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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
This is for Laura.
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 [...]
…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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Laura gave a presentation about the Chinese language for a 7th grade class at her cousin Adam’s school today. She was a little nervous, but she got through it, and her turtle joke went over well. Mary took a couple of severe, Salgado-like pictures to capture the atmosphere at St. Bede’s.
Laura has been uploading her own fiction to the Artemis Fowl fan site at fangathering.com. Take a look. There’s more on the way. She writes it out longhand and then types it in, editing as she goes. I like the level of detail that goes into her scene descriptions, and her dialogue can be kind [...]
When I got back from India, Mary and Laura picked me up at the airport and we hauled ass to the Playmates preschool harvest festival, where Laura and I were booked to do some pickin’ and grinnin’ with our friends Breck and Stanley. We played a few tunes and had a blast, even though I [...]
Laura’s web site is up and running. It has a comments area, which she invites everyone to use, and will soon have some of her awesome art. This weekend she graduated from MS Paint to Paint Shop Pro and has already been producing some impressive stuff. Stay tuned.
I should say something about the concert we saw last weekend. Mary, Laura and I went over to Berkeley to see the New Lost City Ramblers, who have been collecting and performing old-time, mostly Appalachian music since well before I was born. The leader is Mike Seeger, who is brother to Peggy Seeger and half-brother [...]
I’ve always got an eye open for musical role models that Laura might like. She has pronounced likes and dislikes already, but she hasn’t heard all that much. (She digs Arlo Guthrie enormously, and she’s been liking the very impressive Abigail Washburn CD we got recently, to give you an idea of how her tastes [...]
Catching up on some of the summer activities: In the middle of August, on an impulse, we grabbed the last empty spot at the Henry Cowell campground up in the hills above Santa Cruz. We spent the weekend there hiking and goofing off, and then descended on the beach boardwalk on Monday for some intensive [...]
On Thursday we took an easy (for some people, maybe, not for me) two-mile hike from Emerald Bay up to Eagle Lake. Here’s that, plus the remainder of the pics I came home with. (Click the picture to see the rest of them.)