Mazel Tov x 3 (= 54 ?)

After not having been to a Bar Mitzvah in decades, there were three all on the same day, June 14. Lorien's cousin Josh had his Bar Mitzvah in Toronto. Dan, the son of Rich's cousin Gidon, had a Bar Mitzvah in Israel. And in San Francisco, Kathleen, the wife of Rich's friend Scott, who recently converted to Judaism (she's the one who sang the first song at our wedding), had an Anshei Mitvah, which is basically the adult equivalent of a Bat Mizvah. And on top of all of that, it was also Judy's birthday.

We went up to Toronto for Josh's Bar Mitzvah. Lorien's brother David flew all the way in from Australia.

The Bar Mitzvah was in the back yard of Josh's house. I have to admit I was a bit skeptical at first, but it was actually quite nice. And with a real rabbi (or so we're told) and a real Torah and real service -- all legit. And it was a much nicer scenery than many of the synagogues that I've been to. Although it had one bit that was unique to being in a suburban backyard -- that was when the breeze started blowing and the smell of the neighbor's cooking bacon for breakfast wafted across the crowd. Oh yeah, the remants of the Midwest floods that had been pelting Toronto with rain for many days on end took a break for the Bar Mitzvah.

I can't say as much for the lack of rain the next evening, for the reception on a boat on Lake Ontario. Not being able to access the top deck of the boat, and piddling around close to shore, were some unfortunate consequences of that. But we did get some cool looking skies and lightning at least. And there was plenty of room below decks on the boat for the crowd.

Rich's aunt Batya flew in from Israel to visit her sister Sarah right around the same time. Not exactly at the same time, because of Dan's Bar Mitzvah of course, but she arrived a few of days later. So we decided to hang around long enough to be able to visit her. Here we are in Sarah's apartment, Batya, Lorien, George, Judy, and Sarah.

California is burning

As Lorien mentioned, there are a lot of fires in the state. I think about 800. Luckily none of them are too close by, but there's enough of them that it is affecting our air quality a bit. Although living right across from the Golden Gate probably makes it not as bad for us right here -- Lorien says it's worse over the hills where she works.

The sun has this other worldly glow, kind of like a sunset, except it doesn't need to be totally at the horizon to look like that. This picture is from early this evening, from our back porch.

Happy Solstice!

We returned from Toronto (blog post to come) to the middle of a heat wave here in the Bay Area. When we took off from T.O., the pilot said that it was 32 degrees in SF, Rich and I looked at each other puzzled, wondering if he meant 32 Fahrenheit. 32 celsius is pretty unusual hereabouts.

Anyway, the picture was sent by Becka and Mike who were visiting last weekend. It's the latest sunset of the year over the Berkeley Rose Garden. All the roses had been baked brown by the sun, but it's still nice to get some heat now and again, especially since Toronto is the new England, or perhaps Vancouver, weatherwise.

This was the last day before the lightening storms started up the several hundreds of fires buring in NorCal. Now there's smoke blocking the sun all day long and the outside smells like campfire. And not in a good way. Don't worry about us, though, there aren't any fires within more than 50 miles of here.

bike rides

On the topic of bike rides around here (see my recent post), the nytimes just had a related article, Turning a Century in California. (free reg required, or use bugmenot) We're thinking about doing the Marin Century after reading that.

Anniversary Weekend, Part 2

In case you're wondering what constitutes an 8-course tasting menu, here it is, provided by the restaurant. The portions were pretty small and elegantly presented, although we may have gorged ourselves on cheese. The "Sally Jackson" at the bottom of the page is a note scribbled by our waiter about a cheese we particularly liked and hadn't seen before. As a formerly fussy eater, I was proud of myself for going along with the tasting without knowing anything about what it would be in advance (although we requested no fois gras for ethical reasons). I ate everything that was put in front of me and enjoyed it. Rich and I split the wine pairing, to give our livers a bit of a rest. Overall, one of the best meals I've ever had.

bike, sniff, bike, sip, eat

Here's a quick recap of some of what we've been up to for the past couple of weeks...

Two weekends ago, we drove down to the Santa Cruz area to participate in the Strawberry Fields Forever bike ride. Lorien (and Arnab and Alicia) did the 100K ride, Rich (and Matt) did the 100 mile ride. It's a good thing it was the weekend before this one, as I think the area we were riding through was pretty close to the Summit Fire that started last week.

Shortly after the ride (like the next day), I came down with a cold, which I'm still fighting to overcome. Copious amounts of motzah ball soup and pineapple juice (not together) got me a lot of the way there, but it's still lingering on.


Thankfully, I recovered enough that we didn't have to cancel our plans for this past weekend. Our second anniversary is coming up (tomorrow, actually), and to celebrate we went away for the weekend to a bed and breakfast up in Geyserville, in northern Sonoma County. We relaxed, rode our bikes around the wine country, visited some wineries for tasting (and ended up coming back with quite a bit of wine), and had a fabulous dinner (really a 4 hour, 8 course, dining experience) at Cyrus, a restaurant in Healdsburg.


Here are a couple of pictures from our wine country adventures. We biked around some of the same areas from the Wine Country Century (that we did last year, but not this year), but it was a bit more casual and relaxing to be doing it at a slow pace, stopping for wine tasting whenever we got the inspiration. And bringing our commuting bikes (with attached milk crates) instead of our road bikes made it a lot easier to haul around the growing number of wine bottles that we acquired during the day.

warm nights

For the second night in a row, I'm sitting out here well past dark out on the back deck, wearing short sleeves and shorts, and it's fairly comfortable. That might not sound like a bit deal to those of you that are used to warm summer nights, but it's pretty unusual out here.

Yesterday was warm, today was downright hot. I never thought I'd be uncomfortably hot biking to work in the morning, but today I was.

But the warm nights are kind of nice, and we had dinner outside on the deck.

Roses on Rose St.

The season vaguely known as "winter" here is well behind us, and our garden is blooming and growing.

The rose bushes on the side of our house (the ones we didn't realize were there until after we had bought the house) are doing great this year. We've got enough that we've been having freshly cut roses inside whenever we want them. Which is a lot.

The wisteria picture is actually from a few weeks ago. It's long past blooming now, and merely continuing in its quest to take over the world. It's practically ready to head in the back door of our neighbors behind us, but they don't seem to mind.

Speaking of the wisteria, I finally managed to most clear a bed that had previously been dominated it. We took advantage of the new space to plant some corn.

In non-farming news, this past weekend saw the return of cocktail hour -- we had been on a bit of a hiatus with Lorien studying for the PE. It was also a weekend for birthday parties -- Matt's 40th and Ben's 30th, both on Saturday night.

Itchy and Scratchy

Unfortunately there was a little downside to Wildflowers II. I seem to have caught some poison oak or poison ivy or some other poison foo, and the hike from a few weeks back is the most likely culprit (probably when I had to venture off trail to retrieve my errant camelback bite valve). After a week or so of some downright unpleasantness, I seem to have turned the corner and am finally getting better.

I'll spare you from including any pictures in this post...

Wildflowers II

We went to Tahoe again this weekend, primarily because we had to go back sometime within the next few weeks to retrieve our winter gear before our lease on the house is over for the season. It was a bit hard to get in the mood for snowboarding with the overly warm (okay, hot) weather. On Saturday we did go snowboarding, which was still fun, although by the afternoon it was getting a bit too slushy.
Rather than repeat that on Sunday, we packed up and headed out of the mountains and into the foothill. Right by the highway exit in Colfax is a hike down into a valley (along the Stevens trail) to the North fork of the American River. Lots of wildflowers were in bloom! It was hard to imagine that the day before we were surrounded by snow.

Strawberry season is here

Mmm... tasty... and cat-like!

Wildflowers I

Now that I'm free of studying, I was really pushing to get outside and enjoy the springtime. Every year it seems that something gets in the way of us seeing the wildflowers that grow in various spots around California, but not this year. Last weekend we lit out for Point Reyes for a hike along the coast. It's been a pretty dry spring, so while there were plenty of flowers, there wasn't the carpet of colour that Rich and I had imagined. But there were sea lions, which was good, and it was a brilliantly sunny, if somewhat blustery day.

Spring Cleaning

The snow in Tahoe is melting, it's getting warmer (well, okay, maybe not right now, but it certainly was hot a week ago), and it was time for the seasonal beard to go. But I decided to have a little fun with it over the course of a week rather than shave it off all at once. I feel (and look) quite a bit different now.

One Laptop Per Cat

Selena has decided on an alternate interpretation of OLPC

I'm free!

(of the PE exam). I'm looking forward to resuming whatever it was I used to do for fun.

my XO laptop is finally here!

It took a long time (3 months), but I finally got my laptop from the Give One Get One program from the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) today. I've been spending most of tonite playing around with it. The biggest problem is that the keyboard is VERY small for adult hands. But I'm getting a little used to it. And it's a lot easier to use now that I installed Opera (the browser that comes with it kind of sucks). Anyway, here's a picture I took of myself sitting in front of it, using the built in camera.

So ya wanna be in pictures...

I spent time on Sunday as an extra in a movie they're shooting in San Francisco about Harvey Milk, starring Sean Penn. For those of you who might not know, Harvey Milk was the first openly gay San Francisco supervisor, who was murdered in City Hall along with Mayor George Moscone. (I had never heard about any of this before moving here -- although maybe that had to do with my age at the time.)

It was kind of fun, although unusually hot and sunny and I ended up with a bit of a sunburn. The scene they spent the most time shooting was one in which Harvey Milk gets up on stage to give a speech at the 1978 Gay Freedom Day. The best part was during one take, where instead of giving his Harvey Milk lines, Sean Penn instead went on a rant against George Bush, Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, and the likes. I think he got even more cheers from the crowd for that than when he was acting. Maybe they'll put it on the DVD extras for the film.

The world's largest dandelion

Ok, perhaps it's not exactly a dandelion, but it sure looks pretty damn close to me. Doing some weeding in the yard this Sunday getting ready for Spring planting (yes, it's not that far away in California), I couldn't resist taking some photos of the largest weed we have in our backyard.

Starfish infestation

My friend Kathryn visited this weekend from Toronto. We hung out in Berkely on Saturday, went hiking and to the Golden Gate Bridge on Sunday and then wine tasting up to Sonoma on Monday. For the Sunday hike, we took a trail from the Muir Beach overlook in Marin down to the Beach. We timed the trip for low tide so that we could look at the tidepools. There were hundreds of starfish at the beach. I've never seen so many at once. When Rich and I went tidepooling up in Mendocino, we were impressed when we saw three or four of them.

As for the bridge, we were there just as the fog was rolling in. I'd never walked out on the bridge before. It was very loud with traffic, but we got to see some sea lions in the water below.

Overall we got pretty lucky this weekend weatherwise. The rains are back now. Rich will probably take advantage of that this weekend and head up to Tahoe. I'll likely stay in town and study for the PE and try to make up for time lost to last weekend's cavorting.


For full pics from Sunday, go to http://richandlorien.org/pictures/2008-02-17-MuirBeach/index-small.html

Edwardian Ball January 26 2008

Back in January, Rich and I went to the Edwardian Ball, an annual event in San Francisco that I've been wanting to go to for a while. Its a combination of Edwardian (circa 1900-1910) dress-up and Edward Gorey gothiness. It was fun, but crowded, and great for people watching. There sure are a lot of people who like to dress up in costume in this town.
The picture posted here was taken by the event photographer and then all sepia-ed up by Rich to confuse our descendants.

flying video

Scott (of the flying birthday party) put the video up on YouTube, in case anyone cares. Music and titles are courtesy of Scott. Fwiw, I appear around 02:08 in Part 2 and 07:49 in Part 3. (And yes, that's me -- the facial hair is seasonal.)

• Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-2MldaaIqs


• Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vii7WBW69is&feature=user


• Part 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djrG1XbRw_g&feature=user


• Part 4: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlpxU4B7wmI&feature=user

Plans had been to return to Tahoe this weekend, but things didn't end up turning out quite so exciting. I spent most of the weekend at home involved in house projects. The huge storms earlier this month exposed some weaknesses in our basement waterproofing efforts from a couple of years back, and I wanted to address those before the rains returned (which happened today). So far things seem to be mostly successful. Which is good, because a weekend full caulk, hydraulic cement, and masonry sealer isn't as much fun as it might sound.

Now that snow has returned, hopefully we'll be back in Tahoe soon.

snow, wings, and stuff

New Year's Eve was kind of mellow. We headed into the city, over to the Penthouse, the apartment where I lived before moving back to Berkeley. It was a fairly small get together, and we watched the midnight fireworks from the roof.

As you may have heard, last weekend we had some pretty big storms here. Lorien and I drove to Tahoe for some snowboarding. Feet and feet of dry, fluffy powder. Which was pretty amazing, except for the few times that I was making fresh tracks and the terrain wasn't quite steep enough and eventually leveled out enough so that I sunk. It's pretty tiring and time consuming digging your way out of chest high snow. I wish I could have just spent the whole week there, but that wasn't very doable. The cold and the snow temperatures continued for pretty much an entire week, but unfortunately last weekend was back to typical Tahoe temperatures, where it gets above freezing during the day and below freezing at night, so I'm sure the spectacular conditions have passed.

The drive to and from Tahoe was a bit of an ordeal, which was all the more reason to not go again this past weekend. We had a beer and wings cocktail hour on Friday night. I think it was our most attended cocktail hour ever -- maybe 20 or 25 people? Which seems to indicate that maybe it's not about us at all, and it's just about the wings... A friend from Cornell (Jim) who I hadn't seen in like 16 or 17 years tracked me down recently, and he lives in North Oakland, and he's from Buffalo, so he showed up with a deep fat fryer for the event. Which was much appreciated, and cooks wings faster than in a wok, and has now convinced us that we need yet another kitchen appliance.

Saturday I went down to the South Bay for two birthday parties. One for Jon's son Simon (who I can't get over is 13 already), and the other for a friend Scott (who probably hasn't been 13 for numerous decades). Scott's gathering was at a vertical wind tunnel that features a simulated sky diving experience. I have to say, it was pretty damn incredible. I think Scott will eventually be posting a video of us somewhere, but in the meantime there's the marketing stuff (complete with annoying soundtrack) at http://www.iflysfbay.com

And yesterday we saw Juno. Which was good. I highly recommend it.

That's the semi-random assorted rundown of what's been going on for the past few weeks. Sorry, no pictures.

Time to stop posting and eat some yummy gingerbread that Lorien made.

Happy New Year

Lorien and I are slowly getting ready to head into the city for New Year's Eve, precise plans not entirely known at this time. I just wanted to take a minute to wish anyone reading this a Happy New Year, and share what I just snapped of the sun setting (I know, I'm a sucker for sunsets) over Rose Street. If you look carefully in the distance, you can see the Golden Gate Bridge, which is visible during the winter when the trees have less cover.

Winter playground

Tahoe was fun, we did a little bit of various winter activities. Some snowboarding, some ice skating, some cross country skiing. Every time I go to the mountains in the winter after not having been there in a while it makes me long for real seasons again, especially winter. But maybe that's just easy for me to say, since out here winter becomes this playground that you go to, and not something that you have to endure day after day. Maybe I'd be singing a different tune if I had to deal with a real winter again after having acclimated so much to the Bay Area. Maybe not.

We didn't take a real camera with us, but there were some incredible sights. Coming down from Donner Pass along the backroads, just around sunset, with the full moon rising, was a pretty spectacular sight. And there was this eerie fog swirling above the Donner Lake. This picture from Lorien's phone doesn't quite do it justice, but it's all that I've got.

Ken says, "Sewing is hard"

Or at least that's how it felt doing a stupid little repair on my GoreTex pants. I guess like anything it gets easier if you do it repeatedly, but it's usually a long time between any sewing I do. I still can't get over that Matt made his own suit for SantaCon -- check out the lower right corner in this picture. I don't think I'm quite up for that.

But my pants are now fixed, which is good now that the rainy season is hopefully finally upon us for real. They're handy for biking to work; and Lorien and I are planning to head to Tahoe for Christmas for some snowboarding, and I use them for that too. Hence the late night sewing project.

SantaCon 2007

Santa's little helper is too lazy to post too many pictures repeatedly, so if you want to see more, go to our web site.

Happy holidays!

The End

Of Chanukah, that is.

Kitty progress, measured in small steps

While Selena The Cat may be a mysterious figure that lurks in the shadows,

she has been spotted actually eating side by side with Dirk. Or should I say Mr. Dirk, as he has been known to be called.

Cocktail hour

Maybe I'd post more frequent random tidbits of our life if I didn't always feel compelled to also post pictures, so here goes...

We just finished up our December cocktail hour. We started having cocktail hours a while back -- with the combination of planning a wedding and recovering from our fire, we were worried it might be the only way we could see our friends, having them come over to us. We've continued the tradition, and have semi-regular events (nearly) every month. Some are bigger, some are smaller, it's kind of random.

John and Heather came over, and just them, so I guess it was our smallest one yet. Although I think we maybe had one other small one some time ago where just Neal and Genevieve came over.

We had mulled wine (which turned out better than last year), latkes, some of our latest experiment in vodka infusions (with chai spices -- actually, pretty much the same spices as in the mulled wine), and some Christmas beers. For any beer afficionados out there, I heartily recommend Allagash Grand Cru, a spiced Belgian style ale from Portland, Maine. Of course, with such a small turnout, we have plenty of Christmas beers left to enjoy for the rest of the season. So stop on by and help us if you're reading this locally! (Although I suspect that most of our readership is from farther away...)

And congratulations to John and Heather who are expecting a baby!

Happy holidays,
- Rich

Happy Hanukkah

more Israel photos

Not more of mine, that is, but George Fono has also posted his online (actually, he beat me to it), so I might as well put in a plug for him at http://www.flickr.com/photos/fonofotos/

I never really saw it as any kind of competition, but I think he may have. I managed to edit our 700-800 (I forget now) originals down to about 300. I don't know if George has 500 because he took so many more, or maybe Lorien was more convincing in getting me to edit down than Judy was.

Home for Thanksgiving

While it was a bit difficult getting on a plane again so soon after returning from the Middle East, and dealing with the holiday traffic, I'm very glad that we were able to head to my parents' house in Broomall for Thanksgiving. Last year we had stayed in California.


The best part of the trip may owe global warming a debt of gratitude. We perpetually talk of planning a fall colors trip some year (starting up north in Canada and working our way down to Philadelphia as the colors change), but we have yet to do it, so it had really been 13 years since I had truly experienced fall colors. Philadelphia (and the rest of the Northeast, I gather) has had an unusually warm fall this year, delaying the usual cycle. By Thanksgiving, the trees around Philadelphia are usually pretty much bare. Not so this year.


My excitement gave me the enthusiasm to rake leaves. Twice. And at a time when I should have been jet lagged (since it was something like 4:30 AM California time), I somehow got the inspiration on Thanksgiving to go for an early morning walk around the neighborhood and take pictures, when the morning dew was still out.


Steve and Laura drove from New Jersey with Matthew and David, and Larry and Sheryl drove from Indiana. So a little bit smaller than our last Thanksgiving home (when George and Judy came down from Toronto, and Elaine and Bill came down from New York), but a fairly big crowd nonetheless. I helped out with the cooking, contributing butternut squash soup, sweet potatoes, and cranberry sauce. (I learned my lesson last year not to try to bud my way into my Mom's well established turkey preparation protocol.) Oh yeah, we also roasted some chestnuts.


While we didn't end up getting the time to head to our favorite beer bar in Philly, or try out a new one, we did manage to find the time see a local band that we like, Lotus. The venue, the World Cafe Live, was a pretty nice place. Also fairly new, it certainly didn't exist back when I lived in Broomall.

We also went with the kids to see Enchanted. I was pretty impressed; it was one of the better Disney movies that I've seen in a while.

And finally, in a stunning turn of events, I haven't taken forever to put our pictures online! You can find the full album at http://richandlorien.org/pictures/Thanksgiving2007/index.html

Pictures. FINALLY!

I'm sorry it's taken so long, but I have finally gone through and edited and organized and captioned our pictures from our trip to Israel and Egypt. Part of the long time was that I decided I wasn't entirely happy with existing tools for web publishing of photo albums, so I ended up writing my own from scratch. But now that it's all done, it ought to hopefully be much easier in the future.

So far all that's up there is the pictures from our Middle East trip, but I sincerely hope to in the not too distant future start back publishing the hundreds of photos that we've accumulated over the past few years.

The pictures themselves can be found at http://richandlorien.org/pictures/

We will continue to use this blog for more day to day commentary on anything that we feel like saying, which hopefully won't just be limited to times when we're traveling.

More Jerusalem

Yes, we're back home but our loyal readership deserves more photos, so Rich and I will keep posting some selections in chronological order.

Here's a Jerusalem street (there are no thoroughfares in the old city - all the streets are like this), my mother and me in front of the Dome, a view of Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives, and a view of olives on the Mount of Olives. Actually, the olive tree is in the Garden of Gethsemane, where Jesus was supposed to have been arrested. Carbon dating says the trees are over 2000 years old, so presumably they knew Jesus personally.

Before I post more pictures, I wanted to quickly explain the ones from the last pictured post. The top two are of the Dome on the Rock, where Mohammed was supposed to have dreamed that he ascended to heaven, also, the site of the erstwhile 2 Jewish Temples, and the holiest site in Judaism. They're excavating underneath the site, and we (Rich, my parents and I) took a tour of the excavated tunnels with Ziggy and Siggy Fromm and their daughters Hadass and Daphne (bottom picture). The other pictures are of the Wailing Wall, the retaining wall of the Temple, and the only part remaining above ground. The metal door is at the Kabbalah Yeshiva where Siggy's cousin used to work.