Google

Scott and some of the other Fellows visited the Googleplex yesterday to meet the folks behind Google Earth. The employee cafeteria is staffed by top-notch chefs, and their budget is "the sky is the limit", so lunches are very tasty there. Scott said new Google employees usually gain a lot of weight. Google has a dinosaur skeleton in their courtyard and a rocketship in their lobby.

More San Diego

We went to Balboa Park which is where all the museums in San Diego are clustered. They're all in beautiful old buildings, and the whole park is landscaped with lots of flowers and fountains. We decided to visit the Natural History Museum. They had some fun exhibits for the kids, including one where they could stand in front of a green screen and see themselves on TV with time-lapse photography of plants growing. Audrey liked meeting the baby mammoth. Mary liked comparing the size of modern shark's teeth with the enormous teeth of extinct mega-sharks. After we left the museum, we stopped to watch some street performers. They picked a bunch of kids to be part of their juggling show. One girl had to leave the stage suddenly, so they needed another kid quick, and grabbed Mary. All the kids stood in a line, and the jugglers threw their clubs back and forth in front of and behind the kids. We didn't think they were actually going to do it, but they did. They told all the kids to stand still so they wouldn't get hit. Mary said she could feel the clubs going by, they were so close.

A visit from the Wittekinds

Don, Maggie and the boys came out to San Francisco during MLK weekend for the MacWorld Expo. Scott went to the city on the train Friday morning to go to the Expo with Don and Danny, and the girls and I drove up after Mary got out of school. The lower grades get out at 1:25 on Fridays, so we able to beat the traffic with a big headstart. We got a hotel room so we wouldn't have to drive back and forth each day to visit with the Wittekinds. We toured a WW II ship, ate lunch in Chinatown, drank hot chocolate in Ghirardelli Square, ate lunch in a sourdough bread restaurant at Fisherman's Wharf, rode the cable cars, saw the Golden Gate Bridge at sunset, and just enjoyed each other's company.

It was really cold that weekend. Below freezing at night and not much higher during the day. Mary's winter coat disappeared the first time she wore it to school. Another girl in her class who had a similar coat took it home by mistake, and we were able to get it back in time for the weekend in San Francisco.

San Diego Zoo

Last weekend we flew to San Diego. Scott met up with Don and the rest of the Swarm gang on Friday, and the girls and I went to the zoo. It took an hour to get there on the city bus, because we had to transfer twice and wait for a long time for one of the transfers. We took a taxi back, and it was only about a 10-15 minute ride.

Mary's favorite part of the day was the sea lion show. She was picked out of the audience as a volunteer, and she got to hug the sea lion and feed it a fish, and get a big kiss from it. Audrey likes to imitate the sea lion's bark.

They also liked the children's area of the zoo. Audrey pet a rabbit and Mary pet sheep and goats. We liked the Pandas too.

En garde!

I'm taking fencing this quarter!

Halloween

The kids had a great time on Halloween. Mary found a Batman cape in a thrift store in Sonoma, so she was a vampire bat. Audrey was a pink kitty cat. Scott made her ears out of construction paper and a hairband, and he painted both their faces. It's sort of hard to tell what animal Audrey is. The ears look a little like pig ears. Some people guessed she was a mouse. In the afternoon, we trick-or-treated in the shops along California Avenue with Mary's friend from school. In the evening, a bunch of families gathered at another Fellow's house to trick-or-treat. Mary painted the scar on the pirate's cheek. The foreign kids really liked our American tradition of going house to house and getting candy.

Sonoma field trip

In October, the Fellowship took us all on a group field trip to Sonoma to visit wine country. They brought babysitters along to keep the kids busy while we grown-ups were treated to a wine tasting with a wine professor from UC Davis and a delicious lunch. The next day, everyone visited Jack London State Park for a picnic and some hiking. It was Mary's turn to take the class mascot, a stuffed rabbit, home with her for the weekend, so Honey Bunny had a lot to write about in his journal!