Journey to Japantown

We spent our Friday holiday celebrating American diversity in San Francisco's Japantown! We had a great shabu-shabu lunch at Shabu Sen. You sit at a table with a high-tech hot plate and vent hood. The waitress brings a pot of boiling broth and plates of thinly sliced meat and veggies and you cook it up and enjoy. YUM.

We also played at Pikapika, a shop full of crazy photo booths. Check out the results -- stickers! -- below.

Luke channeled his inner Japanese girl and out-decorated Ellen & I.

9.5 months

Little clips of Scott this week, taken & assembled by Ellen:

He's big! He crawls and babbles and smiles!

The View from my Office

Outside, there are Ellen (sister-in-law and summer nanny!) and Baby Boy playing in the kiddie pool in our unfinished back"yard". (Perhaps back garden or back nook would be a better term.) Inside, there is me, doing dose reconstructions!

Life has been exciting and full -- updates soon, but after working hours.

Cincinnati

I'm in Cincinnati for a week of training for my new job (I'll be working from home after this week). I'm really enjoying the training and looking forward to the health physics work. It's now been over 72 hours away from Luke & Scott and it's starting to get a little weird! I'm posting this older video of Scott playing peekaboo back in College Station at 6 or 7 months old so you can enjoy his filmed cuteness and miss him like I do. ;) I know Ellen's taking great care of him, though, and am so glad for a supportive husband who was all "Go for it!" about the job.


Also on my mind lately: the beautiful lyrics to "Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing". (<-- btw, I do not like to protect the period punctuation within the quotation marks. It used to be necessary for typsetters to place it inside so as not to jam up the printer because the period stamp thing was little and delicate, but it's totally not necessary now and is nonsensical. Check out Eats Shoots & Leaves for more fun punctuation facts!)


Favorite verse this week:

Here I raise my Ebenezer;
Here by Thy great help I've come;
And I hope, by Thy good pleasure,
Safely to arrive at home.
Jesus sought me when a stranger,
Wandering from the fold of God;
He, to rescue me from danger,
Interposed His precious blood.

Road Trip vid

Tip from Dad #1

I think I need a new series of posts called "Tips from Dad". Since childhood, I've planned on writing a book about my father (he has a crazy interesting life) and have never known how to start -- maybe it can just be a collection of tips, like "How to land on an aircraft carrier", "How to get out of being arrested in Poland", "How to fix your 17 year old Celica with a paperclip and chewing gum", and "How to escape the Coast Guard that is chasing you because you and your sister burnt down a banana grove on a Florida island".

Anyway, the first tip: How to fix your squeeky dresser drawers. (Yeah, it's less exciting than the above teasers, but it's what I'm doing right now.) Get some soap or a candle, rub it on the wooden parts of the frame and drawer that touch, and voila!

Thanks Dad.

Quick Updates

HELLO friends! So much has been going on: we are in our new home in California, had a great trip. Luke started at Mozilla. I'm starting a new job Monday. Ellen is coming out here to be our nanny for the summer. More on ALL of that later.

For now:

Therese and Jesse are parents! Meet Emma Marie, gorgeous little girl. We can't wait to see her in person. They are in NYC.

Karen and the Navy volleyball team won the US Armed Forces championship! Karen was then selected to be on the ALL US ARMED FORCES team -- she's flying to Brazil to play in the world championships. They'll be playing awesome teams like the Chinese (their military team is their Olympic team, whoa). I hear that a personal corpsman/masseuse will accompany each team member??