Day five in Derbyshire was foggy: a thick drippy low cloud was spread over Great Longstone. These trees from the day before were now these trees:
My sister Zoë came over and we went for a walk around the village. It was bright but super-misty:
Fog condensing on the wires of the fence:
Berries in the fog:
Wendy and Zoë inexplicably matchy-matchy:
Gravestones in the fog:
The rest of the photos are on Flickr.
Day four in Derbyshire we woke up to a light fog and a thick frost. San Francisco gets one used to the former but not so much the latter. I popped out and managed to take a few photos before either had cleared. This is the gate at the bottom of my parents' drive:
the wall:
and the field beyond, with cows belonging to the couple who live across the road:
Later on, on a walk above Grindleford, you could see the fog sitting in the Hope Valley below:
although where we were it was as bright and clear as can be:
and apparently very pleasant weather for sheep:
A few more photos from the day are on Flickr.
Zoë and Brian:
Wendy in the park:
Tate in the park:
The second day in Derbyshire we took a walk along the Monsal Trail, a staple of staying with my folks. The path's along a disused railway line which was built in 1863 and decommissioned a hundred years later—nowadays it's a flat graveled track about eight miles long, open to cyclists and walkers. It passes half a mile or so from my parents' house and is the shortest route to Bakewell (population 4,000), about three miles away and the nearest town.
We took the trail to Hassop Station and walked back again. Some photos from the way:
Wendy and I just got back from taking The Bean to meet the English side of the family in Derbyshire, UK. It was her first time flying across the ocean.
Within a day of arriving Lux had been on a walk in the wonderful Peak District countryside, reunited with my mother, and met my sister, brother and father.
Sue and Lux:
Field:
Dave and Lux:
Wendy:
Jak and Lux:
Church:
Zoë and Lux:
The English Hallowe'en tradition is that kids dress up as something scary: a ghost or a vampire or a zombie or a monster. In the US the tradition is that everyone dresses up as anything. It's a like a fancy-dress free-for-all: a car air freshener, the fail whale, a chick magnet... anything at all, it seems. Trick-or-treating is roughly the same both sides of the Atlantic, although the solid expectation over here is treat rather than trick.
On Sunday we went to a Hallowe'en party in Marin. Wendy and I intended to dress up but didn't quite make it (our costumes stayed in the car). Lux, though, went as a woolly lamb. The hood of her top had ears on it, but you can't see them in the best shot I have. I'm not sure what she made of the whole thing.
I considered being a Luchador for hallowe'en. This one's another from the Saturday morning walk with Lux, and it gave me the idea.
I wasn't a Luchador for hallowe'en.
The chaos last night became pretty intense and this is what we woke up to this morning:
Seriously, that dip in the curb is our driveway. I did a double take when leaving the house to go to work this morning.
Here's one more from the walk at the weekend. 19th & Valencia on a wet Sunday morning, peaceful and un-rioty:
I like taking these polaroid-style photos. The no-cropping no-rotating constraint makes you think harder. Here I messed up the horizontal (I nailed the wrong lines: the yellow ones) but I like it enough to post anyway.
Tonight the SF Giants beat the Texas Rangers to win the World Series. San Francisco's gone crazy. Our neighbors have a sound system out on the street as well as an open fire, several armchairs and a television. Everyone who passes honks their horn, including the police and fire trucks.
@thebeean is going all kinds of nuts.
Hallowe'en over here is a big deal, much more so than in the UK.
On the other hand, on yesterday's walk I saw this sign in the window of the thrift store at Mission & Clarion and enjoyed the quiet understatedness of it:
The changing season in San Francisco this year is being measured for me by @thebeean. Fall has definitely arrived. These days it's dark when she gets up and we watch it get light together. She goes to bed a couple of hours after sunset. My Saturday walk with her this morning was on wet streets under a gray drizzle and I put the rain cover on the stroller for the first time.
She's thirteen weeks old today.
The Mission felt distinctly autumnal as we walked our circuit, and I took some photos along the way. Here's one from the window of a pawn shop around 19th & Mission. The sign says Unredeemed Viola.
Great name for a band, I thought.
We're taking Lux to meet the English side of the family next month so we had to get her a passport. Filling in the forms was actually easy enough (and Wendy wrote "Occupation: BABY", which I found charming) but the photo was a challenge.
It's harder than it sounds. No smiling, no funny faces, no hands or limbs of anyone else, eyes open, facing forward, a white background. And this photo is in a passport valid for five years! We laid Lux down on the white bed, stretched the sheet out, and I took her photo. I thought the result looked fine:
but the Post Office said the background was too dark.
We came home, put some white cardboard down, and took another picture. This time it passed muster, but the photo's not worth posting here. We're yet to apply for the UK passport; perhaps the original photo will work for the Brits.
The Bean is seven weeks old today.
My good friend Jesse pointed me at the fantastic chart below showing what's in store with her sleep over the coming months.
Each horizontal scanline represents a day (the week numbers are down the left hand side) and the chart as a whole shows wakefulness and sleep for a single newborn subject over the course of the first six months of life. Sleep is depicted by a line; wake by gaps in the line. The dots are feedings. You can see a day/night pattern of wake/sleep forming, beginning around week 16 or so.
We've a while to go yet.
Before publishing my updated résumé, of course I ran it past the Inner Circle for review. My best friends always have useful things to say.
One of the first comments I got was about my line "Now the lead of four Partner PMs defining Twitter's product partner strategy, divining and prioritizing product needs in key verticals":
I think you meant to type "defining" rather than "divining"which made me wonder. I'd intended divine in the sense of "discover by guesswork or intuition; have supernatural or magical insight into". I suppose it was deliberately a bit fanciful but I didn't think it unclear or religiously suggestive until my reviewer gave me pause.
The next day I got a bunch of feedback from another friend, including
I like your use of divining a lotand on balance I decided to go with the line as written. Shortly after that I wrote my Anniversaries post.
The next morning I woke to an IM from yet another friend wondering if I'd mistyped "defining". And also a blog post by my mom wondering what a "key vertical" is.
Sigh.
Here's a photo from the weekend:
Today marks my six-month anniversary working at Twitter. I'm loving it so far, and I'm delighted that the things I hoped to find there I've pretty much found there.
It's also been 12 months since I last updated my résumé, something I try to do every year no matter how difficult I find it. So without further ado, Isaac's Summer 2010 résumé can be found at http://isaa.ch/cv. Sure, give me feedback. Why not?
Bonus photo of Lux, five weeks old:
About 18 months ago, before Lux was yet a twinkle in anyone's eye, Wendy and I were having lunch in Kelly's Mission Rock cafe. A couple arrived and sat down at the next table, rolling their stroller up alongside the table and then magically rotating the seat part so it faced inwards.
Our jaws dropped. It seemed like such an ingenious design and we'd never seen anything like it: the seat was attached to a circular mounting upon which it could turn 360º—forward-facing, backward-facing... or right now, in the cafe, sideways-facing. How clever. We couldn't resist asking the couple what kind of stroller it was even though we had no immediate plans which would require one.
Fast-forwarding a year and more, though, we do find ourselves suddenly in the position of needing a stroller. Of course there was no question that we'd get that same kind, with the uniquely cunning design and the seat which can face any direction. We were delighted when it arrived and demonstrated a bunch of other similarly thoughtful features too.
And then a couple of weeks ago, eating at Barndiva in Healdsburg, we rolled our stroller up to a table in the back garden and rotated the seat so it faced inwards. The young couple at the next table whispered and pointed, and asked us about it. They told us they had no immediate plans for kids but gosh what a superbly designed piece of kit they thought it was. We were more than happy to tell them all about it.
After all, the stroller is indeed fantastic and, fittingly, is made by Orbit. What goes around, comes around.
We called our firstborn child Lux (aka @thebeean). It's Latin for light.
We didn't anticipate confusion or uncertainty about her sex based on the name¹, but encountered some nonetheless. It prompted me to do some research about other folks called Lux. Turns out in fact that there aren't all that many.
Lux Interior (an assumed name which came "from an old car commercial"), frontman of The Cramps, is just about the only famous one—and is a bloke. On the other hand, Lux Lisbon is a girl but is a fictional character in The Virgin Suicides. I didn't find any other well-known people called Lux but I did find one or two others considering the name.
Beyond names, Lux has a formal meaning in physics: as the SI unit of luminous emittance it's equal to one lumen per square metre. And Lux is also a soap; originally (1909) a laundry soap but subsequently (1925) a bathroom soap. A colleague of mine at work clipped for me this page from an old Time magazine:
How awesome is that?!
Notwithstanding the rarity, Wendy and I both think the name suits our baby very well. We are certainly delighted to have her luxing up our lives.
The title of this post, by the way, is the second half of Genesis 1:3: dixitque Deus fiat lux ("and God said let there be light"). Et facta est lux ("and there was light")... and the rest, as they say, is history.
¹ UPDATE: although Anssi Porttikivi points out that lux is grammatically feminine in Latin.
I learned the other day that the word "infant" derives from Latin and means "not speaking" or "unable to speak". I liked that.
More babyfacts:
And now some babyphotos:
An old friend of mine (I've known Lee for over thirty years) wrote me about the arrival of The Bean but also commented on Learning or Earning, Redux. He summarized it ever-so-neatly thus:
When people start only learning skills related to surviving in their company its bound to lead to a lack of innovation
And yes, this is precisely it. You might think of progress and invention in a company as a chemical reaction, with corporate inertia represented as activation energy. There's a point beyond which exciting reactions that might take place in a smaller organization are no longer possible in the larger one. The cost of survival itself in the organization becomes an inhibitor.
In baby news, here's a recent photo of Lux at the tender age of eight days, struggling herself with energy:
I met the bean. She's amazing. Lux Hepworth, 8lb 4oz & 20½", born 1.38am 1.37am in San Francisco.
More to come.
