The Mission remains as colorful as ever.
Wedding plans continue apace: I wrote a whole bunch of "Save the Date" cards this weekend, and Wendy went shopping for something to wear on our big day (I was considerably more successful than Wendy).
Matt's blog is compulsive reading; you should check it out.
Where else but the Mission? In fact, less than 100 yards from our house:
This last weekend Wendy and I volunteered at a "build day" at Wendy's school at the end of our road. Between us and the 400 others there we painted benches, mixed concrete, constructed a wicked climbing frame, erected basketball hoops, planted plants, cleaned classrooms, and painted a mural. "Neglected school yard blossoms into made-to-order playground", no less. It was altogether very cool, and kinda like the barn-building scene in Witness.
It's now 191 days to go until the wedding. Wendy's in Colorado with family at the moment, doing scheming and such... rumor has it she even tried on a dress or two today. Me, I'm just trying to decide which Google t-shirt I'll be wearing.
More Mission colors:
This week's wedding update: locked and loaded for October 13th at Barndiva. We were up there today starting on the arrangements, and even put down a deposit... yikes. I also took a bunch of photos while we were there.
Things are getting serious now. Exactly 200 days to go, and counting.
I'm going to put these in a "colors of the Mission" series, but for now you get to see them one by one:
Wedding planning is in full, although rather unstructured, swing. We decided on a venue in the wine country, which is (thankfully!) much more of a delightful place to get married than its baroque and unnavigable website conveys.
Also a date: October 13th, 2007. Stay tuned.
Tasty, tasty, very very tasty! They're very tasty!
It's been a while since I hung out with any concentration of people who grew up in the UK at the same time as me. But when one does do this, the conversation will inevitably turn to at least one of Rhubarb and Custard, Chigley, Trumpton, the Bran Flakes advert or the one for Birds Eye Steakhouse Grills.
Such conversations aren't new to me.
What's new, though, is that nowadays you can actually dig these things up on the internet and take quite a spooky trip down memory lane:
Astonishing.
Dolores Park in the Spring:
A bunch of people have emailed, written and called to congratulate me on my engagement to Wendy, which is very nice. Weddding planning (such as it is) is going pretty slowly, starting with a sleepy conversation in the park about who we might invite, and how big a wedding might result. Baby steps.
Bard sent a link to a blog posting he thought would be helpful; I liked the first item in particular.
I went to Amazon today to have a look at a new phone---and was greeted by something un-phone-like; something which in fact seemed strangely spooky since last week I got engaged to Wendy.
Yesterday I took this, which I adore:
Wendy has fallen asleep in front of the Super Bowl. Wendy---the woman who took me to my first football game, taught me the difference between a false start and offside, and made me a Broncos fan---has fallen asleep in front of Super Bowl XLI. Unbelievable
But we've had a busy weekend (brief adventure yesterday). And there's a couple of things which make the Super Bowl actually less interesting than your average football game and make you more likely to skip the game in favor of the commercials rather than the other way around.
Firstly, chances are you don't really have much invested in either team. You've not followed them week in and week out over the previous few months: not spent hours delighting in their wins and despairing with their losses. You may have a vague preference but hell, in all probability neither's your team.
But in this situation the crowd usually makes all the difference: the home team gets the cheers and the away team the jeers (much more so than in English football, for instance, where away crowds actually... exist). And you can decide to go with or against the crowd: cheering with them or joining in their mockery of the "other side". The sound of the crowd is a polarizing factor, and they make the game interesting.
Super Bowl, though, both sides are "away", and the crowd's reaction is pretty much a wash. Which is why, I suppose, after a long weekend, even the Super Bowl commercials can't keep Wendy awake.
Continuing the theme of colors in the Mission, I can barely top this snap of Wendy out for dinner a couple of days ago.
I was in New York City last week, visiting the Google office there. I hadn't been there for about seven years, and nor did I see much of Manhattan, but boy the feeling is just the same as I remember it.
Rob says:
just about to click "order now" for a hard disk video recorder
Rob says:
sometimes it's easy to do
Rob says:
sometimes it's hard
I found something so insightful about this observation. I wonder what that means?
In other news, Sue has become a supremely prolific blogger! Not one, but two blogs maintained by my mother, no less.
I told Wendy once that something I really love about living in the Mission is that one is surrounded by all these bright colors. Look at this! Even in the dark tail end of December the trash is colorful, dammit!
This was taken with my fancy new camera, by the way. Thanks Google.
"What use is a White Christmas if you can't get there?"
So indicated Steve this morning, referring to the Holiday Blizzard 06 of Colorado. Wendy's there at the moment, and me booked to fly tomorrow---but with
Ideas?
I've just uploaded the rest of the pictures from Fort Collins yesterday.
Today, back again in San Francisco, having gone away, for the second time in a week. Went for a walk up Bernal Heights, swam at the gym, went on a fruitless shopping trip downtown. But wandering round outside in a t-shirt is the way to spend late November. I like California.
Dave Boot emailed to provide a datapoint to complement my post a couple of months ago (dammit where's my permalinks when I need them?). Quoth Dave:
One out of three US people is heavier than the other two combinedwhich I rather like as a statistic.
At first it sounded nonsensical to me, but I guess it means that the heaviest third of America's population weighs more than the other two thirds. Amazing! Could this be true?
