Tag: life

Perhaps it has something to do with the amount of dead material I cut out of the trellis last Fall, or maybe it’s something else entirely, but the wisteria filled in really well this Spring.  This is what it’s looked like for the last couple of weeks (and probably will for another week or two):
And it smells nice too!  Just watch out for the bees and wasps….

We decided it was time to make Mom & Dad’s travel calamities work for us.  So they came to visit in the middle of a major drought.  It hadn’t rained any appreciable amount in 14 months.  But, it started raining the day after they arrived and has been continuing to rain fairly regularly since then.

Heather was enamored of Grandpa.

We tried going up to the Redwood Valley Railroad again.  It seemed like Heather was going to be okay with it, but the moment Jess tried to lift Heather into the car Heather lost it.  With every shred of vocabulary she could muster she demanded that she didn’t want to ride the train and that Jess get off the train.  I wasn’t allowed on the train either.  So Grandma and Grandpa took a train ride while the rest of us tried to calm Heather down.

We also visited Duarte’s Garage which seemed like the kind of thing Mom & Dad do (it’s an old garage along the original Lincoln Highway that runs through Livermore).  They have restored, old-timey fire engines and various related relics.

If you look closely you can see the sparks being generated by the hand-crank starter.  The spark plugs are at the top of the metal brackets on the right-hand side of the contraption.

We also went to the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum in San Jose.

Before they left we took a few pictures of them with Heather, this somewhat candid shot (taken in between “real pictures”) ended up turning out best:

Come back and visit again anytime!

We stayed home for Christmas this year and didn’t have anyone coming to visit either.  This is the first year for us when we didn’t either visit someone or have someone visit so it felt a little off.  For me at least, it’s always tough to feel like it’s Christmas in California since the weather is usually warm (mid 60’s, low 70’s this year).  On Christmas Eve this year I heard the ice-cream truck driving around the neighborhood; it just doesn’t work for me.

At least going to visit or having visitors creates some excitement, but without even that it just never really felt like the proper season.  I mentioned to Jess on at least one occasion that I needed to figure out something to do that would make it feel like Christmas.  I never really did, unfortunately.

We watched “A Charlie Brown Christmas” and several other Christmas specials, but up until the week of I was still going to work every day, the sun was shining, and many of the trees still have leaves on them.  Due to poor air quality it’s been illegal to burn wood for most of the month (including Christmas Eve and Christmas Day) so that didn’t help either.  I’ll have to figure something out for next year.  We’ve kicked around the idea of every other year having Christmas at a “cabin” in the mountains so we’d get some snow and cold weather.  We’ll see if we still like that idea next year.

Anyways, enough lamenting about that.

On Monday Heather and I did some painting.  This was my creation (I’m planning on keeping my day job):

On Christmas Eve we went over to the house of some friends who had invited over a few families who also didn’t have any family to visit with for Christmas.  We drank Dickerson Family Wassail and ate Dickerson Family Little Weenies so that helped make it feel like Christmas.  Of course, we also ate Triscuits and Wheat Thins with cheese.  After a couple of hours of hanging out we all headed home.

Christmas morning was calm and sunshiny.  Santa had arrived.

I think Heather knew something different was happening—she was pretty amped up (but then, she’s often all amped up in the morning anyway…).  We, of course, took obligatory pre-presents pictures:

Heather was just as adorable as could possibly be.  So here are a bunch of pictures of her looking adorable:

The trolley and affiliated characters are from Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood, a modern, animated spin-off of Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood.  Netflix has the first 20 episodes and Heather loves it.

Jess and I were also around, but we know everyone would rather look at pictures of Heather than us.  But just for proof, here’s Jess with her Eye-Fi card:

The Eye-Fi card will magically transfer her pictures from her camera to the computer so she can just sit down at the computer to work on them without taking the memory card out of the camera.

Since the desktop computer is only on when we’re using it (saving a bunch of electricity) I set it up to transfer to the Raspberry Pi and then wrote some scripts for Jess so she can just click a link on the desktop and it will transfer all her pictures to the computer, organize them by year/month/day and then automatically convert any videos to mp4 files (which take up much less space with no noticeable loss in quality).  Being married to a geek has its perks.

And yes, I was also present.  Here I am showcasing this year’s “Most Unexpected Gift,” a “Zombie Shelter” sign my parents found in New Orleans: