I’ve always been a little bit skeptical of the milk-carton approach to kids’ safety when they participate in the Web. And I have skin in the game; Laura spends a whole lot of time on social networking sites, and recently Lilly has been doing a fair amount of Web surfing too, albeit mostly for Flash [...]
Archive for the ‘Family’ Category
Peein’ in the Dark
The Bazaar Cafe is a songwriter’s showcase with an open mic Thursday nights. Laura and Kai have been grinding out originals at a fair clip lately, so they signed up last week and did two of their strongest numbers. They were such a hit that they were asked to come back this week. Lilly shot [...]
The good fight
Laura and I took a day off school and work to do election-day campaigning for Eric Quezada, an old friend who was running for Supervisor (kind of like city council member) for the district that includes both the neighborhood where our home is and the neighborhood where Laura’s school is. It was a lot of [...]
Beginning band
Laura’s middle school band had been playing their instruments for about 4 months when they recorded this. We voted to tax ourselves a bit extra a couple of years ago to pay for arts in the schools, and the proceeds started to flow in last year, just in time for Laura’s 6th-grade year. Suddenly her [...]
Lilly in the house
Lilly is a pretty good shot. Every picture in this set was done by her, except the first one.
It’s cool to be reminded of what a place looks like from a view four feet off the ground.
Ian flies through
My cousin Ian, on his way from Austin to Osaka for some super-brainiac post-doctoral type thing, was stuck on a plane for six hours at San Francisco last Friday night, courtesy of a storm we were having. We brought him home and made him eat some of Mary’s chicken pot pie. The weather cleared the [...]
The Golden Compass
…was a blast as expected. Laura was annoyed at the liberties taken with the plot, but I was too busy soaking up the Terry Gilliam silliness to notice. Evil minions in funny hats, fisheye lenses, the whole thing — it reminded my suddenly how long it’s been since Brazil, and what an impact that movie [...]
Opa’s funeral
My dad’s dad passed away in November at 95. He became a Lutheran minister in 1935 and served in about 10 churches, ending up in Madison, Wisconsin. Laura and I joined the family for the funeral in Minneapolis, where Opa had lived in retirement. Then we all drove to Madison and had another service at [...]
Halloween at Lilly’s school
Lilly was a dog for Halloween this year. Her school has the nice tradition of a Halloween parade around the playground.
Later that evening we walked at least four miles, starting at Kristin and Mark’s place near Guerrero, wending our way up into Bernal Heights and then back over to Glen Park. Our kids are in [...]
Straight outta the Sunset
We’d been thinking about moving across town to the Mission for a long time. Closer to both our jobs, Lilly’s school (and Laura’s too, as of this year), better weather, more diversity, decent coffee. This summer we finally went ahead and got an agent (Steve Davis, who is married to Cassandra Mettling-Davis, the architect who [...]
School: The Two Towers
Laura’s report on her new middle school. Bottom line: doesn’t seem to mind it too much. She is playing the saxophone in the band and practicing to try out for the basketball team. Her “elective” class is a peer-support program where she helps other kids with homework and school issues. I’m still not a fan [...]
Solar
Luther dons the killer shades for an article about his mad solar cooking skillz. We expect to be doing a lot more solar cooking now that we’ve escaped the fog zone and moved to the sunny Mission district.
Lilly in the media
Lilly’s class was featured in this story in the SF Chronicle yesterday and in this CNN report last night.
The teacher, Angelica Chang, has been speaking exclusively in Chinese to the kids all year. She didn’t even talk to us parents when the kids were around, so they wouldn’t catch on. This afternoon Monika, the mom [...]
Fowlfiction
Here is a small sample of the reams of material Laura has been supplying to the Artemis Fowl fan community. And here’s another.
She has been putting in a lot of time at this the last couple of months, and it shows. Her dialogue gets better every time I look at it. She has as good [...]
Minneapolis
Hied me to the ancestral homeland for a week to attend a professional conference and see friends and family. My first day here I got to see my mom (right) and my sister Jo (left) perform with a flute choir called Flute Cocktail, accompanied by my brother Nathaniel on the Andean quena and related tubular [...]
Rockets
Lilly’s classmate Xavier was talking about shooting off toy rockets with his dad, and Lilly decided she wanted to do that too. So last week we ordered a kit from Hobbylinc.com and put it together, and today we went out with Xavier, Dan (his dad) and his big sister Guadalupe to a softball field in [...]
Laura’s hit list
Laura has started using Librarything to track her reading list, so that anyone interested can follow along. She’s on a tear right now, downing about two books a week the last time I checked her records. We’ve been talking about the different levels of reading — reading for pure pleasure, reading for knowledge, reading closely [...]
Most Fowl
I don’t think Laura reads this site, so maybe she won’t notice that I’m putting up a link to her work. She has been contributing heavily to fangathering.com and fanfiction.net in the last few weeks. She has written someone resembling herself into one story (no hints, you find it), and also tried some interesting mash-ups [...]
Jump
Lilly has been participating in a heart health program at her school. She went from two consecutive jumps to 50 at a time in about a week. She’s also been skating, with and without a hockey stick, and has a fine-looking swing with a bat. She spends more time than ever on her living-room trapeze, [...]