Site 52 seems to aspire to be a grand plaza comprising four public spaces that face each other around the intersection of Howard and 2d St. (just down 2nd from Site 51). Only three of them are there, sadly. All three are done up in squarish black stone designs that give off a sort of [...]
I’ve fallen behind on my reports. Here come a few, rapid-fire, to catch up. Our fortunes improved with site 53, which is a pleasant enough little courtyard outside the building at 235 2d St. that houses CBS Interactive. There are spiffy brushed-aluminum tables and chairs. At this time of year there is shade along the [...]
The second site on our tour of publicly-owned, privately-operated spaces in San Francisco was another disappointment. The whole open area attached to 303 2d St. is fenced off for construction. We had to peer over the fence and try to figure out what the features might look like when finished. It looked like there would [...]
Since I started working in downtown San Francisco, I’ve talked John into helping me with a project I’ve been idly imagining for years: visit every one of the sites on this list of “publicly owned, privately operated” spaces. I thought we’d start from the end of the list and work down, just because. Today I [...]
Here are some pictures from our walk in the wilderness last Saturday. We took a relaxed hike in the vicinity of Mt. Starr King, just to see if we could.
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Wow, Kauai. What a place. We just got back from a week there with Mary’s parents. We had a gas. Even the occasional rain shower was better weather than we get at home. This is the view from the back deck of our apartment. Lilly spent more time in the water than out. She preferred [...]
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 [...]
For Spring break we went to the Grand Canyon with Grandpa Ted, Grandma Helga, and Karen and Al and their four kids. We stayed in Sedona, a couple of hours from the Canyon. We did two day trips to the Canyon and several hikes around the Sedona vicinity, which is very different from the Grand [...]
On the way back to Guatemala City from San Marcos, we stopped at the spectacular Lago Atitlan for lunch and a bit of scenery-viewing. From there we took the old road to Antigua, the one that was replaced by the Pan-American highway in the 1960s. It was slower, but more rewarding, the way those things [...]
More imagery from Guatemala. This is a fabulous little cascade that you pretty much have to hack your own trail to, in a back corner of a coffee plantation. It’s always suprising to find a place like this without so much as a snack stand to exploit it. [youtube]47bs1_um2_E[/youtube]
So here we are in Guatemala. The trip was a little grueling, but it’s great to be here. Hopefully United will manage not to lose our luggage on the way home. Here’s Paul diving off the 5-meter plank at the local spring-fed swimming place. We spent the morning there and had some home-fried donuts from [...]
Here’s a place to keep track of gas mileage online. We are temporarily (we hope) the owners of a three-car fleet, so knowing what each car can do becomes even more important than usual.
I spent Thursday evening, my last full evening in Chennai, seeing a movie. And I really mean full evening. The movie went a little over three hours, counting the 15-minute intermission. I can only say that I have never seen anything like it. I kept thinking of that scene late in Blazing Saddles when the [...]
[youtube]G9ewoSzoL9k[/youtube] It’s Friday. We are leaving tonight at 10:30 p.m., which is 10:00 Thursday morning at home. Change planes in Singapore again, a rest stop in Hong Kong (no time for any joy rides outside the airport this time), and then about 13 hours to San Francisco. But I’ll get home at 1:30 Saturday afternoon, [...]
[youtube]NKVhCxpkrdk[/youtube] Near the elephant farm we met a tour group of women from the Sree Narayana College, which is in Kerala. They were singing and clapping to pass the time. We joined in as best we could. I got six clips of this before my battery burned out, of which this one is the silliest. [...]
Tonight I went with my colleague Kavitha and her two kids (boy 11, girl 5) to the giant Rasi’s sari shop. Kavitha really knew her way around the fabrics, which helped make my benighted choices a little less benighted, I hope. I dropped somewhat more than I should have but got away with some amazing [...]
Last Friday we flew to Bangalore, where a driver was waiting to take us to a resort in the high coffee country at the other end of a 200-mile dirt track. On Saturday we hiked around, saw elephants, sampled the local nightlife. On the way back to Bangalore the following day, we got lost in [...]