Rome away

Such a beautiful set of days! Trevi fountain, Vatican, colluseum, pizza pasta pizza!









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Picking Apples

We spent a wonderful day with Becca and Luke out at an apple farm yesterday. It was hot hot hot. 92 degrees. We ate a slew of apples - socha, Molly delicious (mealy) - from trees that 5 year olds could have reached. It was so hot in the shade that I think I paid for water with a ten dollar bill... and somehow got $14 back, with farmer and me both thinking I'd underpaid. Hot to make you addle-brained!

It's not often that the heat around here makes me long for a bit of fog or air conditioning. We stopped at a place on the way back that had the best and most beautiful seeds - the Petaluma Seed Bank. Heirloom seeds abound in this beautiful old bank right in downtown Petaluma. And whether from actual AC or the cool dustings of previous cold hard cash, it was lovely and mild inside. Favorite varieties included the "Love-Live-Bleeding Green" Amaranth, and some cucumbers the size of quarters.



To top off the southern-feeling day, we stopped for barbeque on the way back and they had actual pulled pork. Top that off with blackberries from the side of the dusty road, and you have a day to be reckoned with.

Chart Porn and Daschunds

I've become a bit obsessed with charts and graphs. They have the allure of lists - lots of information, little space - and they also have colors!

While thumbing through my favorite site for charts, Chart Porn, which has real, if not always lucid, data, I found Graph Jam, which has very lucid data. (I'll let you decide for yourself about its reality/subjectivity.)

And that is where I found this chart about The world as his or her daschund sees it. Daschunds always remind me of Shawn, and Shawn + Dog reminds me of Skeledog. Oh, that equation feels like a chart coming on. Gotta get to it!


see more Funny Graphs

Shane and Jen's Baby Party

Arne and I had such a fun time this weekend hosting a Baby Shower for Shane & Jen's soon-to-be-here little Miss. Some of the highlights were:

1. having cleaners come clean the house (and me not having to do it),
   
2. the "How Big is Shane's Sympathetic Belly" game (what a hoot!),
   
3. and having over 20 people comfortably in the house on a standard San Francisco summer afternoon (foggy & cold, then sunny & warm, repeat).

Pin the diaper on the baby didn't get played, but the kids in attendance sure had a fun time drawing various excrement on the construction paper "diapers".

Lastly, we tried to do a "Conception Pool" to "guess when it all began" but couldn't really get that off the ground. Maybe the price was too high - $5. I did have a chance to deflect my nephew's question, "What's that?" to his dad (my brother-in-law). (Cheers, Dino!)

Here are some fun pictures of the shindig. We'll know next time to set people up to open presents on the side of the room across from the windows. Wish you could have been there!

Hawaii Here We Come

Headed to Hawai'i for the See Change & Hawai'i Community Foundation's youth-led Youth Empowerment Stories video program. So very exciting! This is where we'll stay for the first day or so until the youth join us. Mission Pictures (Arne & Shane) and Ed are coming to be part of the team. I'm starting to get fired up about it. Until now, it was all-logistics-all-the-time, and there was always something that needed to be done. We're in the calm before the storm, when there's nothing more to do until we get there and are on the ground with the youth!!!


Well, nothing more to do except work on my tan. Ha (who are we kidding!?)...

Chillin' with the Ballards

I spent a lovely Sunday chillin' with the Ballards. Or more appropriately, I ooh-ed and coo-ed over the littlest Ms. Ballard. She's my partner in crime in the picture.
We all went to All Saints Church for a lovely service and a tiny little 18th birthday reunion with Kat and Noelle (who is a priest there now).
Happy Palm Sunday!

Tuckered out

I'm a bit tuckered out. Stayed up way too late playing my first ever round of Settlers of Catan and eating Arne's homemade Earl Gray and Butter Cookie icecream. Yum.

Before that there was a party for Arne and Shane's DVD release.

And before that a week working in Hawai'i when I didn't even have time to put on my bathing suit! I had time to do lots of other fantastic stuff... including work with See Change's fabulous client, the Hawai'i Community Foundation, see a humpback whale spout and tail, visit an 800-year-old fishpond, get some yummy greens (thank you Summer and pals) at Ma'o Farms, take the secret (unpaved) back way from Hana to Kahului, see 4 rainbows or maybe more, and bond with my delightful boss, Melanie Moore Kubo. Here's the fishpond below. Oooh pretty!