Category: Personal

Day-to-day life and other ramblings

Winding Down

I’m on vacation now. Somehow the weekend flew by so fast that it’s already Monday. Yet I’m not at work. Which is a good thing, since I can really use some downtime. We get this week through New Year’s off anyway, but I took the rest of next week off, too, so I have two full weeks at home. That’s right – we’re not going anywhere, just doing Christmas at home and hanging around.

As usual I have a lengthy list of things I’d like to do over the break, and I expect I’ll only do about half of it. Here’s what comes to mind off the top of my head, and in no particular order:

  • Play poker. Going to the casino during a weekday is a good way to avoid the crowds.
  • Assemble some Magic decks.
  • Take care of our friends’ cats, which we’re doing through tomorrow.
  • Hit some used bookstores.
  • Clean up the study upstairs, especially the closet, which is full of disorganized crap. I’m hoping that Storables will have their annual closet sale after Christmas, in which case I might redo all the shelving in there, too.
  • Related to that, prepare some comic books to sell on eBay, and just throw out (well, recycle) some others that I know won’t be sellable.
  • Buy a new stereo receiver. Mine is over 18 years old and is showing signs of being on its last legs. I might also look for other consumer electronics, like a DVR.
  • Write. I have some stories I want to work on which have been coming together in my mind. I ought to try to get a few pages of them written and see if I develop some momentum so I keep going.
  • Draw. I’ve also ben getting the yen to do some sketching, so I might play around with different styles in my sketchbook.
  • Cook. We plan to cook a turkey for Christmas, and I also plan to make meatloaf (mmm, bacon-wrapped meatloaf) and biscuits sometime.
  • Go to lunch with Debbi some day when she’s at work and I’m not. (She has this week off, but not next week other than New Year’s.)
  • Upgrade the desktop computer to Leopard.
  • Find a new theme for this journal, as I’m getting tired of this one. I expect I’ll find a theme someone else has concocted and just make a few usability tweaks to it to work with my set-up. Since I don’t have a testbed install of WordPress, I’ll have to set one up, probably on a local computer, to play around with themes.
  • Read. Our book discussion group is early next month, and the book is long, so I need to get cracking on it.
  • Catch up on journal entries. I have several that are half-written which I haven’t posted yet. Including two from last month’s vacation!

Like I said, I probably won’t get through all of that. But it’s good to have a list, right?

I haven’t made much progress on it yet, though. But I did finish the crossword in this morning’s paper. Oh, and finished my Christmas shopping – that’s very important!

Holiday at the Park

Our weekend hasn’t all been the glamour and excitement of steam-cleaning the carpets, although I did do the stairs today. No, instead last night we shlepped our way up to the city to go to AT&T Park (home of the Giants) for the Genentech holiday party, Genentech being Debbi’s employer.

We ended up leaving about 45 minutes later than usual, but we still got to the park 35 minutes early, which was even early enough to park at the optimal parking lot. We met up with a couple of Debbi’s friends, and in fact we were the first ones in line to get into the park.

Park Scoreboard

It was a pretty neat party: They’d set up an ice-skating rink and a little sledding hill on the field, along with a large dance floor. They had caricature artists and photo stations around, lots of food, and beyond the outfield bleachers some fire pits set up to making s’mores.

Field Panorama
(Click for larger image)

We indulged in several of these activities – with no lines since we’d gotten there so early – and especially enjoyed making s’mores. We also had a snowball fight when we got down to the field near the sledding hill. Plus, I got to enjoy some parts of the park that are usually covered in kids and have long lines when I go to a ballgame there. The cable car, for instance:

Hangin' on the Cable Car

Around 9:30 there were fireworks!

Fireworks!

I also astonished Debbi (and a myself a little, too) by running into someone I knew at the party – a woman who used to come to my book discussion group. Seems I know a lot of people out in this little Bay Area place!

This was a novel event, making good use of the park’s space for something pretty neat in the temperate climate. I was a little disappointed in the food, which often seemed on the cold side, but otherwise it was a fun time. And a lot less crowded than I’d expected – although some lines got long, there was plenty of elbow room and even places to sit.

And Debbi was happy because she got to hang out with friends, and see snow and fireworks. It helped make up for not going to Disneyland for Christmas this year.

Cleanliness

This weekend we’re doing something we should have done long ago, indeed should have been doing regularly since I moved into my house: Steam-cleaning the carpets.

I borrowed a Bissell 9200 ProHeat 2X from my friend James, set it to the “Heavy Traffic” setting and went to work on the bedroom shortly before noon. It works really well! Since it’s been years since the carpets got serious cleaning, I ran over it twice before putting it on the “Rinse” setting and doing it a third time, and at the end the carpet looked so much better than it did before. I did the upstairs hall afterwards, too.

It’s amazing how much cat hair and carpet fuzz I picked up with it – despite having vacuumed the carpets before using the cleaner. It also took me a little while to realize that the thing uses a lot of water and cleaning formula, though I bet it would use less if it weren’t set on Heavy Traffic. We used the whole bottle of formula that James gave us, so we went out and bought several more, since doing the living room and stairs is likely to take at least one full bottle. (Incidentally, the bottles were cheaper at Fry’s than they are at Amazon.) And we might give it all one more pass next weekend (did I mention the carpets haven’t been cleaned in six years?). And I know that it’s worth emptying out the waste-water and cleaning out all the fuzz whenever the clean water tank runs out during cleaning. It’s a little extra work, but everything runs a little smoother if I do that.

I always have a good feeling when finishing a project like this. Okay, I’m not quite finished, but I’ve done a lot of it, and I can see real results. And that’s case for happiness.

One Thing After Another

After getting back from our vacation I made an appointment with the eye doctor, figuring this would be the last of my appointments for the year. I went in on Tuesday morning and everything checked out fine, so that was easy.

The “last of my appointments” part, not so much. Debbi had noticed a little puddle of oil underneath where I park my car in the garage, and I confirmed that I have a small oil leak. So I’m taking my car in to get it fixed. Hopefully it’s just a leaky seal. Actually I’m not so worried about what it will cost, I just want them to be able to find and fix it. It’s worth some money to have some certainty that my car is working right.

I also talked to a neighbor about the termite inspection we had recently, and it sounds like we do have sights of termites around the building in the complex. Not really a surprise, since termites are a fact of life in the valley, but it’s something the homeowners association will have to deal with early next year. Again, it’s not so much the expense that bothers me, as the annoyance; if our building needs to be tented (and I assume it will) then we’ll need to clear some things out of the house, and find somewhere for both us and the cats to stay for a couple of days while it’s taken care of. Maybe we can find a hotel which allows cats, or maybe we’ll have to board them. Unfortunately most of our friends who don’t have allergies already have pets.

Well, we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it. I’m sure we can figure something out.

Meanwhile, we’re now in the holiday season, so I’m hoping after getting my car fixed I can focus on that and put other chores off until next year.

Fortunately, Jefferson seems to be recovered from his bowel problems of a couple of months ago. I’m still keeping an eye on him, but the symptoms seem to be nearly gone, and that’s a good thing.

20-Year High School Reunion

The Saturday after Thanksgiving (the 24th) Debbi and I went to our 20-year high school reunion. For those keeping score at home (or surfing in later), we graduated in the class of 1987 from Newton South High School in suburban Boston.

I generally have fond memories of high school. Oh sure, there are things I’d like to forget (most of German class, for instance – oh wait, I already have!), but I enjoyed it a lot more than I enjoyed college. This is because there were more people in high school of like minds to my own, reading comic books and science fiction, arguing about math and science, playing games, and so forth. I have more friends and people I keep in touch with from high school than from college. (From college, I think John is pretty much it.) I was in the nerd group in high school, but in our high school there was a large nerd contingent anyway, as well as many smart intellectual types who weren’t my brand of nerd, so it worked out pretty well.

I went to our 10-year reunion in 1997, which was just a few months after I started my web journal, and I had a good time there. I was looking forward to this one, too, even though I knew that most of my good friends from high school wouldn’t be there. The nerd crowd just isn’t interested in attending reunions – maybe I was unusual in my fond memories of high school. But I knew that several people were not in contact, such as Marc F, Tony C and Mark C, and that Matt H and David A wouldn’t be there either (though the last I think would be happy to attend, but wasn’t able to make it). Still, I was reasonably cosmopolitan as a high school nerd went, so I expected to see a lot of people I knew.

* * *

We knew going in that one of the stories we’d tell over and over is that Debbi and I have been dating for over six years. We met each other through the e-mails that were going around for a 15-year reunion (which ended up being cancelled due to lack of people locally to organize it), and after exchanging a number of e-mails we went on a date and things have moved along from there. We’re not married and we don’t have kids, but we do live together with our four cats.

Debbi’s high school experience was very different from mine, but I won’t try to describe it here; we weren’t really in the same social circles (though we were in the same homeroom). She missed the 10-year (she was out of contact at the time), and unlike me she hadn’t been back to South to visit in many years. (I was there maybe 5 years ago, and had visited off and on up until then.) So she was less sure what to expect going in, although she had more old friends who seemed like to attend. I’m not quite sure whether she’d have gone if we weren’t together. Maybe she would have.

Myself, I enjoy watching people, and I was very curious to see where people had gone and how they’d changed in the years since. I suppose one reason to go to a school reunion is to see how successful and happy you are in life compared to your peers, and being a pretty competitive person – from a pretty competitive environment – I admit there was some of that for me. But mostly, well, childhood friends are the people you’re in the best position to watch as they grow up and mature, and reunions are the best opportunity for that sort of observation.

* * *

Saturday morning was an informal reception at South’s gymnasium so we alumni could see some of the things they’ve done with the school since we graduated, and families were invited. Debbi and I went with my sister Katy and her son Ivan, since Katy also attended South (she was 4 grades lower than me). They’ve built a huge second gym down the hall from the original gym, and done a lot of renovations on the buildings in recent years. I’ve seen a few of the changes they’ve made since high school, but a lot of this was new to me. Unfortunately we weren’t able to see the rest of the school, but it was an interesting glimpse anyway.

A whole bunch of people showed up with their families. I was a little surprised at how many young children there were, but then I remembered that only a handful of people had children by the 10-year, so therefore most of the kids would be young. Since I don’t have kids of my own, I don’t have a good perspective on what raising kids is like. (With some of my friends today starting to have kids, this may change over the next few years.)

The main reception was in the evening at the Newton Marriott (which was certainly more accessible than driving into downtown Boston as we did in 97). There were old yearbooks out to peruse, photos of people back in high school, and of course the obligatory dance floor and DJ playing 80s dance music (which was not for me since I don’t dance and I can’t stand 80s pop music).

There are two big differences in one’s classmates between the 10-year and the 20-year reunions: First is the physical changes people have gone through, whether it’s gray hair, or less hair (even the women have less hair as they opt for shorter hair styles), or a few wrinkles. I’ve been graying at my temples for several years now, plus I’m heavier than I was back in the day. The other difference is the additional maturity. At the 10-year reunion we were only 6 years out of college, which meant many people were just starting their careers, or had gone back to school for an advance degree, or were working jobs but hadn’t yet decided on a career. At the 20-year all of us professionals had been plying our trade for close to a decade, sometimes more. People had children, some had become full-time parents. For the most part we’re now in the roles we’ll play for the rest of our careers, whereas 10 years ago we were all over the map.

I sometimes wonder whether my peers think they’ve changed a lot since high school. I tend to think I’m much the same person I was back then: The geeky guy who feels uncomfortable in groups of people, and the reunion was of course… a group of people. So it took me a while to start chatting with people, but I did have a good time once I started. Adding to the awkwardness was that many people remembered my name on sight, while I often had trouble remembering peoples’ names even when their faces were familiar. I’m not sure if this is because I was weirdly memorable from back in the day, or if my brains have mostly turned to mush. Maybe both. It was flattering that so many people remembered me, though.

As for Debbi, some friends from her childhood were there, including someone she’d been good friends with through school who had grown up to be a friendly, good-looking guy who owned his own business:

Debbi & Friend

And of course we got to tell the story of getting together over and over again, which I think Debbi enjoys telling. (She says she’s amused that we were “the talk of the room” for a while.)

Reunions are a bit awkward and a bit weird, but I had a good time anyway, and found it very interesting all around. I guess they’re talking about having a 25-year reunion, and if they do, we’ll definitely go back.

* * *

(A final note: Some journal entries are harder to write than others. Occasionally they’re hard enough that they end up languishing for a long time or never getting published at all. This was one such entry, as the reunion happened nearly a year ago as I write this. But I didn’t want it to be completely forgotten, so I’m hoping it’s better late than never!)

A Short Brush with Winter

Once again I’ve gone off and left you all for a week and a half while I’m off on vacation. Very sneaky of me, I know. But not only is it difficult to put entries together just before I leave (since I tend to leave my packing and cleaning and such to the last couple of days before leaving) but I don’t like to announce when I go away. Just a little bit of my own Internet paranoia.

This trip was one to Massachusetts to visit our families: My parents, and Debbi’s sisters and their family. Normally we visit in the spring or fall – certainly not during the holidays, since we prefer to avoid the holiday travel crunch – but we had an ulterior motive: Our 20-year high school reunion was the Saturday after Thanksgiving. Debbi and I met through an e-mail list for our 15-year reunion (which ended up not happening), so we were motivated to make it out for this one.

We flew out Friday night on a JetBlue red-eye. Other than a small (and ultimately harmless) hiccup when checking in, the trip went perfectly smoothly. I guess JetBlue’s public image has been colored by the incident when a JetBlue plane was left on the runway for hours waiting for take-off, but their image during a flight is the opposite of that: Their check-in process is nicely streamlined, and on the flight they have a selection of drinks and snacks of which you may have as much as you want. Each seat also has its own television screen with satellite television, which meant Debbi could watch movies while I watched poker. Our flight took off and landed on time, and though neither of us were able to sleep much, it was about as easy as we could have hoped for.

Debbi’s sister picked us up at Logan Airport at 6 am (oof) Saturday and we drove down to visit her family for the day. We made a Dunkin Donuts run (Debbi lo-o-oves Dunkin Donuts) and met her other sister and her family for breakfast. The kids are all growing up awfully fast, and were happy to see us (more adults to run around and tire out!). As usual I ran out of gas around 10 am and fell asleep on their couch, and as usual I woke up an hour and a half later covered in pillows from the different couches, with three kids climbing on top of me! Fun. I fell asleep again in the afternoon, I think to Debbi’s consternation, but I was exhausted. Debbi’s sister drove me to my Mom’s house before dinner, and my Dad drove out to meet me and we sat around talking and eating See’s truffles.

I crumped out early and slept over 13 hours Saturday night. I think I was not only catching up on the sleep I missed Friday night, but also releasing some of the stress of the work-week and packing. It’s been a while since I’ve slept that long, and I slept hard.

Sunday started late as a result, of course, but it was a laid-back day. We made a trip to the New England Mobile Book Fair, which, although not mobile, is still a good deal for book lovers. In the evening I drove in to meet Dad for dinner. We went to a nice, upscale restaurant, about which I said I knew it must be good because at those prices if it weren’t good it wouldn’t have lasted more than a couple of weeks. But indeed the food was quite yummy and filled us up, and we had a couple of tasty mixed drinks too (I had an espresso martini – with real espresso! You can’t beat being tipsy and wired at the same time).

Monday Dad and I made our annual pilgrimage up to Wakefield to go to Web Head Enterprises, which might be the best all-around comic book store around Boston, between their selection of new and back issue comics, plus paperbacks. Unfortunately I struck out looking for items for my want list: The condition of many of their back issues was not up to my (admittedly stringent) standards, and their selection didn’t seem quite as good as in years past. Plus they closed their nifty downstairs used book section, which was disappointing. So I may have to re-think whether I want to keep making that trip every visit. (To be fair, my want list is getting pretty short and specialized, so I think the days of walking way from a comic store with a big stack of back issues are in my past.)

On the way back, on impulse, I took us to Waltham to visit The Outer Limits (where I also struck out), but we made a detour to stop at the house we’d lived in for two years when I was a kid – specifically from 1970 to 1972, when I was under 4 years old. I took some photos of it, and now I know where it is, for future reference. I only have two memories from that house, but one of them is of walking Dad to the train station one morning, so we walked off in search of the station.

After a couple of blocks we stopped at an intersection and I said, “I don’t see a rail line down here.” Dad was pretty sure it was quite close, closer than the existing MBTA commuter rail, so we turned down the cross street at the intersection and climbed up a shallow hill a couple more blocks. We stopped at another intersection and I said, “I don’t see a rail line down here, either.” We scratched our heads and looked around and Dad said, “This looks familiar.” We were standing next to a long, thin building sandwiched between the side street and a line of trees, so we walked over and realized that it must be the old train station – heavily renovated! And walking past it we found the railroad tracks – long unused and overgrown – running along side it. I took a few pictures, and then followed Dad inside the building.


Restored Train Station
(The white edging along the lawn is a railroad track!)

It turns out that the building had been bought back in the 1960s and it had been renovated into an insurance office – with an extension with a basement and second story added on – and the son of the man who bought it ran the officeand we talked with him and the two employees for a while. They had photos and a large painting of the station dating back to the 1800s – it was a leg of the Boston & Maine railroad for quite a while – and they gave us postcards they use for their business with a picture of the station from the 1920s. The owner was interested in knowing when Dad rode the train – it sounds like the rail line was reaching the end by then. They had a photo of the station from 1976, but it was impossible to be sure whether the rail line was still being used by then. It sounds like the line will be turned into a bike trail in the near future. All-in-all this was a fun little side-trip into the past.

In the evening I took the subway downtown and met my friend Bruce for dinner. I realized it’s been nearly 20 years since we first met, back when I joined APA Centauri when I started college, and we still exchange the occasional e-mail (“It wouldn’t be a proper meeting if I didn’t say I’d try to write more often!” I said) and get together whenever I come back to the area. As usual we had Italian food in the North End, and then moved to Cafe Vittorio for coffee and dessert, staying out until nearly midnight. Bruce is working on the project to reprint Terry and the Pirates, the first volume of which I’ll need to pick up when I get back home. And as always it was a good dinner.

Tuesday we got some snow in the morning. Snow! It’s been a long time since I saw snow. It was just around a quarter of an inch, but still, enough to make the ground nearly white. In the afternoon it turned to rain and started to melt away. That afternoon I also drove down to visit Debbi and her family again, making another Dunkin Donuts run and playing with the kids, wrapping up the day with a four-way dominos game after the kids went to bed (Debbi won, pulling ahead of me in the last round). Wednesday was a sedate day, mainly with Mom and I going out to do some shopping, picking up an external hard drive to back up her computer onto, and to buy a shirt for me to wear to the reunion. (My turtlenecks seem to have gone AWOL at some point.)

Thursday of course was Thanksgiving. It also got up near 60 degrees, after a week down in the 30s, which was nice. Mom prepared dinner in the afternoon, and Dad came out for dinner: Turkey, stuffing, and he brought wine and two pies. Other than Mom cooking it was a pretty mellow day, with football and sitting around. Our nutty, crazy Thanksgivings are in the past, I think.

Friday my sister drove up to stay for the weekend, bringing my nephew, Ivan, with her. I hadn’t seen Ivan since we all visited my parents a year and a half ago, which is a long time for a young kid – he’s 3 1/2 now. Katy says he’s very precocious with computers, and especially loves Apple products: Macs, iPods, etc. He was very interested in my iPhone and enjoyed flipping through my photos on it.

He actually reminds me a bit of — me. He seems to be very what my Mom called “self-entertaining”. Mom brought out some old Legos from the sunroom and he was able to entertain himself with them for hours and hours, just playing around with the little Lego spacemen and ships. We also went up with him to the playground at my old elementary school and watched him run around on the play equipment. I think the most fun he and I had up there was sending his toy car down the curvy slide. He also loves to jump into photographs when he sees someone is taking one.


An Ivan in Winter
(I call this one “An Ivan in Winter”)

After dinner I drove down to pick up Debbi, since she’d be spending Friday and Saturday nights with us so we could go to the reunion events on Saturday.

Speaking of which, Saturday was the reunion, with a small gathering at our high school in the morning so we could see the changes they’ve made to it recently, and the reunion proper in the evening. I’m going to write a whole entry on the reunion, so I’ll go into this in more detail soon. Suffice to say for now that it was a fun time, and a very weird time, since most of these people I’d only seen once – if that – in 20 years.

Sunday we took Ivan up to the playground again, and then Debbi and I went to Barry’s Deli for lunch (mmm-mmm!), and then I took Debbi back to her sister’s house. Her brother-in-law Shawn was astoundingly on top of everything and had already cleared away all the Thanksgiving stuff and was well on his way to having the Christmas stuff up. Yowza! He did run out of lights while decorating the tree at the end of the driveway, though, prompting me to ask if he was “a few lights short of a full tree”. See the risks you run when you invite me into your house?

Monday it was time to leave, sad to say. Katy and Ivan headed out around noon, and I left a little before 1, meeting Debbi at the airport for our 4 pm flight. The return trip was long, but went smoothly, and we got home right on time, with our friend Susan giving us a lift home as she had to the airport. It was a long day, the cats were perhaps overly happy to see us, but we made it!

Overall, a nice trip. I was able to relax a lot, but I also got to see friends and family. Can’t complain about that.

November Already?

I’m still quite busy, both at home and at work. So much so that I now have three books with partially-written reviews that I need to finish and post here. It seems like as I get older, I have ever-more stretches of time when I’m so busy I start falling behind on the “everyday stuff”.

This past weekend was quite busy. We slept a lot, since we were both feeling quite tired from the week; we were glad for the extra hour of sleep!

Saturday morning we got together with Subrata and Susan for lunch at The Counter, which they’d never been to. Debbi and Susan then went off shopping at a sale while Subrata and I came home and played some Magic (Ravnica sealed deck), which was fun although neither of us had terribly exciting decks. (I think draft tends to lead to building more interesting decks than sealed, but then you can do sealed with any number of players, so they each have their uses.) I’d contemplated going up to Borderlands Books for their 10-year anniversary sale, but Subrata decided to pass and I decided I didn’t have much I was really looking for and didn’t feel like making the drive up to San Francisco. Instead we stayed home and did some chores and ran some errands, and then went to Cafe Borrone for dinner and reading.

Sunday we ran a few short errands, but mostly stayed home to have a day off. We watched what Subrata called Football Armageddon, otherwise known as the Patriots-Colts game, which was a rare exciting Pats game, in that they still won but it wasn’t easy for a change.

The weekend ended with a bit of irony: Sunday evening I was feeling all happy that I’d finished everything on my list to do for the weekend… and then around 6 pm my stereo receiver stopped working, just emitting a hum instead of any actual sound. I tinkered with it a little, but it seemed pretty dead. I’d been planning to replace it anyway (it’s 18 years old!), but I hadn’t expected it to force the issue. Ah, well.

(Strangely, it started working again by last night, and it’s on right now playing KCSM jazz music, but I bet it won’t last.)

Anyway, November is here: It’s gotten cold and dark out, now that the time has changed. We’re supposed to get rain later this week. My seasonal affective disorder has been keeping itself in check pretty well this fall, and now I’m actively looking forward to the rain. I just wish the trees would finish dropping their leaves so I can clean up the back yard.

Bittersweet Halloween

Every year we buy candy and put out some candles in red-colored holders for Halloween. Traditionally we get hardly any kids, which bums Debbi out because she loves seeing little kids in costume. We don’t get many because we’re on the edge of Apartment Central, on the wrong side of a major street from the rest of the residential area.

This year, though, we hit the motherlode, and went through most of our candy. Many groups of young kids were coming by as late as 7:30. I think it’s because Daylight Savings Time got moved back a week, so the sun didn’t set until 6:30. So it made Debbi’s day.

Unfortunately, I went upstairs to go to the bathroom, and happened to wander into the front room in time to see a trio of teenagers making off with two of my candleholders. I ran downstairs and put on my sandals and ran after them, but by the time I got there there were no candles in sight, and they didn’t know anything about it. So either I caught up to the wrong kids, or they got rid of them (or stashed them in their bags) and played dumb. My bet is the latter, but there’s no way to be sure. I looked around briefly with a flashlight to see if they threw them aside, but no luck.

I’ve always been aware that Halloween is also a night of teenagers (and some adults) playing pranks and generally misbehaving (a friend of mine and I nearly got mugged 20 years ago walking out on Halloween night, and I’ve also been hit with an egg once), so I knew there was a chance I’d lose the candles someday. Honestly, after 5 years I’m surprised this is the first time. But it’s still a bummer that people act this way. Oh well.

We also had a couple of men in a truck loitering around. They parked down the street, drove away, then came back and walked around. Debbi and I each talked to them, and it sounds like they were looking for an apartment complex, and had a number and a complex name, but not the street name. The number suggested that they wanted to be looking on the cross street (our street’s numbers don’t go up that high), so I directed them that way. I’ll never know whether I actually helped them, though. But hopefully they were just lost and that I helped them find their destination.

I don’t have many good memories of Halloween, but I like the idea enough that I keep trying.

Welcome to the World, Isabella!

Yesterday we went to the hospital to visit our friends Lisa and Michel, since Lisa gave birth to a baby girl named Isabella! Isabella couldn’t wait, since she arrived about two weeks early – on the day that was supposed to be Lisa’s last day at work. (A friend of mine – who’s a mom herself – says that the last few days of waiting for the baby are the worst, so maybe this is all for the best.) Lisa’s tired (Isabella showed up not long after midnight), but she’s in good spirits.

That I can recall, this is the first time I’ve had the opportunity to see a baby this tiny, less than a day old. (Well, I can always just walk into a maternity ward and look at the newborns, but that’s not what I mean.) She was pink and purple, she had a head of black hair, and her eyes were just barely open (she was sleepy and had just eaten), but her eyes tracked me as I moved side-to-side in front of her. She was perfectly happy just being held by her daddy.

I said to Isabella “Today really is the first day of the rest of your life!” And she didn’t start crying, so I guess she’s go a good sense of humor!

Pesto!

Last night was fun with our new food processor.

On the way home I stopped at the brand new and freakin’ huge Whole Foods in Cupertino and picked up a few things. Getting home a little late, I put together some garlic bread: Crushed garlic and fresh-ground parmesan cheese mixed into butter, spread on top of sliced french bread, and baked for 12 minutes.

While it was baking I started making fresh homemade pesto. A basil plant I potted several months ago has been going nuts, so I had plenty of basil for the mix, along with garlic cloves, pine nuts, a little parsley, and olive oil. After processing it to a creamy smoothness I mixed in salt and parmesan (ended up needing more salt than I’d first expected, and probably could have used even more). The bread was out by this time, so I boiled water and prepared some shell pasta.

It all came together really well, and man was the pesto fresh and strong! Definitely something to make again, and I wonder if the pesto might taste even better after sitting overnight to mellow. Hard to say, though we do have a little left over. But still: Mm-mm-mm-mm-mm!

We did manage to kill every vampire in a one-mile radius, though. Garlic city, I’m telling you.