Ann vs. Jason

By Jason

We’ve been meaning to post this for a while, but we’ve been pretty busy lately. Athena is now standing and can walk if she has something to hold on to, so we spend most of our time just trying to keep up with her.

Three weeks ago my Aunt Linda came to visit and see Athena.

One of Athena’s new favorite passtimes is swinging on the swingset. She’s still too little to fit i the toddler swing so we just holder her on our laps.

Here’s an earlier photo on the swings with me:

We drove down to Santa Cruz to see the beach. The boardwalk there is a historic amusement park, and though we didn’t really do any rides we had fun walking around. Athena is a big fan of noise, movement, and color so she had a great time, missing a couple naps. We paid for the missed naps later.

Here we are walking down toward the water – the water is always pretty cold in Northern California, so we didn’t plan on doing any swimming. Despite being covered in seaweed the beach was still pretty busy.

Playing on the beach blanket:

Ann took a rest on the blanket and Athena thought it would be fun to crawl on top of her:

The next day we met up with my cousin Kurt to wander around San Francisco. We had lunch at Piazza Pellegrini in the North Beach neighborhood, near Kurt’s place.

After walking down to Fisherman’s Wharf we took the duck tour around the city. We took a similar tour in Boston a while back – it’s a WWII-era amphibious vehicle that takes you through the streets and into the bay.

Aunt Linda even got to drive the boat:

Later she and Kurt helped get the rest of the tourists dancing:

We ended our day with a wine tasting session, and took some photos using my patented “happiest day of your life” method (it really works).

Aunt Linda also gave Ann and I some time to go out, just the two of us. We picked out the most romantic, adults-only evening we could think of: dinner at Dennys and a round of miniature golf.

By Jason

I probably shouldn’t post this – my brother is already convinced that all we do at Google is eat all day.  On Thursday my team had an offsite at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk, which is a pretty cool old-timey amusement park.  We made a stop there a few months ago with Ryan and Jessi but everything was closed at the time.

In a sense it was bad timing, since I have been very busy at work lately and could have used the hours to do something productive…  on the other hand, it was probably good timing to get a break and have some fun with co-workers.

Here’s a video of our ride on the Giant Dipper, an old wooden roller coaster:

Link to video. Special thanks to Reid for recording and posting it.

We promise to write more about the baby shower soon. In the mean time, I’ve been uploading old papers and notes on my professional blog, so feel free to poke around the archives and see what I was thinking about as long as ten years ago. I’m considering putting up some interesting old emails here as well, like from my first days at college or the trip with Todd and Martin to Argentina.

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).