more dinner at Francks!

We all but finished Francks super bottle of wine tonight, discussed camera stuff and came up with a cool design for the megal bike light Mk. III. I think the configuration of lights and driver board is quite logical. The bigger questions are how expensive the part will be to manufacture and whether it can adequately dissipate the heat from twelve (!) LEDs. I finally have settled on Cree MC-Es -- smaller footprint, more optics, no enforced parallel circuitry.

Dinner @ Francks

My friend Franck was kind enough to invite me to dinner on my first night in town, which was really a nice way to ease into my stay in grenoble! He opened a superb bottle of Gevrey-Chambertin to accompany a perfect hearty dinner of charcuterie, salad, potatoes and cheese. It seemed quite close to Raclette, but maybe it wasn't an Official Raclette?

Anyway, jetlag is hitting me hard this time. I also forgot about the fact that you loose a day coming in this direction.

Marketing anyone?

On my commute home, I take 101N on the causeway through Brisbane. They've been building new condos on the Southern face of the Bayview park (That hill that rises just west of Candlestick). In today's economy, I would imagine that they are having trouble selling these condos, which seems to be confirmed by the fact that there is now a big billboard saying something like "If you lived here, you would be home already", or something to that effect. I had to laugh while passing it yesterday though, as the reek from the garbage dump a few hundred feet upwind of the new condos permeated my car. The sad part is that the wind blows the same direction pretty much every day from the spring until the fall. That's why its a favorite windsurfing spot, in fact. If you factor in the eight lanes of freeway, and the carcasses of Seagulls (they flock to the dump and get hit by cars on 101), you have to wonder what they were thinking when they built houses there.

sumppumptastic!

We just had a sump pump installed next to our downstairs bedroom. We might be able to move our junk back in soon! I think we'll paint the room before we do that, as long as we've lugged all of our stuff upstairs. EXCITING!

oof!

Since my accident, I've had several stress dreams related to car accidents. In one, I had crashed chloe's GTI (which we sold ages ago), and I was desperately trying to re-attach the bumper, wheels and other parts of the demolished chassis. LAst night I was driving some kind of classic car -- an old Merc, I think -- and was worried about not having ABS or traction control. Shortly after thinking about that, the car went into a skid and plowed into a building. Nice! I'm no psychotherapist, but I have a hunch that these dreams just might be related to my car crash in January.

grommets in the gym

Now that I've given up any hope of climbing outside in our day to day life, the climbing gym has become our new home. We usually go to the oakland gym, but occasionally end up in Berkeley, which has gotten ridiculously crowded recently. Last night we totally lucked out and happened to be there when the teenage mutant climbing team was working out. It was sweet: every inch of the lead cave decked out in ropes and kids climbing 5.13. While I was cursing our decision to climb on a Tuesday night, I came to the realization that 1)zoe (hopefully) will be one of those kids at some point, so I should just calm down about having to elbow our way through them to get on the moderates and 2)competitive climbing in the US is amazingly under-resourced compared to europe. Even poor european countries have full time coaches, dedicated training facilities and state money to climb. France, for example, which has historically produced many international competitive climbing stars, has a very impressive facility in Aix-en-Provence. A lot of the kids from the gym are internationally competitive, but you have to wonder how much better they would do with the euro resources!

Museum

We went on a family trip to the new California Academy of Sciences, which was fabulous. Unfortunately, the rain forest sphere was closed, but we made up for it by spending a lot of time in the Water Planet. We did the following routine for almost every display:

1)Carry Zoe towards exhibit
2)Zoe starts trembling with excitement and demands to be let down
3)Zoe stands in front of glass and pounds on the glass/plastic with fists
4)Zoe points at fish and makes "oooh!" noises
5)Repeat 3 and 4 for five to ten minutes
6)Pick Zoe up
7)Zoe begins screaming and arching her back, stretching her arms back towards the fish
8)Zoe begins crying and peoples heads turn
9)Zoe sees the next exhibit
10)Go back to 1)

We also checked out the rooftop garden, where I overheard a docent say that they had evacuated the viewing platform earlier in the day(swarm of bees). From the CAS, we walked to the botanical garden, and then had a big Japanese dinner in Japantown. I'll upload pictures in a few days.

Zoe at the park

Röyksopp strikes again

with another great song and video

http://www.vimeo.com/3281558