Suzie and I walked down to the Solano Avenue area for lunch (at Bangkok Jam Thai, which I hadn’t remembered being so good), then walked back, 1.7 miles and 640 feet, up several of the small public paths that run throughout the Berkeley Hills. We were huffing and puffing; some of the paths were steep, especially on a full stomach. The walk afforded us some excellent views on a relatively […]
Packing up to head back to Kensington after a short trip to Santa Rosa. Suzie was honored at the PDI Make Kids Smile Awards Dinner on Friday evening, and the boys came over from Davis to attend and stayed the night. On Saturday we went up Wikiup Drive and trespassed on our old property. I wonder a quoi ça sert, I found it odd to be back there but Suzie and the kids […]
Sitting in our new house in Kensington, watching the sun stream through the windows and warm the hardwood floor, it occurs to me that … I’m happy. Not that everything is perfect. I still have multiple myeloma, and it’s likely to recur in 1, 2, 3, 5, 7 or “x” unknown number of years, and it might eventually kill me. But that aside, things are good. Suzie and I both […]
We’re back in Wikiup for few days for a dinner tomorrow with friends, and this afternoon we took the opportunity afforded by the break between rainstorms to take one of our old walks. A few (warped fisheye!) pictures from our loop today are below, click on any of them to enlarge. I may have mentioned what an amazing job Suzie did in remodeling the small condo we have in the […]
Two sporting events with my two sons and a new fisheye lens, to replace the one lost in the fire. In the afternoon, Cal vs. UC Davis in rugby with Andrew, a former player on the Davis. A mismatch, with a final score of 136-0 in favor of Cal. In the evening, a Cal-Utah basketball game with Will, with a result not so much to Cal’s liking, the short end […]
I am definitely getting my bike legs back. I started out today wanting to ride but not knowing if I was going to go for the down-and-up-Spruce Street route (very challenging) or the along-the-Bay flat route (much easier). I ended up doing a hybrid of sorts (you can see all the wanderings here), first flying down Spruce Street, skirting downtown, and after slightly missing the bicycle bridge overpass on I-80, […]
I was feeling so good yesterday that I went on another bike ride, this one perhaps biting off more than I should have, going all the way from our house on Grizzly Peak to the Berkeley Marina, and back, 13.7 miles, which isn’t much distance, but, with 867.6 feet of elevation gain on the way back, is a lot for a guy who has been on a bike five times […]
Well, technically we moved to Kensington, in a rental house a block and a half from the Berkeley city limit, which is just on the other side of EBMUD Summit Reservoir at the corner of Grizzly Peak and Spruce. Kensington, we’ve discovered, is like our old area of Larkfield/Wikiup; it isn’t actually a real thing, just an unincorporated part of Contra Costa County, served by what the French would call […]
A couple of trips back, I found this very comfortable coffee shop called the High Ground Cafe in Iowa City. Reasonable prices (in the greater scheme of things), free wifi (de rigueur these days), nice open, modern space, with a fireplace going in the winter (a real draw now, with the temperature at 24 degrees and the wind blowing at about 20 mph). I’m sitting by the door, so I […]
