ultrasound

Today chloe had her first doctors appointment and I am SO DISAPPOINTED, because neither of us realized that they would be doing an ultrasound ... so I missed it. Argh. It's exciting and a very strange feeling; all of a sudden the baby has gone from an abstract notion to something very real, and growing inside Chloe!

Alameda

went kiting at Alameda after work today. The tide was the lowest I had ever seen, which made it feel a little like launching at third ave (always in danger of getting pulled across the mud). The conditions were challenging for me, and I seem to have greatly lost my upwind capabilities -- I was fighting hard just to keep ground. I felt overpowered on my switchblade 12, but it doesn't really seem like I should have been having looked at the wind graph (avg 18, gusting to 24). Hmmm. Next time I'm going to steal Chloe's kite, I think.

Kiteboardin' Alameda

I went out in pretty light wind conditions today. It was tough, but I got a few runs in before giving up and heading back to the beach. There was some guy out there on an RRD kite of some kind actually getting up wind... I'm really wondering what kind of board and kite he was on. The rest of us were getting worked

Risotto

Risotto with prosciutto, Parmesan and Arugula

Moving continues...

In baby steps. We're doing our part to keep Ingvar Kamprad in lutefisk and Swedish fish.

Chicken

A chicken from one of the neighborhood coops has escaped into our back yard

The delta

Christa, Tom , Chloe and I headed up to the Delta. They dropped me off at Sherman Island so that I could kiteboard while they toured around for a while. I hadn't been to Sherman before, despite it being one of the premier places to kiteboard in Northern California. I wasn't disappointed: strong, consistent wind, non salty water, and a pretty relaxed atmosphere. The launch is pretty small, but I was there early enough that there weren't very many people around. It was a lot of fun, and I'll hopefully have more chances to head up there this season.

Chloe and the crew very nicely came back to pick me up, and we headed out towards Locke. Along the way, we had lunch in Isleton.


There was an outdoor patio with live singing and the server looked like your grandmother, except that she had lot's of piercings. It was a little uncanny, actually and reminded me of that scene in "Death in Venice" when Aschenbach sees the old man on the vaporetto. The food itself was nothing special -- very fried non locally sourced fish and meat. But let me get back to the music, because that was really the most memorable part.

The main singer was pretty good, but the volume of the sound got to be a little painful by the end. Although he had impressive stamina and belted out song after song while we basked in high cholesterol goodness, he took a break after a while and had one of his buddies come up and sing. His friend's name was "Big John", was well over six feet tall and had a military buzz cut. Basically it looked like he just stepped off of PT109. In any case, while he could hit the lower notes admirably well, things didn't turn out so well when he sang solo. It sort of reminded me of that scene in Young Frankenstein when Gene Wilder dresses Peter Boyle up in a Tux and has him sing "Putting on the Ritz" -- "POOOIN UNNNN HUUUU RIIIIIIITZ".

From Isleton, we headed up to Locke, which was the coolest part of the trip. I'll rely on my trusty friend Wikipedia for the background on this small town. It really is a strange and cool place.




I talked to some local guys who said that all the beautiful pear trees (which were in bloom) probably would be pulled out in the next ten years because there is no market for them anymore. Additionally, whatever small market there is is saturated with Chilean pears rather than local pears. After visiting the museum, which had previously been a gambling parlor, we headed over to the schoolhouse. The schoolhouse, which had amazing pictures of the Chinese community. I thought this one was kind of entertaining though:

There were all kinds of fancy motorcycles and two beautiful Alfas in town

After Locke, we headed back to Berkeley, where Kenji cooked "Spaghetti a la Kenji"

Christa and Tom here

Christa and Tom (her boyfriend) arrived today for interviews at various hospitals. Our apartment is kind of chaotic right now, but hopefully they won't be too disturbed by it!

Grapes in the air

On wednesday the movers came to our place in the Presidio, loaded up all our junk onto a truck and dropped it off at our new place in Fruitvale; right now most of our things are sitting in stacks of boxes on the concrete floor.

After finally getting a chance to have the bladder in my kite fixed at KiteWindSurf in Alameda, I headed back to our place to meet Chloe. As soon as I got out of my car I was greeted a really strong smell of grapes in the air. However, this was not the mellow smell of freshly crushed grapes, but rather the artificial sweetness of purple grape chewing gum. As it turns out we now live next to the Gatorade factory and I'm guessing it was "purple" day. I don't mind it at all though; it reminded me of my organic chem lab in which we synthesized a variety of different aromatic (not aromatic in the chemical sense) esters, and all of a sudden our austere 1920's era Williams College laboratory was filled with the powerful aromas of bananas, oranges and apples. It certainly could be a lot worse.

I'm guessing it was this stuff

It also reminded me of a story I heard on This American Life about the gub'mit cracking down on chocolate factory emissions in Chicago

moving!

the movers from Pat Ryan movers showed up today to cart all of our stuff to the Macaroni Factory (aka our new apartment)

earthquake!

It rattled the windows a bit but nothing too serious! 4.2 on the richter scale