 111 Minna. Not sure why the show was called that, but they had some interesting art, including this painting of San Francisco by Kim Cogan, and these pictures of Bigfoot by Bigfoot One who's an SF based graffiti artist who mostly does art about.... wait for it.... Bigfoot!

That weekend, we went down to Santa Cruz to hang out with Roger and Myrna and watch a good production of King Lear. Spoiler: pretty much everyone dies at the end.

Actually, this has been a month of theater. The next weekend we went to Berkeley to meet up with Bob and Wendy, friends of Kirsten's mom and watch the San Francisco Mime troupe put on their yearly production. This year it was Godfellas, a play about the dissolution of the separation of church and state in our country. People speak in Mime troupe shows, and Bob asked aloud why it was called the Mime troupe. Unbeknownst to him we were sitting directly behind the director of the troupe, Ed Holmes and got a bit of a lecture. The show was fantastic and involved lots of singing, dancing and genuflecting.

Let's see. Last week we went to another of the Progressive Readings and brought along a colleague of mine who was visiting from Glasgow to present at the first Science Foo camp. The reading was great, as usual, but triggered the question "Do you think this crowd is a bit left of the left?" from my colleague. I think one reader's 5 minute long rant of expletives concerning our current administration, and the accompanying hoots and applause might have caused him to wonder.

And that brings us to our weekend, which has been very relaxing, and was kicked off by an exclusive presentation of Snakes of A Plane hosted by the Suspension of Disbelief Society, of which I am a proud, but mostly ceremonial, member. It's hard to describe the magnitude of the event. Perhaps the invitation to the event says it best. Or maybe this collection of SODS SNOP Flickr photos. What they don't capture are the hundreds of snakes which took to the air during the scarier moments of the movie. Fun fun fun!

2006-07-20T20:56:00.000-07:00

Hello!

The news went out on Publishers Lunch, so I think it's official: my book will see the light of day:

Kirsten Menger-Anderson's DR. OLAF VAN SCHULER'S BRAIN, a collection of linked short stories tracing a family of doctors in New York City from 1664 through the present day, to Antonia Fusco at Algonquin, in a nice deal, by Eve Bridburg at Zachary Shuster Harmsworth Literary Agency (World). ebridburg@zshliterary.com

I'm very happy about the whole thing. The edits arrived yesterday, which makes the event seem more real, too.

In other July news, I had a chance to catch up a bit with my old college roommate Marcia, who was in town for a few days; we went to the Pride Parade--another of my favorite SF events;

We celebrated our anniversary at House of Prime Rib (where we'd naively believed we'd find ribs. The menu is all prime rib, carved table side and seved with so much salad, creamed spinach, potato, and yorkshire pudding that it's impossible to finish). Also managed to get the hall floor nearly installed, saw Dead Man's Chest (opening night!) , and created my new favorite summer dish: ratatouille. That's about the news here. Except that it's HOT. What ever happened to the famous SF summers that Mark Twain spoke so fondly about?

2006-06-23T09:19:00.000-07:00

Happy (belated) Summer Solstice!

It has been quite a month. We started off with a visit to the new office of the Long Now where we saw their orrery among many other beautiful things (here are more pictures of the orrery.) Soon after that came Kirsten's mom, who I saw for only a day before taking a plane to Edinburgh, home of nifty streets, Arthur's Seat and dozens of artful cattle all over town. I spent almost the entire week there locked inside Scotland's e-Science Institute attending this conference on RDF, Ontologies and Metadata and presenting a talk titled Toward Reasoning about Conflicting Taxonomic Experts. The talk was shorter than its title. Luckily, my day off was sunny.

Upon returning from Edinburgh we were visited by our friend Daphne, who was here to do a few readings from the recently released paperback version of her short story collection Calamity and Other Stories. Kirsten kept Daphne busy for a few days while I finished up finals. I'm done with my first year of classes - hooray!

Just after submitting my last class paper for the year - this one titled
"Finding Relations Between Ontologies via the Discovery of Association Rules in Annotated Datasets" (what is it with these long titles?) Kirsten and I picked up my sister and we all drove down to sunny Thousand Oaks where we kept my folks company while my mom underwent some gnarly, but successful, surgery. Not too many pictures from there, other than this shot of Kirsten playing piano while the aliens landed and this one of weird hospital mobiles. While we were down near L.A. we took a quick trip to the Fowler Museum at my alma mater, UCLA, and checked out The Missing Peace, a travelling collection of art created or lent in appreciation of the Dalai Lama. It was a great show, with pieces from many of our favorite artists, like Laurie Andersion, Chuck Close, Binh Danh, Bill Viola and um... Richard Gere.

We got back yesterday, and now.. it's time to rest! Enjoy your remainder-of-June!

2006-05-29T21:45:00.000-07:00

It's Carnaval time in San Francisco. The rest of the world may celebrate around Ash Wednesday, but San Francisco puts on its grand parade in May. Why? I believe the timing has everything to do with the weather, which tends to be sunny and warm right about now (and overcast, cold, rainy, etc in February). Regardless, the parade is one of my absolute favorite events in SF--school kids, cultural groups, soccer fans, featered folk, and all the fighting pirates turn out, so ofcourse, we took tons of pictures. Here are a few favorites:

Last week, we were down visiting Lenore, Ali, and Cyrus and meeting Gus for the first time. We took a walk along the beach, enjoyed some good food, and saw Niki de Saint Phalle "Queen Califia's Magical Circle Garden." Her Tarot Garden was one of the highlights of our honeymoon, and I love her work. Again, we took tons of pictures:

Lots of colorful stuff! Our time down south was not nearly long enough, but what the trip lacked in length, it made up for in quality.

Other recent highlights include an amazing dinner at Tartine (the prize-winning bakery now has a restaurant spin-off that offers some AMAZING food) with Wendy and Nadav, lunch with Jenn at The Ramp (one of my favorite outdoor lunch/brunch spots), a trip out to Marin (complete with fire sculpture) for a worthy cause, and a trip over to Valencia Books to see Roy Kesey read from Nothing In the World. That's all for now. The camera battery is recharing, so we'll be back with more tales soon.

2006-05-07T17:47:00.000-07:00

Hello! It's that time again--enough time has passed that I can say it's been too long, and long enough has passed that I won't remember to write everything that we've done which is a good thing, because writing everything would make for pretty boring reading.

Today was the "How Weird Street Faire" here in San Francisco. For ten dollars (weird people could pay five) we got to wander the two block street fair populated with 9 stages, several dozen street vendors, and a booth selling the literature of Brad Olson, whom we believe to be the mastermind behind "World Peace Through Technology," the organization that sponsored this piece of the peace tour. Tonight, we're off to a screening of Battlefield Earth at the Dark Room, a fitting close to the day, I think.

Dave is just back from a week in New Mexico where he went for a SEEK meeting. He returned with a picture of a cool building, a law office, and The Swinging Seniors singing "It's a Wonderful World" at the airport. My week was less eventful, though I was excited to hear that my agent sent my short story collection around to a dozen or so publishing houses. Fingers crossed.

We enjoyed wine tasting at Julie's, even though we discovered that we are horrible at identifying grapes (Cab, Pinot, Zin, etc). Just because we like to drink wine doesn't mean we've acquired any kind of taste evidently. Other recent highlights include a trip down to the SF Moma for a cool Calder show. The museum also had an exhibit of 1906 earthquake photos, which were amazing. For the past month or so, the city has been abuzz with earthquake events to "celebrate" the 100th anniversary of the great quake. We missed the 5 am commemoration on April 18th, the actual anniversary, but enjoyed the Chronicle's reprints of the papers from that time. I made a trip out to Bowling Green, Ohio where I attended a symposium in honor of my step father. And, in honor of Good Friday, both Dave and I joined friends for a home screening of Left Behind starring Kirk Cameron. For those who aren't familiar with the story, based on a series of novels, it concerns the rapture and those "left behind." Today's rapture index, sources say, is 155.

2006-04-16T18:48:00.000-07:00

It's still raining! So, we decided to stay inside and install a new floor. Here are a few quick shots:


the old floor	the floor boards	cat helps with cork

the first plank	the first row	making progress

halfway done	the last bit	the end

If you're interested, here are more details of the new floor.

2006-04-03T20:33:00.000-07:00

Greetings from the rainy shores of San Francisco! March has had the most rainy days on record (25 out of 31 for downtown SF), and April is shaping up to be another wet month. However, we escaped the showers (for the most part) down in Big Sur.

We stayed in a cabin down in Gorda Springs--a town consisting of little more than a hotel, an antique store, a gas station (selling gas for over 4 dollars a gallon), a convenience store, and a tourist information center that never opened, at least while we were around. Our home away from home was called the Redwood House and it had an extra groovy couch (note indentation in middle), burl table, throne, and instant-love fireplace. Outside, our door were two llamas, one tremendous sheep, and a handful of goats. Best of all was the view of the Pacific coast. We spotted spouting whales from the pagoda just outside our cabin.

We bought a book of local hikes and checked out some new trails. Day one we headed south a few miles and then meandered the mile or so up to Salmon Falls. The area was lovely, full of fern-covered rocks and some cool lichen (and poison oak, but we managed to avoid that). Afterwards, we headed down to Cambria for lunch. Along the way, we stopped to view some sea lion pups.

We also stopped at Ragged Point and took the beach trail down to the empty beach--well, empty save for a lone sea lion pup we later reported to the marine center. I'm not sure if anyone ever followed through on the call--we continue to send our best wishes to the little fellow. Dave found some seaweed that he liked.

Day two we stopped by the New Camaldoli Hermitage. We went for a loaf of their famed >fruitcake, and ended up staying to see the mass. We had no idea that it was a feast day--in honor of the Virgin Mary, no less. Afterwards, we headed up to Henry Coe state park where we discovered "Big Sir". We strolled out to the beach--an easy walk along a relatively level trail. Along the way, we passed some deer grazing right where the grass was greenest. We tried to take a longer hike, but had to turn back because the trail was still flooded and we didn't want to get our feet wet. We watched the sun begin to set from Cielo at the Ventana Inn, where we pretty much had the patio to ourselves. Gotta love traveling off season!

Our last full day, we decided to take a longer hike through Julia Pfeiffer Burns State park. I wasn't sure we'd make it, but at last we reached the
end of the trail. Saw some wild life, some wild flowers, and some wild lizards. The view was amazing.

On the drive back we stopped by the Big Sur Bakery, where I had the most amazing muffin I've ever had in my life--cherry walnut and so good I still dream about it. It was Dave's muffin, actually, but after I tried it I proposed that we share. He got some of my pastry twist--all's fair in love and breakfast. I want to go back and and maybe spend some more time in their garden.

Most amazing of all, we passed a California Condor--number 167 and one of only 230 or so in the state. The bird was sitting on the guard rail right at the side of the road. Giant and black (save for the numerical marking), the bird was regarding the passing cars as if sizing them up for dinner. The bird is nesting with its mate in Big Sur, and there is much excitement and speculation about an egg. According to the article up on the Big Sur site, the last known condor egg in Northern California was collected in 1905 in Monterey County.

2006-03-22T19:35:00.000-08:00

We are very happy to welcome our new nephew, August, born March 16! He's busy eating, sleeping, growing, and doing other baby things. We'll be heading south to meet him in the not too distant future and will have a full report then.

In the meantime, we celebrated Dave's birthday with a pasta dinner that didn't interfere too much with his studies. His semester ends today and we head down to Big Sur tomorrow for some hiking, reading, relaxing, and good food.

Recent highlights have included a trip by the Anarchist Book Fair over in Golden Gate Park. I found a good book on the Spanish Civil War and the CNT, the anarchist party in Barcelona. Dave chose a book of essays by Noam Chomsky, and we picked up a few free pamphlets about various anarchist activities that struck our fancy. A trip through the Strybing arboretum revealed that we missed the azaleas this year, but that there is still a lot of blossoming to come. We popped into Giant Robot to look at all the action figures and books, grabbed a focaccia at the Arizmendi Bakery, passed a happy house and a sunny window display and headed downtown to the Metreon, where we saw The Libertine. I didn't care for the cinematography much, but Dave thought it was good. We both enjoyed Plagues and Pleasures of the Salton Sea, a documentary we caught at the Red Vic, much more.

In other welcomes, we saw our friends Jenn and Alan who just returned to the States from Barcelona. Always good to hear stories from that city. Dave was out at Davis for most of their visit, but we all got to share a nice breakfast at St. Francis Fountain. In other dining adventures, we met up with friends for a private booth at Sam's Grill. The day's specials were pretty much gone, but we still found some good seafood on the menu. The private room, which felt a bit like a wood-paneled train cabin, was super.

Finally, I'm glad to report that Doppler is recovering from a bad case of fleas. The vet gave her some Advantage and a bag of steroids, and though her fur is still light in places, she seems much happier. That's the news here! More when we return from Big Sur.

2006-03-04T19:04:00.001-08:00

Welcome to March!

It's been a calm couple of weeks since the last post. Kirsten's still working on her ACLU contract, and my quarter is starting to amp up to finals. Kirsten's dad and step-mom came over one weekend, and we had a good time visiting the farmer's market, where we beheld this dedication to Christian Manhood.

We also celebrated bianca's birthday with a brunch at our place. We had all the good brunch fixings, plus the traditional grilled cheese and saw lots of great biancanauts and friends. We didn't have enough plates for everyone, so we picked some up at Abbey Party Rents which is in South San Francisco right near the See's Chocolate Factory. Here's Kirsten trying to eat a giant nougat. Yum, yum.

Finally, last week we went to Bad Movie Night at the Darkroom. The movie was truly bad - The Astro-Zombies. It was rendered even worse by a zeno-paroxidized DVD which froze more and more often, for longer and longer durations as the movie progressed. Finally, everyone gave up and left. Actually, I kind of liked it. Especially the groovy 1969 costuming.

And that, my friends, wraps it up for February. Stay tuned for more merriment in March!

2006-02-20T20:56:00.000-08:00

In response to Kat Denza's tag.

2006-02-13T22:39:00.000-08:00

Rudy the Organic Rutabaga welcomes you! He'll be appearing throughout tonight's blog entry to gaze longingly out from the screen with his organic rutabaga eyes.

We're just back from the second of Stephen Elliott's Progressive Readings. Tonight's proceeds went to support New Mexico's Patsy Madrid, who's running against conservative Heather Wilson for the House of Representatives. The readings were great, particularly Jonathan Ames, who delivered his essay "Bald, Impotent, and Depressed" with panache. Jennifer Traig read an excellent piece about sisters, Curtis Sittenfeld read from her novel, PREP, Adam Johnson read some entertaining letters from STUMBLING AND RAGING, and Tobias Wolff ended the evening with a short story I've read before, but can't remember when.

This weekend was the Chinese New Year's parade, which we missed, again. But, we did come across a bunch of floats (note the missing head) lining up a few hours before the parade started, all heavily branded. We were on our way back from the ferry building, where we'd searched through the root vegetables, but failed to find a root as cool as Rudy.

In other news, my contracts with the ACLU and WebSideStory are keeping me busy, Dave's going crazy documenting his days at Davis and Stanford, and we saw a hilarious show at the Dark Room: The Gong Show--bringing classic television to the stage.

That's the news from here. Hope your valentine's day is a grand one!

2006-02-05T22:54:00.000-08:00

Happy February!

It's been a busy time here in the cherry blossomful Mission since our last post. Most importantly, Kirsten has become a famous political commentator. She was hanging out at the local coffee shop, getting ready to start her new gig doing some work for the ACLU, when Fox News stopped by and asked her how she felt about SBC turning phone records over to the government en masse.

Devon came over on the weekend, and we spent most of it gazing at art. On Sunday we FINALLY got into the De Young. It is HUGE! We had no idea. The Oceanic collection is especially amazing, and we have to go back and spend a day just in that section. The Three Gems by James Turrell was a relaxing place to kick back and watch the kids run round and round. I took a couple art shots while we were there, and Kirsten took a nice photo of the area outside the museum.

Sunday night we went to our friend Julie's house for her birthday and watched a shadow puppet show put on by her friend Max. It was a modern-type shadow puppet show, using an overhead projector, paper with cutout areas and about a thousand tiny pieces of transparency upon which words and designs had been printed. The story was based on an old Moroccan story about a girl who was brought up as a boy, only to later discover that she was a girl. The details.... um... I forget. The food was great and so was the wine.

The next couple of days held three Gs - Google, Galleries and Gratitude. I went to Google to talk about AntWeb, which is being incorporated into an upcoming version of Google Earth. There I met Rebecca Moore who used Google Earth to convince the City of Santa Clara to put the kabosh on a logging company's dreams of knocking down some old growth forest. http://www.mountainresource.org/ is the site which shows what she did, and here's an article about how environmentalists are using Google Earth to aid their cause. Everybody we met loves working at Google. It was like there was something in the koolaid....

The next G is galleries. On Sunday, Kirsten, Devon and I went to the Ratio 3 gallery, which is only open for a few hours on Sunday, and by appointment. Devon bought a piece by Robert Gutierrez and we went to visit it. We saw Silver Equinox by Takeshi Murata while we were there. It is incredible and creepy!

On Tuesday, Devon and I had more gallery fun. We visited: The White Walls Gallery where we saw some good stuff by Adam 5100, the Shooting Gallery, which is right next door, the Hosfelt Gallery where we saw some amazing books by Dominic Di Mare, and the Fifty 24SF Gallery which has an associated clothing store. Another very good gallery was The Luggage Store which had a great piece by Jen Lui called Volcano Fire Makes Ash Flowers. Here’s the front door of the luggage store, and Devon looking up the stairs from inside.

The final G is Gratitude a local raw food restaurant that opened in our neighborhood while we were gone. It was tasty and the people working there were very nice. And, for consistency, we ran into Max the shadow puppeteer and her girlfriend Tracy there. Check out the menu to get a good sense for what kind of place it is.

And that pretty much wraps up what went down the last couple of weeks. I’ll sign off with some more pictures from Davis. Here’s a weird metallic thing which reminded me of Nomad from the Star Trek episode The Changling. Here is more evidence of the rampant Christianity on campus. Even the fences are filled with the spirit. And finally, to end on an unholy note, here are some of the evil crows I keep talking about. They have it out for me, I’m telling you!

2006-01-26T13:25:00.000-08:00

Hello! And greetings from San Francisco. Lots of stuff happening here at myhappening. Last night, I checked out the William Kentridge, a South African artist, up at the Academy of Art. The place was *packed*, so I missed Kentridge's lecture, but I did get to see two of his video pieces, "WEIGHING...and WANTING" and "Ubu Tells the Truth." Beautiful animation in both. I particularly liked Weighing and Wanting, which featured an animation of the artist himself, according to my friend the art critic.

The two literary events we went to this week were packed as well: John Perkins spoke about his book, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, in which he admits to undermining the economies of various nations with the blessing of those in power. He had us all visualize a series of globe-spanning octopuses, and also a small way in which we could help remedy the wrongs of the world. The guy next to me decided to use less paper, Dave plans to avoid clothing produced in sweatshops (there are many web sites that help), and I decided to donate to a microfinance organization. I have yet to read John Perkin's book, but his talk left me feeling sick about many very large matters.

David Foster Wallace, who read from his new book, Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays, chose an essay he'd written right after the World Trade Center attacks on 9/11/2001. His reading was not particularly uplifting either, but a good crowd turned out to see the man whom many claim is the "voice of a generation." If this is, in fact, the case, I hope that I will one day be able to read Infinite Jest (I've started and failed twice already).

Other highlights include a trip to the Rite Spot, our local bar, restaurant, and small music venue to see Our Lady of the Highway perform, and a trip out to the outer Sunset to see Beder and to try the Indian Pizza at Golden Gate Pizza. We're big fans of Zante's indian pizza, but the Golden Gate version is very good as well. We've been trying to check out some new restaurants with our friends Wendy and Nadav. Last week we tried Garçon, a relatively new French place on Valencia and 21st. The food was good, the wine was fabulous, but the place is on a corner of doom: always a restaurant, and always a different one.

Dave's off to Google tonight, and Devon arrives on Saturday for a brief visit. More on those adventures soon!

2006-01-17T16:29:00.000-08:00

****SPECIAL UPDATE****

Every now and then, we fill up our camera with photos from a single outing, and though we could still cram a few more shots on the memory card, today's foray to Año Nuevo deserved its own post.

Just a little over an hour south of San Francisco, right along the Pacific Coast Highway, it is mating and breeding time: over a thousand elephant seals are now congregating for their annual birthing and fertilization festivities. Hanging out with them are a few blue herons, who try to stay out of the way.

The fun begins in December, when the males arrive and begin to fight (an odd and awkward activity that involves a lot of blubbery chests banging against each other in one-on-one combat. Here's a video). The lucky winner becomes the Alpha male and presides over a harem of about 50 females who will soon carry his seed. Losing males find a nice pool of muck or a sandy stretch of dune and either sleep or watch the tourists walk by in guided groups of about 20.

Though the Alpha male/harem relationship seems a bit unfair, our guide told us that if the females did not cluster, they risked sexual advances from the entire male population. Too much to deal with, especially as they are also pregnant and popping out pups: 60 pounds at birth, which takes approximately 5-7 minutes. During out 1.5 hour tour, we saw two births--at least, we saw evidence of two: the seagulls flock to the scene of a birth so that they can eat the placenta. Yum. The actual births are hard to catch, as the females show no sign of labor, and the whole thing is over quickly.

The pups feast on 55%-fat milk, which helps them gain over 200 pounds in a single month. Then, the moms return to the sea, leaving their "weaners" behind. At Año Nuevo, there were already 4 weaners. The weaners do not know how to swim, how to eat, or what they are supposed to do with themselves, so they muck around in the sand for awhile, and teach themselves the tricks of the elephant seal trade.

We hope to return in the spring to see the weaners hanging out. During spring and summer there is no need for a reservation or guide, which makes visiting a bit easier (when I went to book the trip, all the weekends were already full, so I had to schedule for a weekday). Plus, I'm always looking for an excuse to swing by Pescadero for artichoke bread.

Other interesting facts:

1. The male elephant seal can weigh up to 5 tons. Here's a short video of one fellow.
2. The female elephant seal loses up to half her body weight during the birthing season.
3. The elephant seals have taken over the old lighthouse caretaker's house out on Año Nuevo island, abandoned by humans after World War II. The place, evidently, smells awful.
4. Elephant seals have four inches of blubber beneath their skins.

And now, back to work. If this post didn't provide enough elephant seal goodness, check out the live cam

2006-01-13T20:37:00.000-08:00

Happy Friday the 13th!

We started the new year right with a raging New Years fiesta at our place. Well, it raged if you call staying up until 4 a.m. playing Ticket to Ride raging. Best German Board game of 2004! Don't miss it! After a brief nap, Kirsten and I spent the rest of the first day of 2006 taking a big walk around town. This included a visit to a Frank Lloyd Wright building on Maiden Lane downtown. It's a beautiful space, with a big spiral ramp along the inside of the outer wall. It was built as a gift shop, and now houses the Xanadu art gallery.

The new quarter at UC Davis has started and the trees there are looking weird. So far its shaping up to be a bit less strenuous than the previous quarter. I'm taking a course on programming languages and one on spatial databases. Good stuff. I was taking a class in sensor networks, but it didn't work out... I'm also still working on AntWeb and got to make my semi-regular pilgrimige to the California Academy of Sciences, where they have a beautiful living reef.

Kirsten signed on with the Zachary, Shuster, Harmsworth agency in Boston and just sent them a final (?) copy of her collection.

On the 6th we celebrated El Dia de Los Reyes Magos by eating a big rosca de reyes with some friends in a Chinese restaurant, and giving props to Caga Tio. Those roscas come in all sizes - the one we got was the smallest Kirsten could find. Inside it were TWO plastic baby Jesi. Good luck!

On the artsy-fartsy front, we went to see a play about Emperor Norton at the Dark Room, and we went to the first of the Progressive Reading Series at the Makeout Room. The money from the reading went to help support Nick Lampson in his fight to replace Tom Delay in the Senate. Best of luck to Nick Lampson! Many people read, including Christian Parenti, Daniel Handler (aka Lemony Snicket), Andrew Sean Greer, who wrote The Confessions of Max Tivoli, and Jim Shepard, who was hilarious. There was also a reading of part of a play by Denis Johnson. Finally, we went to the SFMOMA and saw the Chuck Close show there, and some great stuff by Wangechi Mutu. We're planning on seeing her speak in a couple of weeks.

The only bummer of 2006 so far was that we decided to separate our cats by giving Beder to my sister. They were fighting like crazy and making each other miserable. It had been going on for three months and was just getting worse. They were making each other bleed, pissing all over the place, it was getting messier and messier. As we predicted, it took Beder only about an hour to get used to the relocation. My sister reports that he's out and about and acting like his gregarious old self.

Fear not, dear reader, I won't end on a sad note. Today was very exciting. Kirsten and I met Jimmy Carter! That's right, the ex-president and kick-ass do-gooder himself. Well, "met" is a strong word. We got into a huge line which wound through the shelves of Cody's bookstore, and each spent approximately 10 seconds in his presence as he signed our copies of his latest book - Our Endangered Values. Most exciting of all however was that he actually spoke to me! He said "I wish I had as much hair as you." Sigh....

And that is the report for the first two weeks of 2006! Hope yours is going as well as ours.

2005-12-31T15:42:00.000-08:00

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

And a very happy end of the old. It's New Year's Eve, and I wanted to write a quick note to record the events of the past weeks before the new year begins and it's all old news.

San Francisco has done its very best to ring in the holidays with lights, and a combination of palms and evergreen. Union Square had a large tree and our favorite house on 22nd Street did its traditional holiday extravamaganza. I have pictures of holiday decor (and much, much more) from NYC, as well, but I left my camera in NYC--hopefully I'll get it back soon.

Over the last couple weeks, we saw tons of family, first for hannukah, then x-mas. Cyrus met a very special new friend, and we burned our special gold angel candle, which looked quite striking.

The winter solstice found us balancing eggs and debating whether or not we were supposed to have success with this on the equinox alone, or on any solstice. Our experiments led us to conclude that the winter solstice is indeed a very special time.

2005-12-19T15:32:00.000-08:00

Holy cow, almost three weeks without a post. Terrible! Well, I took my last final on Saturday at 8am (can you believe that?) and finally have some free time to write.

It's been an eventful three weeks. At the beginning of the month, we went to Salon's 10th year anniversary party at the Cafe Du Nord where we hobnobbed with some of Kirsten's old cronies. We also attended the semi-monthly meeting of the Society of Unprofessional Journalists, where we heard all about the CNN "Anderson Cooper 360 Degrees" segment about DINKS - double income, no kids. The segment largely consisted of interviews of our friends Jenn and Alan and some other childless couples who went over to their place for drinks. Here's the transcript of the show. You have to scroll about 2/3 down to get to their spot.

We got some pictures of the scene at the Salon party, but unfortunately, the camera upon which the pictures sit is now in New York. Two weeks ago, Kirsten went to Boston and New York for almost a week. She hung out with many pals and met several new babies. She also met with two agents who are interested in representing her latest short story collection. Very exciting! She's chosen one and is currently reviewing the contract. This is great news. In other news, the ice-skating rink was up in Rockefeller Center, along with the tree and many lights.

I've spent a great deal of time on campus these last two weeks, finishing final projects and studying for the tests. Not much to report there. The crows continue to form their unnerving society up in the branches. The fog's started to roll in. And, we've had two frosts. The night before the Saturday final, my undergrad project-mate Alex crashed at my swinging pad in the dorms so he wouldn't have to commute from Sacremento, where he lives with his family. It was a kickin' study party! Actually, we crashed out at 10:30 and didn't even stay up long enough to play Mario Cart on his Nintendo DS. Ah well.

We also managed to squeeze in a bunch of movies (King Kong was amazing), and saw lots of old friends and their kids at a party thrown by our pals Wendy and Nadav. The next week holds much family activity and then.... party at our place!!!! Wooo!!!

Happy Holidays!!!!

2005-11-30T10:22:00.000-08:00

It's hard to believe that it's almost December, and that 2005 is almost over and done. The year has held many wonderful things, as well as some very sad ones. My step father passed away in October, and in November Dave and I traveled up to Portland again for his memorial service. Family, friends, and colleagues gathered for a Quaker style service, which was his wish. Dave and I have always seen this blog as a place to record adventures rather than personal news, but it is also a record of our lives, and I so I must break from the happy tradition of recording fun things to note this one sad one that has affected us all so much.

We've had a quiet few weeks, mostly working, though we did get over to our friends Jenn and Alan's house for Thanksgiving, where I had squab for what may well have been the first time. We took the day after Thanksgiving off to head up to Tomales Bay for some hiking and fine cheese, and then returned home to watch ESCAPE FROM WITCH MOUNTAIN. The next field trip is down Highway 1 to check out the original castle house used in the film. Look for reports in January!

A major highlight of this month was seeing George R.R. Martin talk about his work and latest book, A FEAST FOR CROWS. I got an autographed copy of the first book in the series, and I'm very proud of my Kirsten RR. Dave has been busy with school, getting close to the end of the first semester. I'm off to New York and Boston on Sunday, and should have some stories from the road.

I'm sure I'm forgetting things, so I may be back to update this post. In the meantime, I hope you are well and enjoying these last few weeks of 2005!

2005-11-06T17:03:00.000-08:00

Greetings!

We caught a few late Day of the Dead festivities today--some dancing and drumming in front of out our local Mexican restaurant, El Metate, just around the corner. Lots of feathered headdresses and decorative ankle shakers. We stayed for awhile to watch, but, sadly, did not have the camera.

Our crazy work schedules did not prevent us from renting and watching my new favorite movie this weekend: Zardoz, starring Sean Connery as a loin-clothed Zed. I have to admit that I fell asleep about two thirds of the way into the 1974 sci-fi classic, but we watched the ending this morning, and I marveled at the special effects and costumes all over again.

Other weekend highlights include new cooking adventures with baby bok choy and turnips, both inspired by the fact that the things came in our organic food box.

Dave spent all of last week down in San Diego, where he met in the Supercomputer
center with a bunch of his colleagues. He survived mid-terms last week, as well as the
big pile of stuff in the basement of the engineering building. I spent the week writing technical stuff and watching things like the remake of "Freaky Friday." Highlights included seeing my friend Laila Lalami read from her *fantastic* debut short story collection, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, having Thai noddles and drinks with Alison, and sharing drinks with Mark at Latin America Club. Halloween passed in a blur of princesses, brides, and all sorts of masked monsters who failed to relieve us of our candy supply, even though we allowed every trick-or-treater to "take two pieces" (which usually meant a handful). Our pumpkin remains uncarved and on the front porch.

Today is overcast and a bit chilly; winter has arrived in SF! Last weekend, before the clocks shifted back an hour and the days still felt long, we took a walk through Golden Gate park where we happened across "The Wonders of Cannabis" festival. Had it not cost $20 a person, I'd have more to report about it.

That's the news for now. Happy November!

2005-10-17T22:50:00.000-07:00

Happy Mid-October,

The filming of The Pursuit of Happiness has finally ceased here. Seems that they spent a month gearing up for one or two days of filming, and then outta here. They left the false graffitied and tin-walled facade on one of our local taquerias, but other than that, all the equipment and army of hipsters with wires in their ears are gone. I look forward to seeing it. Apparently Will Smith lives on York Street in the film. Maybe we'll become as popular as the Santa Barbara wine scene after Sideways!

Other than the filming, it's been pretty quiet over here. The weather is glorious this time of year, so we went to the shi-shi Embarcadero farmer's market to take in the views and ogle the produce. This weekend, we went to not-so-well-lighted Den to see our friend Jennifer L. Shawne read from her book "Baby Not on Board" - that's her on the bed, then we stayed up late to check out the scene at the de Young museum's 36 hour straight grand-opening extravaganza. We got there at midnight, and the line to get in was at least two hours long. We bailed because we needed to get our beauty rest before seeing our friend Mikl Em playing the Joker in a stage production of Batman the TV Show.

Other than that, not too much is new. I've been hanging out in my cubicle in the Genome Center at UC Davis, which is constantly being monitored for I'm afraid to ask what. Even with all the monitoring, there's still stuff like this horrifying package lying around the labs. Don't worry if you stop seeing my words on this blog. I'm sure it'll be because I've evolved (or mutated) into something greater.

Oh, speaking of something greater, today I dropped our smoke machine off at our friends Joe and Jill's house. Here are Jill and Sophia. They're great people living in a great house in a gorgeous valley in Pacifica. Ah... life!

2005-10-05T21:45:00.000-07:00

Hello!

It's been a busy past few weeks. Dave started grad school, and I've been doing tons of work (which means that I've gotten no fiction done, alas). Time has been whirling past, and I figured I'd better make note of it before it all fizzled away and I couldn't remember what happened when. Which is already the case, really. However, I'll note some highlights:

The Solar house and electric vehicle tour. We picked up a map of open homes and talked to quite a number of locals about their solar panels and electric vehicles. No one was completely self-sufficient, but we met a lot of people who were trying to make a difference. We took my dad and Myrna along for the ride. I'm curious to see which of us will go solar first.

Crushpad our local wine-making facility. We've walked by dozens of times since we've been back in SF, and through a lucky encounter at Webzine 2005 (more on that later) we managed to hook up with some wine makers. Spent a wonderful Sunday afternoon sorting grapes and stems and trying out all the A Donkey and Goat Winery wines.

March of the Penguins. We had the theatre to ourselves (I guess that's what happens when movies are already out on video.) Penguins are great, and it was great to see Julie, too.

Webzine 2005. Dave was on an online community panel. His panel is not currently in the podcast section, but I'll update this if it's ever live.

Driving down the coast. We stopped by the Moss Beach Distillery for some views and light fare. Stopped to pick some strawberries.

The filming on York street. There are security guards everywhere, and many, many lights. According to one of the guards, they are filming "Pursuit of Happiness." Looking forward to seeing how recognizable our hood is in the final film.

That's it for the moment. Once we've downloaded photos, I'll update this. Hope all's going well with you!

2005-09-21T22:23:00.000-07:00

Happy Last Night of Summer, 2005.

The last ten days have had hilights of four sorts. Let's start with last week's meeting of dorkbot-sf. It was held in the rx gallery and starred, spot who presented his latest generation of electric sheep. They're beautiful. We also saw talks by the publisher of Make magazine, and some guy who manages two open-source projects. The night was capped by "open dork" where the guy who runs radio free berkeley, who was very interesting.

On saturday, we did a variety of chores, like shopping at ikea and costco, and then celebrated craig's birthday in his and Julie's new (new to us) place in Oakland. Lots of other folks were there, and much fun was had playing apples to apples.

On Sunday we checked out the stupa in Hayes valley on our way to Golden Gate park. At the park, we went straight to check out the new de Young Museum. The galleries aren't open, but you can visit the cafe and check out some of the more permanent art, including Faultline by Andy Goldsworthy, Strontium by Gerhard Richter, and some floating stuff. You can also get into the tower and see some amazing views san francisco and the museum roof. It's an amazing place. The grand opening is October 15th, and the museum will be open for 36 hours straight. For more information, check out the de Young web site.

That's more or-less out last 9 days, except for some lovely dinners with neighbors and friends. Oh, and we just saw Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room at the Red Vic. Did you know that Enron traders actually called power plants to shut them down so they could make money off the resulting increase in electricity? Evil!

And there you have it. Stay tuned for next week-or-so's installment.