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.