Birthday in the baylands

Last week we celebrated Paul's birthday with a picnic dinner in the Baylands in East Palo Alto. It was really cool and we're looking forward to going back and exploring some more. Here are a few photos we took that night.


We realized that if we gave Lena the camera with the timer on she could take part in taking photos. Here are a couple snaps she took of us.
Occasionally we needed to help steady the camera.
Other times we weren't quite fast enough.
Morgan and Lena with a delicious cake they made.


Baylands at sunset.

Berkeley Old Time Music Convention: One Trick Possum

During the festival in Berkeley I also had an opportunity to play fiddle with some really great folks. Here I am playing with Maxine (from Oakland) and Edwin (from Huntsville, AL). in the band contest. The videos are pretty rough (almost 'bigfoot' quality) but the sound comes through. I learned these tunes from recordings of West Virginia fiddler, Bill Iman. The video above is of us playing 'Ragged Shirt' and the one below a tune called 'Stony Point'.

I found some freeware video editing software and so was finally able to reduce the size/length of this video so that it could be posted. Here Lena and I sing in our old apartment in Chicago. This is an all-time favorite of mine!

Berkeley Old Time Music Convention: The Magnolia Serenaders

A couple weeks ago we headed up to the annual Berkeley Old Time Music Convention. We were joined by our friends Chuck and Jim who play in a band with Paul called The Magnolia Serenaders. Chuck is from Madison, WI and Jim is from Athens, AL and it was a real treat to have them come all the way for the festival. It was great to visit with them and have a chance to play more music together and also fun to meet and spend time with so many wonderful musicians in our new 'neighborhood'. Here are a few clips of the three of us playing during the festival. The tune in the video above is 'Red Bird'.

During the festival there is an informal band contest which we entered. Here we are playing 'New Hot Times' learned from a recording of Hoyt Ming and his Pepsteppers, a band from Mississippi.

Playing the tune, 'Knoxville Rag', from the Kentucky duo Burnett and Rutherford.

New school

Lena will be starting preschool next week at Country Day Little School, a waldorf preschool located within biking distance of us. We're all really excited about it. Here are a few photos taken there one weekend in early September when we went to feed the rabbits and chickens.

Lena's 2nd birthday

We celebrated Lena's birthday a couple weeks ago with a trip to Santa Cruz to pick strawberries with Mark and Becca. That morning we woke up, sang happy birthday, and then took the CalTrain - all of which was very exciting. Here we are waiting for the train. When we got to Mark & Becca's we learned that it was actually September 5th (not the 6th which is Lena's birthday) so we ended up celebrating her prebirthday and birthday that weekend. The first place we went to was Wilder State Park for a picnic which was fantastic. Here Lena rides a hobby horse at the park.
The bunch of us blowing big bubbles in impressively strong winds.
Lena - the grand bubbler.
From there we drove up the coast to go strawberry picking. Here Becca and Lena navigate their way through the rows with the Pacific in the far back.Strawberries are one of Lena's favorite foods so this was a real treat!
Becca, Lena, and Mark in the berries.

Lena in the strawberry wagon with Mark & Becca's haul.
A frog found in the berries by M & B.
Morgan is very thorough; here she is working her way down the rows, getting each and every last berry in the basket.
The berry bandit on her (pre)birthday.
From there we drove to Greyhound Rock Beach to hang out in the intertidal.
Morgan and Lena looking at a starfish feeding on a mussel that Mark found.
Gooseneck barnacle.
Lena riding on Paul's shoulders with big fronds.
The end of the day as the fogbank began to roll in as we left the park. We had a great dinner of Mexican food in Santa Cruz after that and then caught the bus & train back home. Below are a few videos of our adventures that day.

Our arrival in California

Here are a few random photos from our first day and a half in our new place here in California.

Go west with furries and friends (late August)

Here is a photo of Paul and the big rental rig - a 22' long Penske truck - that transported him and our cats Treat and Riley across the country. The dog kennel that housed the cats can be seen peaking over the dashboard. From Chicago to Grand Junction, Colorado they were accompanied by our friend Sue, another recent grad in Paul's program at University of Chicago. Sue took all of the photos in this post.The Sod House Museum in west-central Nebraska (complete with an American Gothic photoshoot).
Sculptures in front of the Sod House Museum; apparently the buffalo weighs a ridiculous amount and is made of 4.5 miles of barbed wire!
Biodiversity survey en route to California. The bug 'rain' was fairly intense through Nebraska.

Cleaning off the windows so as to better see the road.
Sue, cats, and Paul in the cab of the truck.
All in all the drive was pretty uneventful. Each day was fraught with its own joys and terrors. The photo above was taken during a lunch break after we'd started driving through the Colorado Rockies on I-70. Navigating the truck down the first 6% grade west of Denver was a bit harrowing - a very long steep straight shot into the valley. By the time we stopped for lunch we were all really ready for a break. It was incredibly beautiful despite the occasional scary visions we had.
Steep. The photo doesn't do it justice. The grades didn't seem so bad once we got used to just downshifting and then puttering along pumping the brakes in the right hand lane as we passed the runaway truck ramps... that was until we had the thought that we might be in the way of a faster truck in need of one of those ramps. Yikes.
Beautiful canyon east of Grand Junction, CO.
Paul and Sue taking a break east of Grand Junction. It was really great to have Sue's company on the drive and sad to see her leave the road trip in western CO to meet a friend.
Treat and Riley did great on the drive. They would more or less bunker down during the day - napping or looking quietly around. Despite Lena's joke that they would meow all the way to CA they were all in all pretty mellow. At night they were very busy explorers of all the nooks and crannies in the motel room but it was never difficult to get them corralled in their carrier in the morning.
Paul at the helm en route to CA.
Scenery in western Colorado.
After dropping Sue off and spending the night in Grand Junction, Paul hit the road with Treat and Riley with two days of driving ahead of them. About an hour out, the cats' water dish spilled into the ipod holder and so went the beloved source of musical enjoyment and inspiration. So followed two days of singing, listening to a lot of intermittent NPR in the rural west, and listening to some miscellaneous music loaded on the laptop sitting on the seat between Paul and the cats. From Grand Junction we drove west into Utah, then up to Salt Lake, from there west into Nevada where we spent a night, and then one final push across western Nevada and California. Crossing the Sierras was slightly harrowing due to high wind warnings but we blew along and made it to Palo Alto the evening of Sunday August 30 as the sun was going down. That night Morgan and Lena were dropped off by Mark & Becca, and we spent our first night in our new house sleeping on our friends' sleeping bags.