La Familia Brophy

We took the train into San Francisco this morning, then caught a MUNI trolley to the beach at the end of Golden Gate Park. Nathan loved the waves, they were pretty big, and there were a few surfers. We then walked down the length of golden gate park seeing delights like motorized model boats, horses, friendly dogs, bison and finally the Buddha at the Japanese Tea Garden. The tea garden was actually a great thing to do with a 2 year old. Nathan pretty much led the way and we chose paths at random often looping the same area repeatedly. Nathan was really taken with the Buddha, Lisa asked him what the Buddha says and Nathan said “be carefree.” which was a brilliant answer (though I ‘m not sure that’s what he meant, since hr’s never said the word ‘carefree’ before). I got a lot of sun my face is all warm and rosy.

Be Carefree

Ben took the day off today as his make up day for MLK, Jr Day since he had to work then. We ventured in San Francisco and went to the zoo. It was a pretty long journey but we had a great time.

Once feature I liked about it is that on many of the exhibits they have signs that tell you something about the individuals that you see. Some of the things we learned were that the grey seal was more than 30 years old and he was blind. They felt that he was more comfortable in his small concrete home than a more modern one since that is where he had lived for more than 30 years. We also learned that the black rhino female there has given birth to 16 baby rhinos which is a significant contribution to the survival of her species. We also found out that the male chimpanzee is dominated by the three females he lives with and they have kind of ganged up on him. I was surprised to learn that all four of them were wild born.

Nathan’s favorite feature of the zoo was the tunnel that ran between two areas in the African section. He spent a lot of time yelling, “TUNNEL!” as we tried to enjoy the bears and such. He also got to go on his 3rd ever carousel. The first of which he went on last week. He gets really serious about it but has a great time. Remember to check out the photo section for lots of updated photos.

Zoo Carousel

We had a great weekend. My Dad’s been visiting since Thursday, and this weekend we all went on a couple trips together. We visited Children’s Fairyland on Saturday, and San Francisco on on Sunday, where we did the typical tourist morning of taking a cable car fisherman’s wharf. When nathan was happy (which was most of the time) we all were happy. I’ve posted a bunch of new photos from the weekend on the photo page, click the photos to see bigger versions and access the whole collection of photos on Flickr.

OK, so if a monster snowstorm hits New England and MIT closes for the day, do I get to take a snow day even if I’m in California? It seems only right…

My dad is visiting us now. We’ve been having lot’s of fun, this morning we went to “Children’s Fairy Land” and then to Zachary’s for Pizza. I’ll post photos soon. I wonder if his flight back on Monday night will fly as scheduled.

I am trying a new more relaxed and open-hearted approach to life. So I am in Indianapolis and trying to just accept that it is what it is, and appreciate it’s Indianapolis-nature. I’m at a Starbucks on one of the towns major boulevards, across from a monument to various 19th century wars. A Spanish colleague pointed out the plaques commemorating “Indiana’s victory over Spain” with a smile. Man, it’s cold here.

I went on pilgrimage to MacWorld today. I saw the new Mac Mini, the new $500 dollar mac that’s the size of a cookie tin (and not a big cookie tin, either). It was really small and light, though they trick you a little, b/c the power supply is not in the machine, it’s big box you plug into. Still nice, and if you upped the RAM significantly one of those $500 boxes would be as powerful as last year’s $2500 powerbook.

The iPod shuffle was also neat. The $99 model probably holds 120 songs. You can listen to them in order or shuffled, so it would be a nice way to carry around an audio book. And it’s tiny, like a pack of chewing gum. I bet they’ll sell like hot cakes.

I admired eyeTV, a personal video recorder (like TiVo) that you can install on a mac. But if we start recording TV shows onto our mac we’ll be done for. The reason I don’t want a TV is that I’d get hooked on it. Having hours of TV I want to see sitting on my computer at all times would not be healthy for me.

It seemed like half the exhibition was devoted to the iPod. Mark left a comment asking about iPod tips, and have to admit I don’t have many. Have fun choosing a case, as there about 60 of them on the market now, and replace the earbuds with nicer headphones. I did see a really cool book at the O’Reilly booth called iPod and iTunes hacks that looked pretty inspiring.

I think the best lesson was that it is really easy to get into San Francisco, just a 20 minute train ride. We should do it more often.

I’ll be posting photos regularly on our photo page. You can also go straight to our flickr page to see more.

Rough morning at the Berkeley Bowl

We are approaching the greenest time of year here in the Bay Area. There is lots of green grass everywhere we go although it is quite soggy right now. I love seeing all of the flowers blooming in January. That alone makes Berkeley feel very special indeed (there are many other things as well though). I especially like to see the plants that we grow as houseplants only in New England growing as giant hedges. Some of these are geraniums, clivia, and jade plants. Then there are the plants that we just don’t really see in Boston like lemon trees and eucalyptus trees, redwoods, birds of paradise, and many I don’t know the names of.

Even though palm trees seem a bit out of place here I like to see them. We have some that mark the beginning of our driveway. For the first few days here Nathan said, “Trees kaboom fall down” every time he saw them. He even tried to push one of them over.

Along with all of the green of Berkeley and the lovely scents that are unfamiliar to us is the mold of our apartment. We have worked hard to scrape it off the windows and apply generous squirts of bleach and I think it is getting better. I put the lavender from the market yesterday in the bedroom and a grapefruit scented air freshener in the living room to sweeten things up.

My friend Margaret suggested hanging some papeles picadas in the place to brighten it up a bit when I was telling her it was a bit dull. I was able to find some right around the corner in a store called Global Exchange. I’d love to fill the whole living area with them but my frugal nature gets in the way. That and knowing that in Mexico they would cost only a few cents. They cheered up the kitchen nicely though.

Today we got to go to the Saturday farmers’ market on Center St at MLK, Jr. It was all that I hoped it might be. Everything at the market has to be grown within a certain distance from the city and yet it all seemed to exotic to us North Easterners. We bought fresh corn tortillas, sweet potatoes, goat cheese, lemons, tangerines, lavender, and a couple different types of greens.

Also available were walnuts, pecans, raisins, raw juices, raw honey, olive oil, coffee, lots of citrus, kiwis, bread, smoked fish, soups, and the standard spring or fall selection from Boston farmers’ markets like squash, carrots, potatoes, etc.

Nathan got a pretzel and listened to some cool dudes sing a R&B version of Eensy Weensy Spider.

Then we had a long walk back in the rain. It was a very rainy day but I kept appreciating the fact that I was out in my raincoat without a hat, gloves, and heavy wool sweaters.

Today Nathan and I went to the Children’s Museum. It was a nice but longer than expected walk there. Nathan enjoyed playing in the large pretend ambulance they have set up there. He also did some painting. It is a pretty small museum especially when we have the one in Boston to compare it to but it was lovely and not overwhelming at all. There is a science museum on the campus that we will check out soon too.

We walked back via the Berkeley Bowl which is an utterly amazing grocery store. It gets really crowded and intense and there is so much there I can’t quite get a handle on it. Today I ventured into the produce section which is the size of some grocery stores. I bought organic fair trade bananas for only $.89 a pound. These were one of at least 10 different types of bananas I had to choose from. And then of course there is the dairy section which had so many egg varieties I just had to settle for one without looking at them all. But the milk! I knew you could buy raw milk in the stores here but was still amazed to see it sitting there. It is quite pricey at $7.49 a half gallon but the taste is incomparable. We won’t get it all the time but I do have to get it a lot since it is there.

Nathan is adjusting well. We are all a little tired but have pretty much switched easily over to PST. Since we share a room here Nathan came scrambling into bed with us at 1:30 am. There isn’t much we can do to avoid this other than strap him into his own bed so we will all get used to it. Hopefully he’ll learn to just fall right back to sleep after making the switch and we’ll all have virtually uninterrupted sleep.