Tilden

We hiked around Tilden a little with ZZ today

It's come to this

I'm so un-indie that I get music recommendations from NPR these days. Yeah I know it's sad. Here are some recent songs that I actually really love

Paper planes by the Sri Lankan rapper M.I.A.. Love it.

LCD Soundsystem -- North American Scum I'm North American too!

Heimdalsgate Like A Promethean Curse, Of Montreal C'MON CHEMICALS! Recommended by Carrie Brownstein of Sleater Kinney.

Green Gloves, The National This is a live version, and not as good as the one I heard on the radio.

I'm gonna have to listen to Blitzen Trapper by Wild Mountain Nation a few more times to figure out if they are too close to the much hated Grateful Dead for me to like them.

undecided on Vampire Weekend too.

poor marketing word of the day

I was just reading the NYtimes travel section, and came across a reference to gem "encrusted" jewelery. Setting aside the question about how tacky and/or crass jewel encrusted anything is, I wonder if other people have the same associations that I have with that word. For me, "encrusted" implies that whatever is now coating the object in question was not necessarily meant to be there. I would use it do describe the state of my shoes after stepping a turd, for example, or the wheel wells of the car after some spirited spring driving. Even if were the kind of dude who bought (or could afford!) a diamond-encrusted Vacheron, I think that "encrusted" would cause me stop writing that check (lots of time to do that with all those zeros to fill in). Anyway, it's not something that keeps me up at night really. Far more annoying is when people have a nut-encrusted fish on their menu. Don't get me wrong -- I LOVE fish to which a layer of ground nuts has been adhered to, but please, not the E word again. There must be a more poetic way of describing it.

A trip to Alta with Zoe

We went up to Alta for the day today, which was the furthest Zoe had been from home (It's usually a 2-3 hour trip). We stopped at Awful Annie's in Auburn for waffles/ Zoe feeding and changine, and then proceeded to the cabin, which was really cold. After un-shuttering and getting the wood burning stove up and running, the grandparents showed up and I got started with the sawin. You're not supposed to let the fuel/oil mixture sit for too long, so my goal was to use it all up. The thing is, a 50cc 2 stroke engine isn't very thirsty, so it took me the better part of the day to accomplish this goal. After five fuel tank refillings and a whole lot of sawing, I called it a day. We had fired up the tub, so I took a brief soak to soothe my by now semi-crippled back, packed up the Xmas tree that I had sawn down and headed back to Berkeley. The trip back was uneventful, except for the part where I set off the burglar alarm at my parents house (thanks for telling me it was on guys!). Here are some photos of the day:

absinthe

All this talk of Absinthe, and in particular, a local absinthe distillery brings to mind an interesting story (to me at least) about it.

Thirty years ago, my parents won a bottle of original Pernod Absinthe in a wine auction.



The bottle had been previously opened and apparently came from the cellars of the Crocker family. Rather than popping the cork immediately after geting it home and inducing a hallucinogenic painting spree, they saved it and put off its dramatic re-opening for an important occasion. The occasion kept being pushed back: first it was my graduation from high school, then Kenji's conversion to a U.S. citizen, then college graduation, and we finally ended up opening it when I got my Ph.D. at a little gathering of friends. Among those friends, coincidentally, was the well known UC Berkeley professor and good family friend John Casida. As it happens, John had done a lot of research on Thujone, the "active" ingredient in Absinthe (there is controversy over whether these new Absinthes are really Absinthes, since the Thujone has been mostly removed) and had worked with it himself. Thujone has a distinct odor, and as soon as we uncorked the bottle, he exclaimed that it was the most concentrated thujone solution he had ever smelled. Although John demurred when offered a glass of the green stuff, Kenji and I dove in. I'm disappointed to report that we didn't paint any masterpieces shortly thereafter. On the other hand, neither of us went mad (or madder in Kenji's case) or chopped off our ears.

Chloe and Zoe's blog

can be found here: http://chloezoe.blogspot.com/

Pt Reyes

Today we took a road rip (Zoe's longest ever!) to Point Reyes for a hike. Along he way, we stopped at Point Reyes Station to make a stop into the Cowgirl Creamery in Point Reyes Station


Here's my opinion about Cowgirl Creamery: They have some decent cheeses and I fully support the mini-renaissance in stateside artisanal cheeses. However, none of the local cheeses I tasted had much character. "Insipid mockeries of french cheeses" would be going too far, but that was my first reaction. I also do not see the point of transporting low grade Comte and Gruyere halfway around the world from France to a small town in rural West Marin. If you're going to burn the plane fuel, at least make it comte de Montagne! One last thing -- their cheese cooler is *way* too cold (maybe thats a health regulation though) for cheese.

From there, we continued on to the end of the road at Pierce Point here.

We bundled ZZN up:

near the farm:


and headed out. We only got about 1/5 of the way there before we got tired of pushing the stroller up hills and sat down to enjoy some baguette and Point Reyes Bleu. We turned the little poop machine around aftwerwards, and started heading back


and were surprised to see a herd of Elk!






don't worry - we kept our distance. That last shot is maximum zoom, cropped way down from the 10 mega pixel file.

After the long process of destrollerizing, changing and car-ifying the baby, we started driving back down Pierce Point Road.

I had read in Heat that the most critical ingredient for good homemade pasta is the egg. I had also read that the best eggs in the bay area can be found right in Pt. Reyes Station at the Marin Sun Farms, so we had to stop there to get some eggs, despite being almost out of gas. We also picked up some organic basil, more baguette and some pastries in town, and then pointed the Prius back towards oaktown.

As soon as we got home, I checked out our $7 (!) eggs



and got to work making a simple Fettuccine Pesto, which turned out pretty well.

Rita Mitsuoka

A long time ago, on a French road trip far, far away Chloe and I got addicted to the French Star Academy TV show. It was the first year that we were in France (2002) and I have to say that as far as reality TV goes, it was pretty good. Maybe it was less cringe-worthy than it's U.S. counterparts because your average French person is a lot less, well ... stupid than the average American. Sorry, but its true.

This was the series that catapulted Nolwenn into fame. Our favorite contestant, however got kicked out relatively early, but not before performing a spirited rendition of Marcia Baila by Les Rita Mitsouko. As soon as she announced her choice of songs, it was pretty clear that everyone in the French audience knew (and loved) the song. Chloe and I had never heard it of course, and both got it stuck in our heads, so I scoured the net for mp3s when we got back to Grenoble. I even got over my "only indie in my ipod" pretensions and rounded up a copy of the original AND the star academy version. The originial is a catchy song, and I was reminded of all of this by the sudden re-appearance of the video for Marcia Baila on youtube. The reason for the reappearance is sadly because one of the original duo (Fred Chichin) just died of cancer.

I can't remember very many other details of the show except one of the contestants running around naked, and Lionel (pronounced Leo-nell) Ritchie making a guest appearance (ohhhh, what a feeeeeling... to be daaaaancing on the ceiiiillling)!


edit: wiki reveals that the female vocalist is an actress, with a rather niche filmography, which she had a shocking confrontation with the famous Serge Gainsbourg on TV about. I didn't learn those words in my crash French class!

OKAY

I'm going to hopefully find some time to catch up on the blog in the next few days, and based on the phenomenal interest in more photos of little ZZN, chloe and I have started a ZZN-only blog which will be replete with pictures and goo-goo faces. Over here at moneycrushing, it will be business as usual. I'll post a link here as soon as the zoeblog is ready!

Life Posters / iPhoto Mosaics

A while ago I saw a cool link on Lifehacker about putting together a collection of images from your iPhoto library into a large format mosaic ( for printing through the built in Kodak printing service). The crux of the method is the fact that you can print a contact sheet at up to 8 columns wide into a PDF in iPhoto, which can then be converted to a jpg (or whatever), re-imported into iPhoto and then sent off for printing. This is fine, but the contact sheet ends up looking pretty bad if you have portrait *and* landscape shots, which I would assume most people do (also, 8 columns is the max width). Also, the Lifehacker protocol called for constraining the proportions of all the photos, which kind of sucks. Anyway, I figured there was a probably a better way using Imagemagick and with a little fiddling, I got more or less what I was looking for.

I should also mention that I found a piece of software called Posterino which looks nice, but also doesnt seem to do well with combining landscape+portrait (And charges $25 for a single user license! This isn't frickin rocket science here!).

The biggest problem was just installing Imagemagick on my Mac. As far as that goes, here is what worked:

1)Install MacPorts
2)sudo install ImageMagick
3)sudo install GhostScript
4)add /opt/local/bin to the PATH
5)grab type-ghostscript.xml type.xml
and install into /opt/local/share/ImageMagick-6.3.7/config/
6)edit the paths in type-ghostscript.xml to point to /opt/local/share/ghostscript/fonts/

e.g.
metrics="/opt/local/share/ghostscript/fonts/a010013l.afm"
glyphs="/opt/local/share/ghostscript/fonts/a010013l.pfb

and voila: ImageMagick installed. If you can install it in a more starightforward way, more power to you and you can skip all that.


Now the easy and fun part.

1)Export 96 of your images from iPhoto in File->Export, File Export tab into a folder.
2)Open a Terminal window and go to the directory where you exported
3)montage image_names -background black -geometry 650x650 -tile 12x8 ../poster.jpg

and you whould get an image called poster.jpg one level up.

now import into iphoto and order your prints.

Another trip to tilden

We headed up to Tilden park to try out the new jogging stroller today. We started the outing on the Nimitz trail, but it turned out to be way too smooth for our bump and offroad loving baby, so we headed for the Skyline trail instead:

A day trip to Alta

Kenji and I headed up to Alta to check out some of Roy the arborists handiwork


We walked around to try to find the property line posts, and in the process found a huge pine tree that is definitely within the lines.

Royksopp

a cool video By a band I had never heard of.

A trip to Tilden

Katie, Taras and Lucy visit

meet Zoe, give us even MORE cool stuff, and try out the climbing wall

Thanks guys!

more baby pics

Death valley

an article on Death Valley in todays sfgate.

climbing wall complete

Finally! I had wanted to put a dead vertical section on the right hand side of the wall (just to cap the structure), but chloe convinced me to try out an idea I had drawn up for a full extra 4 foot section which makes a 30-45 degree angle with the 50 degree overhang. The advantage of this vs. and end cap is more climbing area and a very cool overhanging blunt arete. The disadvantage is that it requires a lot of careful measurements and cutting (for me, at least), so I drew up plans on google sketchup to avoid calculating angles and where to cut the plywood. After getting my next door neighbor tom to put a 30 degree bevel on two 2x6s, measuring everything three times and finally cutting the plywood it came time to get the damn sheet up into the overhang. Tom was sick and unable to assist or lend me his clamps, so I attached it with a rope and Christa and Stephanie's help. The end result was well worth the effort, so now it's route setting time!






The framework is actually kind of cool to play around with behind the wall -- I guess we could use it for storage or something.



a Sketchup file of the wall (without a lot of the framing) can be downloaded here

halloween

The realization that it was Halloween barely registered in our sleep deprived zombie brains today. I'm sure the parents out there can understand how low on the list of priorities finding a costume for a six day old baby who sleeps during the day and parties all night is. Nevertheless, it seemed a shame to let the opportunity go to waste, so without further ado, I give you ... FUTURE ZOE

Christa and Stephanie coming to help!

And to continue the much appreciated work of bringing us food (oh and to play with snd coo over the baby of course). I actually hadn't anticipated how helpful it is to have people (friends, family) bring meals by .. it really helps a lot, especially with chloe out of commission and requiring upped caloric intake. I'm definitely going to do that for any friends who have babies in the future.

Doctors appointment

Zoe is gaining weight after losing a bit in the first few days (normal) and she is back up to 8 lbs, 8 oz. Here's some pictures of the little butter ball from today

Zoe's first earthquake

and she maintained admirable sangfroid

ergh

first night alone with the baby, and the little thing is still apparently on a nocturnal schedule.

Just got back home

We got kicked out of the hospital this afternoon, laden with diapers, ointments and a lot of frequently contradictory advice. We got home to discover that the grandparents had put up balloons and welcome posters at out place, and our neighbor had even built us a table and left me a couple of beers! I've been running around trying to find places for all of the little baby-related things.

Also, I'm not sure if this is normal, but I'm feeling a tad sleepy now.