Ann vs. Jason

I’ve been away from work for almost two weeks now, taking care of Athena full-time. Everyone wants to know how I’m doing, so I thought I would file an official status report.

1. Going for walks

Ann took Athena out in the stroller many, many times while she was on leave but she didn’t have the nerdy desire to record GPS tracks of her trips, like me. Below you’ll see a map of some of my walks with Athena. You can check back later to see the red tracks slowly covering the rest of Mountain View.

View Larger Map

2. Sleeping

Ann’s going back to work has altered Athena’s sleep schedule – she’s sleeping long through the night, which is great, but the longer she sleeps the less likely she is to nap during the day. That’s not good, because she gets periods where she’s obviously tired and crabby, but she just won’t nap for any appreciable amount of time. Last night she did almost 11 hours in a row, but then only got in two 20-minute naps during the day.

My mom says that’s how I was when I was a baby, but this is new for Athena and not her regular schedule. We’ll see what happens when she goes to daycare – my guess is she might go right back to wanting to stay up until midnight playing with us like she used to.

3. Eating

Since she kept getting hungry every 3 hours, right on the dot, we though we’d up her intake a bit to see if she’d go longer between meals. We are now up to 5 ounces and she’s still hungry at 3 hours. I think this is related to the sleep thing, too, since she has to make up meals for the large block of time spent sleeping.

She also seems to be in the middle of a growth spurt, she seems longer and heavier every day.

4. Taking photos

It’s actually a lot easier to take photos with Ann around for baby support – Athena is too young to really sit up on her own, so I end up holding her, propping her up, and holding the camera at arm’s length pointed vaguely in the right direction.

Luckily Athena is unbelievably cute and only getting cuter, making it very easy to take cute photos.

You may have seen some of these before, if you follow me on Flickr or Ann on Facebook.

I just grabbed another set of photos off my camera, I’ll upload them tonight or tomorrow.

5. Doing anything else

I’m not really getting anything else done at this point. I’ve checked my work email a few times and feel like I’m falling behind, but Athena deserves (and often demands) my full attention, so don’t expect too much else out of me for another week or so.

We’re not looking forward to starting daycare, Ann and I would both rather have her all to ourselves. But we’re thankful for the time we’ve had – many people don’t have employers that are so understanding.

By Jason

I just go back from a weekend trip to Yosemite, but I haven’t uploaded the photos yet so that story will have to wait.  In the mean time, I wanted to report on two short trips – our trip across the bridge to the Golden Gate National Recreation Area and a hike around the hills south of Mountain View.

The Marin Headlands just north of San Francisco have great views of the city and the bridge.  You can get an idea how high the mountains are from this picture:

Here’s a black sand beach in one of the coves along the Pacific coast here.  The sand was pretty coarse-grained, but the wind was still strong enough to whip it around.

You can see the city across the Golden Gate.

Here’s a view of the bridge from the vista point.

Ann smiles for the camera despite the strong wind.

This wall has bronze plaques that point to various cities and landmarks in the distance.

This photo is from higher up, on the other side of US 101.  We were originally thinking about waiting for the sunset but we got too hungry and the wind got too cold.  I have even more photos in the Flickr set, with more views of the bridge.

This next set of pictures is from a hike I took in the hills just south of Mountain View.  I was actually hiking the trail that leads to the top of Black Mountain – the one mentioned in the city’s name.  I saw this young buck when I came to a fork in the path – luckily he was on the trail down the valley, while I was headed up to the mountains.

Little lizards like this one scurried here and there across the path as I walked.  I managed to get some photos of this particular lizard by moving very slowly and making full use of my camera’s zoom.

At this point I’m pretty sure he’s posing for the camera.

Here’s a view from a high point on the ridge.  The big buildings in the distance are on Moffet Airfield and NASA Ames, including Hangar one, a huge dirigible hangar.  You can see a few small towers in downtown Mountain View in the midground.

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Here’s a photo of Black Mountain from the other side of the valley.

The landscape in the hills and mountains is really amazing, and the light is really good in the evening.

I have more photos in Flickr, including more photos of that camera hog lizard.  Next I’ll write about Yosemite.

By Jason

We are ridiculously behind in posting what’s going on in our lives in NorCal (this is what the kids call it).  We have been fairly busy, though, what with all the gestation going on.

Last month my parents came for a visit and we gave them our comprehensive tour of the Bay Area.  They flew in around noon and Ann brought them directly from the airport to Google for lunch.  I gave them the grand tour (which, despite all the practice, I have yet to master) and we ate at the No Name Cafe.  Within 10 minutes my Mom managed to get the all cooks singing Canta y no Llores.  It was one of those great moments that is both endearing and a little embarrassing.  Dad was impressed by all the different languages spoken and how people seemed so social and engaged in discussion.  It really isn’t like any other workplace.

The next stop on the tour for which I have pictures available was San Francisco – hopefully we’ll post an addendum later to fill in narrative gaps like this.  We parked near the financial district so that we could take the cable cars up California Street and then down to the Hyde Street Pier and Fisherman’s Wharf.   I think my dad could have ridden the cable cars up and down the hills all day.  Mom kept wondering whose idea it was to build a city up and down so many steep hills in the first place.  I think it was a conspiracy between cable car union and the post card industry.

To get an idea how steep the ride is, here’s Mom and Ann with Hyde Street in the background:

As always, you can click on the photos to see larger versions.  Next is a picture that should be pretty familiar to anyone who’s traveled with my Dad – reading all the informational signs:

Next we took a cruise around the bay, out to the Golden Gate and around Alcatraz Island.  Here’s a photo on the boat with the bridge in the background.

This picture is a little more newsworthy but also a bit sad.  Can you tell that the tug boat is pulling something?  That would be a dead whale, which had drifted under a pier and was stuck for a few days.  We just happened to be heading back as they towed it out to sea.  I wasn’t the only one taking pictures, it looked like the city’s entire fleet of news helicopters were circling above.

Next we wandered around Fisherman’s Wharf for a bit, taking a look at the Lefty’s leftorium, which is just like Ned Flander’s store in the Simpsons, and the other shops and galleries.  We walked down to the end of Pier 39, which you can see here:

Our next adventure was to Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park, which we also visited with Ryan and Jessi.  Next door is the Roaring Camp Railroad.  We couldn’t take the ride because this part of the year they do group events like weddings, but we got to watch as one of the old steam locomotives headed out.

Dad got to talk a bit with the engineer.  One thing you might notice in the picture is that the train doesn’t have the usual pistons and connecting rods on the sides of the driving wheels.  Think of the arm motions you would make if you were pretending to be a train in a game of charades.  Since these trains had to go up steep grades they actually had three big pistons up front with a central drive shaft down the middle.

Here we’re watching the train leaving the station.  Ann is eating old-fashioned horehound candy which does wonders for nausea.

The big attraction of the park is the giant redwood trees.  You can get an idea how big they are from the picture below.  We had a chance to crawl inside one tree that was completely hollow inside, maybe 15-20 feet up.

One thing I don’t have a picture of is a giant banana slug.  I have been hoping to encounter one every time we’ve taken a trip to the redwoods with no luck.  As we headed back down the trail we heard a bunch of commotion ahead of us.  On the ground was a (relatively) small, very stunned banana slug.  Apparently some kids had run ahead for their parents and found it on the tree.  They dared each other to kiss it, at which point on of the little girls freaked out and knocked the poor thing off.

Our next day was spent in sunny San Jose, where we visited the Winchester Mystery House.  There’s no real mystery, but it is a great story – Sarah Winchester, wife of the creator of the Winchester rifle, was left a widow with a ridiculous sum of money.  She worried that she would be haunted by the ghosts of all those killed by her husband’s rifles.  Supposedly a psychic told her she must never stop construction on her house (ghosts don’t like loud hammering), so she didn’t.  The end result is a sprawling complex with no central plan and lots of expensive details:

Here’s a picture from one of the upper floors but this doesn’t really give you a good idea of how big the place is.  It’s a lot of fun, though the tours are a bit pricey and our tour guide was less than knowledgeable.

It used to be on a big estate but now it’s right in the middle of San Jose, you can see office buildings behind us.

Mom liked the place because Mrs. Winchester had lots of mini-steps built in the staircases.  It was like the house was designed for her.

As always, there are more photos of the trip here.

Up next:  shirt trips to Golden Gate National Recreation Area and Rancho San Antonio Open Space Preserve.

By Jason

Ryan and Jessi came out to visit us in California and see all the sights. We tried not to disappoint them, taking them on a whirlwind tour of the Bay Area. In this post I’ll talk about the first few days, in the south bay and down to Santa Cruz. Next I’ll write about our day in San Francisco.

First we bummed around Mountain View a bit. Here you can see us pondering a poster offering Scientology “personality tests” for free. Later we had to politely brush off an actual Scientologist. It’s like we’re in Hollywood! We ate at Shabuway, which you might remember from a previous post.

Next Ann took them on a tour of the local wineries. I wasn’t there so she’ll have to fill you in on what happened. We also had lunch at Google and I did a little tour. You would think by now that I would be getting pretty good at giving tours, but it’s mostly: “here’s some weird thing, here’s the dinosaur, and let’s eat!”

I took Friday off and Ann is finished with her contract at Oakland Kaiser so we were able to drive down toward Santa Cruz and the beach.  Our first stop was at Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park where they do indeed have giant redwoods.

This picture might help give you an idea how big the trees are, click on it to see larger versions at Flickr:

We just took a quick walk around the Redwood Grove Trail.  No wading through ice-cold rivers this time.  I was pretty disappointed because we didn’t see a single banana slug, though at the end of the trail this squirrel jumped out of a rustic decorative garbage recpetical and posed for our cameras.

Jessi was kind enough to procure some hoarhound candy at the old-timey store which has done wonders curing Ann’s nausea.  I don’t have any hoarhound pictures but here’s a shot of me licking all the green apple flavor off old-fashioned rock candy.  Rock candy always seems like a good idea but then I get sick of it almost immediately.

We ate at Redwood Pizzeria and then headed down to Santa Cruz, home of the famous Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk where The Lost Boys was filmed.  We didn’t see any vampires, but we did see sea lions from the wharf.

We walked along the beach a bit but the water was too cold for swimming.

The boardwalk has an amusement park with roller coasters as well as a couple of large arcades.  Everything shut down at about 5p.m., thought, which seems kind of strange for a Friday night.  Maybe it isn’t really boardwalk season yet.  Before everything closed Jessi got her fortune read by this creepy old fortune machine but it did not cause her to wake up as Tom Hanks the next morning.

We took a quick drive over to Natural Bridges State Beach to see the natural bridges.  There’s actually only one left.  It’s a pretty cool little park, with a creek flowing into the ocean on a small sandy beach.

The dunes where covered with what I think is ice plant flowers (but please correct me if I’m wrong), which you can see in the picture.

Up the beach was a rocky area where we watch waved crashing and looked for sea life in little tide pools.  There were a lot of anemones and a few little crabs but no sand dollars or any other pelagic currency.

Next I’ll write about our trip to San Francisco.  In the mean time, I have lots more photos up on Flickr (and follow this link to see photos on Ann’s Flickr page too).

We are very grateful that most of the packing and moving was done for us by the moving company, but unpacking has been a ton of work with no end in sight. The byproduct of all this unpacking has been piles of cardboard boxes and paper packing material. The movers individually wrapped almost everything. They even wrapped the paper towels in paper, just to be safe.

I put a “free boxes” ad on Craigslist and got 5 responses before morning. If you’re ever looking for boxes, or looking to get rid of boxes, I highly recommend the free stuff section on Craigslist.

The lady who came by to pick up the boxes was nice enough and very thankful for the packing materials. She and her mother were both moving out of a house in Sunnyvale. We talked a bit about the area.

At one point, she said, “you’re in Mountain View, so just be careful.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well it’s not the best area.”

I was dumbfounded. I might not be a local here, but the condo next door to us (identical to ours) is selling for $525,000. That’s a 1000 sq ft, two-bedroom condo in a building from the 1970s, so no Granite countertops or walk-in closets. The median home price is $800,000. There are virtually no empty storefronts or office buildings. All the crime statistics are below the national average.

“Uh, we’re coming here from Cleveland,” I said. “How is this a bad area? Are there murders?”

“Just don’t leave your door unlocked,” she replied.

She later told me that there weren’t many places in California that she would be willing to live in. Maybe Gilroy, a city to the south with two-hour-each-way commutes. I asked where she was moving.

“Back to Montana. They say that on average, your nearest neighbor is five miles away.”

So there you have it. Mountain View, California is a rough town to be in, if you ignore the high property values, full employment, and low crime statistics. And you only compare it to rural Montana.

…

There’s nothing wrong with enjoying life out in the country, of course. But we, as a country, are starting to pay the price for our obsession with moving ever outward, from suburb to suburb to exurb. Our cars are dumping carbon into the air, and our sedentary lifestyles contribute to heart disease and diabetes.

Often what drives people away from walkable cities and small towns is fear. It’s good to be afraid, and take appropriate measures, when there is a real threat. But when people are afraid to live in places like Mountain View or Shaker Heights, I think we should worry about our collective irrationality. Neither of those towns are perfect (we had a break-in at our house in Shaker), but you are never, ever going to be 100 % safe from harm. Even if you’re five miles from the nearest neighbor.

Ann had to work a 12-hour shift on my birthday, so we went on a little excursion on the 17th instead.  We drove up to the Monte Bello Open Space Preserve for a quick hike.  Then Ann took me out to dinner at Garden Fresh Vegetarian Restaurant.  They’ve got good food and are within walking distance of our place so I’m sure we’ll be back there in the future.

Things we learned:

• Baskin Robins makes ice cream cakes with the low-fat frozen yogurt, but that might not be enough for me to trick myself into thinking I can have any.
• Ann learned what a coyote howl sounds like.  I learned that Ann does not like coyotes.
• Foothill College has a really interesting campus.  It also has just a single, long, looping one-way road that you have to drive all the way around to get out.

Here are some pictures from the hike:

- Jason