at the Academy of Sciences Museum in San Francisco.

I hear you’ve been wearing the wool beanie a lot (the first beanie that I ever knit, which wound up being too short, that I nonetheless gave you for Christmas). Well, although it may be very sentimental to you, I insist you try this one that I knit the other night. It’s the perfect neutral Shetland virgin wool, and it’smells so rich with lanolin, you’d think they built the wool from the extract up. It’s soft and I didn’t make ANY mistakes either. It’s so genius. And it’s all YOURS. Enjoy!

Ford is rediscovering the coast and he asks to go back, time and again, to Santa Cruz. However, I’ve blissfully started introducing him to different shoreline habitats and today I figured was the perfect time to indulge myself, and the kids, in a low tide experience along the rocky surf at Moss Beach. I’d actually never been before. As it turns out, the park is a refuge for the Harbor Seal, who swims between this beach and the harbor, in lower Moss Beach; and, during low tides, this is the safest refuge for them to rest, atop the black rock that crops up through the crest of low tide. In fact, the rangers set up construction cones around the rim of the beach to give the seals privacy. Otherwise, they might flee the beach and swim to exhaustion, unable to find the refuge they need anywhere else along this shoreline.
We had just reached the beach, at the end of a short trail, when the camera battery died.

Ford was so anxious to recall what we saw today once we returned to the hotel. He quickly synopsed the visit with a drawing of his favorite finds (which deserved better light when I took this photo, but this will have to do):

With a stick, we had turned over an organism in the sand that resembled an enormous, wide cow tongue. On the underside of the orange beast, a flat foot with a central groove, in the shape of a U. On the backside, a row of partially hidden plates under thick hide-like orange flesh. A chiton relative? A grapefruit from outer space? Actually, I was right: Cryptochiton or Gumboot chiton (named after the color and texture of its flesh). Way cool, but also very dead and intensely rank. Next!:

Ford’s favorite of the day: the Green Sea Anemone. He discovered that he could stick his finger into the flowery nubbins and make them close up, squirting water out in a tiny little stream clear up to his nose. Very entertaining, he did this for the longest time until the tide started swallowing us. But not before we investigated Turban snails and rescued a parching Pisaster.

I couldn’t properly toodle around until we found ourselves a home and signed the paperwork. Fortunately, we found a lovely home in saratoga last week. It’s sunny and quaint and sits on a terraced acre where an orchard once stood. The road bisects the farm from the field. We live in its vestiges: a tower hung with vines, once for water, stands beside the driveway. What happened to the orchard? In the excitement of finding ground for roots I forgot to ask. There’re more history behind the house, too. It was the retirement home for the owner’s parents. I recognize the 50s mint cream bathroom tiles. A real breakfast nook. And it was home to two young boys, before we came along last week. There is a fading basketball hoop in the driveway with a piece of paper taped to the backboard, claiming “FREE.” Two belay ropes hang from a large pine tree in the backyard, and as I look around, I see other swings hanging in other trees. A treehouse in an alcove of the lot, tucked behind soft green corners.

We move in february 1st. The owner, who lives next door, is my new town historian. She has a playground of her own in her backyard, standing attention under the eaves, awaiting her seven granddaughters. In her pool she has taught all the neighborhood children to swim. Ford is on her list for Summer 2007. She even has an Araucana chicken.
Home, indeed!

In the meantime, back to toodling:

Shoreline Park shenanigans

Natural Bridges driftwood

cleaning our lungs at Castle Rock SP

budgeting a membership

We lived here once and it was never so sunny. Kids change everything. Baker beach, the Presidio, SF

Noodles on Haight

Tired on Haight

all toodled out on Twin Peaks.

The hotel is quiet and mellow, and the ebb and flow of Googlers from Sunday afternoon to Friday morning keeps me regular. Otherwise, our life is crazy and chaotic and loud. I come and go through the lobby apologetically, always on some pretense to avoid conversation with the concierge, but the reality is that they are all cool with our presence. They love the kids, and they laugh when Chas climbs all over the fancy retromodern furniture in the lobby, reaching out to grab bottles of wine from the rack on the wall. But someone has to hear them downstairs when they jump off the bed like kid goats or stampede across the room with the foam basketball towards the net I hung from the minibar closet. And if I don’t get out of the hotel room by ten o’clock, all of us reach a critical mass and someone has to have noticed the screaming tantrums when we’ve missed that deadline. Half-dressed baby dolls on the floor in the corner of the room. Marbles in the toilet. Cream cheese on the rug. But every day we return in the evening, after a long day of house hunting, to find Petey and Baby (the boy’s dolls) tucked properly back into bed, and a replinshing set of little toiletries standing in array in the bathroom, telling us to go ahead, shower off, relax. There’s an apricot beer in the microfridge. This isn’t so bad now, is it?

Friends. We return to very loved friends here. Alis is now a mother and I enjoy watching her on her home turf. She’s beautiful and photogenic and while she may wonder why I chose this photo out of many others, it is because I just love it for some inexplicable reason. She’s thinking about something while we wait for food at the Upper Crust Pizzeria in Santa Cruz. And this is Seth, Chas’ partner in crime, so you’d better look out.

Jim is Alis’ husband and is telling me that I have a sweet camera but that my fisheye lens is really not a fisheye lens. And I’m about to tell him that it is a fisheye lens, but that it cost less than $800, so it’s just not an expensive one. Santa Cruz, at a popular local coffeeshop that I can’t remember the name of.

Jerry, our best man, bester than ever. In counting our blessings, having Jerry back in our company is at the top of the list. We pick up just where we left off, just like that, and it’s fun to watch him study our new parental habits and hurdle the chaos we create around him. Always benevolent, here he is with a peace offering for his girlfriend, because we kidnapped him for an entire day down to the beach to skateboard and watch clustering monarchs and buy panoramic cameras at SwapMeet.

We insisted that Chas poop before getting on the plane, and this saved our LIVES. The kids and Damon filled the row behind me on the plane, shouting out random data like “Look, Mom! Shit Pile crater!” and “WHOOOOOOOOOAA!” and “Look at me! Look at ME!” as the plane bounced through mile-high white clouds. Really, there was nothing sober about the flight; I think that these pictures just show our fatigue after dealing with the whole waiting-for-Chas-to-poop-while-fearing-he’d-still-wind-up-pooping-on-the-plane period. The flight was nothing but an amped riot and strangely, everyone near us on the plane thought it was all pretty funny. One man lost it when he heard Ford ask Damon,
“Daddy, what’s this button for?”
“Don’t touch that Ford, that’s the Self-Destruct Button.”
Just lost it.

Chas asked me to make a nativity scene like the one on the table at our local church. He has played with it the past few weeks and I’ve rounded up the little figures for many evenings. I’ve found baby Jesus in the bedsheets, under the nightstand and in a shoe, among other places.

Ford wanted a houseful of gems, “Gems, Everywhere!” he mentioned many times. Santa met him somewhere on the way to halfway. But he got a microscope, so the handfuls (or little felted bowlfuls) of miniatures seemed pretty magnificent.

All Chas wanted were balls, which he was very pleased to recieve.

Our favorite Christmas book this year was Christmastime in Noisy Village, so I thought it was cute that, instead of skiiing on Christmas day (as the children did in the book), we instead skateboarded the rest of the day. I think it might become a new tradition, and the book is so wonderfully loaded with old family traditions that we continue today, anyway. have you read it?

We skated into the night and until eleven. So, that’s moonlight. We don’t have streetlights on our rural road.

I feel like that rocket in the picture above.