Philadelphia

Just got back from visiting Ellie and her intended, Jacob Fenton, in charming, snowy, Philadelphia.

They got access to the Penn printmaking studio to print their wedding invitations.









I won't put in any pictures of the final print, since that is E and J's business.

I can't tell you how great it was to have ink on my hands, though they did all of the actual type setting and printing. It brought back memories of printing our own invitations more than 30 years ago.

In less than four days we also saw the extraordinary Frida Kahlo show at the Philadelphia Art Museum. This painting just blew me (as we say in my country) away. I've always been so conscious of her imagery that I never realized what a good painter she is:



and a show of contemporary puppets and puppetry at the Institute of Contemporary Art:



I got to see our old friend Steve, who introduced me to Young way back when, in the print studio, our natural stomping grounds. And I saw the new deck Ellie and Jacob installed on their house, which was quite beautiful covered with snow.

Happy New Year & Valentine's Day

Haps

I'm fresh out of words, but here are some pictures of what's been going on:

Matt's friend Jenn came up from UCLA to spend her birthday weekend:





Tammy took me out to the bluff over Montara beach to try out a new photo-technique she's working on. It involved me standing very still in the cold for six very slow exposures for every pose, but the light really is amazing:



And here are two pictures from a December visit with Ellie's long-time friend Jessica and her new family. Jess is the first of my kid's close friends, the kids I watched grow up, to have a baby.







Jacob really liked holding him.

An experiment:

I really like Reuters Editor's Choice Photo page, where hey have a blog of the best pictures of the week or whatever. Here is an attempt to link to them. I don't know if the addresses are permanent or if they take things down the following week - so let me know if the link is bad.



The caption says:

"Swimmers compete in the Water Performance section of the of the 2008 Cold Water Winter Swimming Championships at the Tooting Bec Lido in London, February 10, 2008. It is the first time that the competition, which has attracted almost 700 competitors from all over Europe, has been held outside Finland.

REUTERS/Kieran Doherty"

Avoidance can be a good motivator

I finally sat down to start compiling all the records for our taxes, and was suddenly, miraculously, energized to take Sparky for a long walk on the beach, throwing the ball and picking up a big bag of storm-wrack plastic (why do you suppose so many pieces of nursery plant pots get washed up?)

As I walked, I mentally planned a terrific product design course where-in students would be asked to pick up plastic garbage on the beach, and then apply a kind of 19th century naturalist objectivity to classify each item, large or small by material, morphology, production method and probable original use. Maybe even illustrate it with stippled precision.


(image from http://starfishncoffee.blogspot.com)

If possible, they would track down retail sources of the product in its original state, and photograph them in situ. That would be easy in a lot of cases - plant pots, bottle caps, children's sand toys, shoes (all things I found today on surfer's beach in El Granada) but more difficult in other cases - complicated parts that must have required multiple part molds for injection molding, but give no hint of their utility.

I also discovered it was crucial to weed the garden, and make a blog entry...

But now I fear I must return to the taxes.

Southwest Road Trip

We did a road trip through the great South West after Christmas

We started by visiting Young's mom, brother and sister in law in Salt Lake:


That's Lorraine, looking a lot like her beautiful daughter, Kara.

I didn't get any good pictures of Demian, so I messed with this one.





Drove south in a blizzard to see Win and Mish in Bluff. We had a wonderful New Years singing and carrying on :



Hiked around Bluff and marveled at a locked tree that Win and friend Gill discovered:



And then we drove on into Arizona where we hiked Canyon de Chelly with Maria and one of her twins, Jeremy:







It was really COLD!

We ended LA to see Chuck (Hooray for Chuck!) and closed the loop back to Half Moon Bay driving the coast highway most of the way through some kind of record storm. I found out later that a bunch of highways were closed due to high winds, and there was a high tide advisory for coastal areas, but at the time it just seemed a lot easier than the snow.

Came home to no electricity, but since all we really wanted to do was sleep, that was okay.

Goodbye/hello

This is the first post of a new blog.

We are shutting down the old blog, "What's Up with Jacob" , because Jacob is now a fifteen year old boy named Blue, who deserves some privacy.

On the other hand, I am a fifty five year old woman who occasionally wants to share things, and I was feeling sad about giving that up.

Thus it begins.

I'm not so sure about this template. Figure on changes as things progress.