Adventures in Tahoe

We spent a few days in Tahoe this weekend. My brother Andrew, visiting from Chicago, and Eric skied one day and then the next day we all went on a snowshoe adventure.

The scenery was gorgeous and it was fun to tromp around the woods at the lake's edge. There's a river that we discovered that runs through the woods out to the lake and there were ducks in the river eating and being cute. Here's my brother Andrew and me.

And here's me being seven months pregnant while snowshoeing.

We came across a snowy open-air amphitheatre during our tromp and Eric asked "Who's going to do a show?" Andrew and I volunteered and made our way up to the stage. Here's the show!

Go and Getty 'em!

I mentioned that we spent a little time at the Getty Center on our way out of LA last weekend. I wanted to share a couple photos. Not only is there art on the inside, and we enjoyed the Rembrandt exhibit very much, but the grounds and the buildings themselves are spectacular. Here are a few shots from our visit!


A special thanks to the clouds for making this one particularly striking.

It is quite large and all of the buildings are made of this white-ish stone. It almost felt like Versailles.

This is probably the best example of why it felt like we were touring an ancient castle in the future.

This was just neat.

Ear candy

I got an email yesterday from a client who had to cancel a meeting. The client was very apologetic, explaining:

"Sorry for the last minute cancellation. We are just busy as heck this first quarter so I am going to have to push our meeting out to next quarter. [Name] from my team may reach out to you sooner as she is the team lead on stakeholder engagement but she is equally up to her ear balls with work this and next month"

I'm sorry, did you say "ear balls"?

I thought so.

It might come in handy in an emergency

I had some yogurt for breakfast this morning but by the time I got to work I was hungry again and needed some sustenance for what was looking to be a pretty busy day.

I stopped into RJ's, an organic mini-market a block from my office, to see what sorts of nutritious breakfast items they had to offer.

I decided to take a look in the pastries case to see if by chance someone had accidentally put a healthy, high-protein breakfast item in there with the donuts, bear claws and chocolate-covered rice krispie treats.

I spotted a bran muffin hiding behind more indulgent-sounding muffins like lemon chiffon poppy seed and decided it was a good compromise, so I reached in and picked it up.

I am not joking when I say this thing weighed at least 4 pounds. Maybe 5.

And it's not a huge muffin - it's kind of average sized. I think it may be breaking some sort of rule of physics for maximum density of a baked good.

Having put my hand all over it, I had to buy it (luckily it was not priced per pound) and then I had to haul it back to my desk.

I've eaten maybe a third of the top crusty part (which has not only bran but dried fruits and coconut and who knows what else) and may not eat again for days. I might just tuck the rest into the company Emergency Survival Kit with the other calorie-dense survival foods.

Roy

In LA we stayed at the Fairmont in Santa Monica, thanks to a generous gift card gift from a colleague. It is great fun to stay at a fancy place like that for a night and pretend that you belong there.

One major giveaway that we don't belong there is Roy; he's our white 94 Honda Accord. He's all heart and a great car, but not as good looking as he used to be, especially with some of the bumps and bruises he's gotten lately which I blame entirely on our new obstacle course garage parking spot. It requires a level of precision in parking that I'm clearly not capable of.

So we were both a little uneasy about cruising up to the Fairmont valet in what can only be described (lovingly but fairly) as a sloppy jalopy.

We actually avoided this on the way in by "accidentally" pulling up to the side entrance where there were no witnesses, and Roy could be whisked away by a valet send around the corner to get him.

We more than paid for it on the way out. Roy was valeted and we had left our bags with the bellfolk. The valet car guy was significantly quicker than the bell guy, which gave us 15 minutes - a very, very, very long 15 minutes - to stand there in front of the Fairmont Santa Monica with Roy, next to a sampler of the world's most impressive luxury cars: a couple Porsche's, a Maserati, many Lexuses (Lexi?), not to mention the BMW's and Benz's.

I did a better job of not feeling embarrassed than Eric did. In fact, I took it as an opportunity to check Roy out.

His front license plate was hanging crooked so I walked up and inspected it. Both screws were rusted out pretty badly and it looked sort of precarious. I tugged at it a little bit.

"It looks like it's going to fall off," I said in my loudest non-yelling voice to Eric who tried his hardest not to acknowledge that I was talking to him.

I walked away from the car over to where Eric was standing.

"Stop." He hissed. "This is bad enough without you starting to pull things off the car." He was mortified.

The bags mercifully arrived not long after and we escaped without any further humiliation. As we pulled into the Getty Center parking lot 20 minutes later, Eric was almost fully recovered.

"I was embarrassed," he admitted. "And I'm embarrassed that I was embarrassed. And I'm embarrassed that I'm embarrassed that I was embarrassed."

Roy seemed mostly unscathed.

PS Roy had a major car milestone on the drive home: check out his odometer about halfway back!

Wherever

Starting the drive to LA on Friday, I was on the phone with Jamaica when I noticed that the car next to me had the license plate VAREKAI.

I know this word: it is the title of a Cirque du Soleil show from several years ago. I have the soundtrack.

I observed this and wondered aloud what the car's owner's association with that show might be. Performer? Producer? Big fan? Somehow all of it seemed sort of unlikely. Plus, it was not the sort of car I would expect a circus performer to drive.

"Maybe it isn't that show, but I'm pretty sure it's a nonsense word," I said pretty surely. "Hmm, or maybe it actually means something. Maybe it's a Romanian word?"

Jamaica was sitting at her computer and looked it up.

"It is a Romanian word," she said. "It means 'wherever.' "

That is actually a pretty neat license plate.

Pirate attack at the Symphony

Eric and I went to see Yo-Yo Ma perform with the San Francisco Symphony last night. Instead of our usual awesome subscription seats which are front orchestra on the bass side, these were up in the balcony. I guess you could say it was nice to get a different view, but it sure felt far away. At least there wasn't an earthquake.

The piece that they performed with Yo-Yo Ma was Shostakovich's Cello Concerto No. 2. Yo-Yo is a masterful, vivacious and evocative performer. He was so animated that it seemed his butt was barely in the chair for most of the performance. I thought he might go "gremlin"* on us, but he didn't.

I took a look at the reviews this morning and was discouraged that the Chronicle reviewer hadn't picked up on what I felt was the clear "pirate attack" motif of the piece. There were dark and stormy seas, there was a lot of low growling and there was a whole section with cannon fire. Yo-Yo Ma might as well have had a Jolly Roger flag flying off the end of his bow - it could not have been any more obvious.

Instead the reviewer used words like "plangent" and phrases like "the orchestra's angular expostulations" which just make me feel inarticulate and uncultured. He did at one point refer to the piece's "aggressive swagger." But that's as close to pirate-y as he got.


*At a live music show at The Parkside not too long ago the bassist balanced his bass precariously and proceeded to hop up on it and perch like a gremlin, one foot near the neck, the other resting in the side groove, while he continued to play. Impressive, horrifying - your call.

This post is not about the rain

That doesn't mean it isn't still raining (it is - very much so) but I think I have found something more interesting to write about: the beehive in our living room.

I've taken to calling it a bee house rather than a hive because it doesn't look like the hives I used to be dangerously fascinated with as a child. It's just a bunch of wooden boxes stacked up, with a green slab that looks like a hat sitting atop.

Eric built it on Martin Luther King Day, which he had off but I didn't. First he had to drive to Sacramento to pick up all the wooden pieces (many, many pieces). Then he spent what I can only imagine was the vast majority of the day hammering nails into them (order of magnitude more nails than pieces of wood).

I don't know if our neighbors had the day off or not.

He bought enough wood to make two complete bee houses - each of them with a base, 5 bee boxes and a funny green hat. One is built. The other one is still practically at the sheep/loom stage hidden in the guest bedroom.

The bees (~30,000 of them) will arrive end of April in a box shipped overnight from somewhere not too far away. Apparently it weighs 3-4 pounds. I'm sort of curious as to what sorts of labeling they put on the outside of the box.

It is my understanding that the bee house will not stay in the living room once the bees become resident in it. (It's too cold and there isn't enough nectar flow in here.)

More on the rain

In spite of my intentions to get to work dry (or at least more dry than yesterday) this morning, I showed up even more wet than yesterday due to a spill I took on a slippery sidewalk into a large puddle. No one was around to point and laugh, but it was still pretty unfortunate. I landed on my right hip and am totally fine, other than a skinned knee, bruised pride and soggy everything.

I'm tempted to threaten to write about the rain every day until it stops, which is expected to be about two weeks from now. This is probably an empty threat, unless the rain keeps being the most interesting thing that is happening to me.

Thunder!

It is not often that we get thunderstorms in San Francisco. It may be for this reason that when the loudest thundercrash I have ever heard ever woke me up at 3am, I was pretty sure that San Francisco was being bombed.

Turned out it was just thunder. But I'm telling you: it was really, really loud.

It was still pouring rain when I had to leave for work. I wore a large raincoat but I may as well have put a plastic baggie on my right hand for all the good it did me. By the time I got to work, it was as though I had gotten dressed and then stood in the shower for 20 minutes. I was drenched to the skin.

One of the nice things about my office is that I have a skylight, so on rainy days you can hear the pat pat pat of the rain. It sounds kind of like sitting in a parked car in the rain. Or laying in a tent in the rain. I guess what I'm trying to say is that it sounds like rain.

The "real" ice thing

We had our six hour birth prep marathon class on Saturday which featured what a friend who has taken the class before us referred to as the "real" ice thing when I told her about the other ice exercise we did.

We knew we were in for it when we saw her come in with two large bags of ice and two gallons of water.

This is how it went: each of the four couples* in the class got their own tub full of ice water and we spent the next 40 or so minutes with our hands in and out of the ice water, but more in that out. It was cold.

I was pretty cavalier about the first ice exercise. This one: not so much. It hurt. I no like. And I am oh so aware that spending 30 minutes with cold hands is a laughable and ridiculous proxy for labor pain.

The remaining time was filled with lots and lots of birthing info. So much, in fact, that the teacher went 45 minutes over time. So the class which was already six hours long and supposed to end at 7pm actually ended at 7:45pm. Whoops! Yes, this was a Saturday. So Eric and I did the only reasonable thing: we went home and watched Grizzly Man on Netflix. It was actually better than I thought it would be, yet still quite odd.


*We started out with 5 couples but one of them had their baby early (!!) so they don't have to do the rest of the class.

Seven

I've decided to stop working on March 5, which means that I will work for seven more weeks before I hit the "pause" button on my career.

Depending on the moment, seven weeks either sounds really short or like plenty of time.

I expect it will end up being both.

Sister

When I was at BCG, I worked on a pro bono project for a non-profit in DC called Women for Women International. It's a sponsorship organization where someone like me "sponsors" a woman in one of the eight post- (or current) conflict countries where they work. The sponsored woman then gets to participate in a year-long training and education program to help her rise out of poverty, become more independent and take better care of her family.

Part of the deal is that you and your "sister," as they call the sponsored woman, write letters to each other during the year while she is in the program. (Because most of them are illiterate, the letters are dictated to program staff, and then translated as well.)

I was particularly tickled by the sweet letter I just got from my current sister, "Adeline," who is in the DR Congo. Here it is:

Dear Friend Elizabeth,

Hello!

By the name of Jesus Christ, are you fine?

As for me, I am doing a bit well!

I have chosen the activity of Cultivating. I like too much culivating
through Women for Women and that is the activity is the one that I will continue
doing after Women for Women's instructions.

My dearest friend, merry Christmas day and happy new year 2010.

I have no more to tell you, my dear friend.

Lovely yours,
Adeline

Never too early for some Def Leppard

A friend at worked passed along some info on the Ritmo, an advanced in utero stereo system.

That's right - this is a special device that you can strap around your belly to play music for your unborn child. And according to the website, not doing this is basically condemning your child to a life of mediocrity and social awkardness. In a section on the website called "The Science" they offer a number of very science-y sounding tidbits like this:

"Current research shows that musical interactions from these earliest moments are directly related to brain development and may be the building blocks for future musical ability, intellectual development, and ultimately full functioning in the culture in which the child lives"

I'm not even a mother yet, but already I've become extremely aware of the marketing approach to mothers, especially new mothers, in which the underlying message is always "IF YOU DON'T DO THIS YOU ARE A BAD MOTHER AND YOUR CHILD WILL BE A FAILURE." Sometimes the marketers are more subtle about it, but not always.

The FAQ section also notes that the belt that holds the audio system can be washed up to 5,000 times. That seems kind of excessive, doesn't it?

Baby name madness

For fun, Eric and I decided that we were going to invite friends and family to help us with choosing a name for the baby boy who continues to bake in my belly and should be arriving late March or thereabouts.

We decided to use a March Madness-style bracket system* for the baby name competition. Over four rounds, we get from 16 contender names down to 1 winner, and we see how the names polled along the way. Feel free to weigh in here if you haven't already.

We've already gotten a lot of feedback on these names:

• "Are these all REAL considerations?!?"
• "You can't name your child after a vodka" (from three separate people)
• "You can't name your child Rufus. That's a dog name. You might as well name him Fido or Spot. If you name him Rufus I refuse to call him that - I will call him Joe or Bob or some normal name."
• "I knew a [insert any contender name here] once and he was [choose one: horrible, missing teeth, fat, irritating, too touchy-feely, racist, my plumber, a pedophile]."
• "You guys are insane."

What we've learned so far is that for every name that someone loves, someone else hates it violently. We've also learned why people don't usually share the names they are thinking about before it is too late for anyone to weigh in with feedback. There's a lot of strong opinions out there! So we keep reminding people (and ourselves) that this is just for fun.

And this is just Round 1! Three more rounds to go.


*Full attribution and mad props for this idea goes to Margaret and Tony Ross who did this prior to naming each of their two children.

How you know when you are out of shape

Eric and I went to Ikea on Saturday and got a few more key pieces of furniture to fill out our new joint.

I think we all know how assembly-intensive these items can be. As I once joked in my days (day?) of doing standup comedy, "when you buy a rug from Ikea, they give you a sheep and a loom."

We split up the assembly for the two pieces which required the most significant amount of assembly: a bed frame and a 5-drawer dresser.

Two hours later our furniture was built and we were exhausted.

The next day we were both sore.

That's right - we were sore from assembling Ikea furniture. Which is ridiculous. But it does suggest that Eric's idea about creating an Ikea Olympics, where contestants race to assemble apartments full of Ikea furniture, might have more merit fitness-wise than we originally thought.

Highlights from The Midwest

After a glorious week in Mexico, Eric and I headed to the midwest to freeze our buns off for a few days visiting family.

We spent a quick 12 hours in Chicago eating too much and shivering with my parents and then headed to Fort Wayne, Indiana for Eric's grandmother's 90th birthday party (part of the trip from Chicago to Fort Wayne was on the Megabus! which was much more normal and comfortable than we had been hoping for.)

I really hope that someday I get to throw myself a 90th birthday party. Isn't that amazing? You're all invited.

The party was great fun and in addition to giving her a gift, Eric and I also received a gift from his grandmother. It was a quilt she had made for Belvedere which we will treasure.

(This strange backwards gift exchange reminds me of one of the great injustices of my childhood: my younger brother threw such a fit one year on my birthday that I was getting presents and he wasn't, that for years afterward he would always get a couple of presents on my birthday. Did I ever get presents on his birthday? Of course not. I learned too late that I should have been a more difficult child...)

After the party, the family (about 25 people) all went out to dinner to keep celebrating. It was a good chance for me to talk more with some of Eric's relatives who I was meeting for the first time. At one point in the conversation, one of Eric's cousins' children who was about 12 years old made an innocuous but bizarre and nonsensical comment that no one seemed to know quite what to do with. We were all just quiet for a moment. Then the boy's father who was sitting right across from us looked Eric straight in the face and said, "I made that." (I nearly peed myself laughing, though what is needed to make me pee myself isn't nearly as high a bar as it used to be.)

At the end of the meal when they brought another birthday cake, we were instructed by grandmother not to sing. So I suggested, subversive as always, that we hum instead. Eric's uncle heard the idea and ran with it: he started loudly humming 'happy birthday' and the rest of the family joined right in. And it had the most amazing effect - the whole restaurant got kind of quiet and it seemed that everyone was staring at us wondering what in the world we were doing.

I think at my 90th birthday party I would like everyone to hum 'happy birthday' to me, just like that.

Highlights from Mexico, Part 5 of 5

We promised each other we wouldn't talk about it, but....I can't help myself. Eric and I made a very, very bad decision while in Puerto Vallarta:

we went to the Mexican circus.

I don't think this quite makes the list of things that may someday prevent me from running for public office, but it is close.

In our defense, what we didn't know is that going to the circus in Mexico is like going back in time to at least the 1930s, maybe even before.

We were expecting trapeze artists, clown acts, and maybe a parade involving fancy costumes and maybe a well-cared-for elephant or two.

What we got was nauseated. The show centered around a set of once-beautiful and majestic exotic animals that were all so beaten, drugged and exploited that they held their heads low and quietly seethed resentment, just waiting for their chance to gobble up a small Mexican child.

What made it even worse is that it was really amateurish and poorly done: a lot of the tricks didn't work, the animals disobeyed or just seemed confused. The monkeys kept breaking away from the people holding their leashes and fighting. One of the mini-ponies went renegade and ran around the circle the wrong way. The animal trainer Julio Cesar fell off the horse he was riding and was nearly trampled (that actually would have been a highlight - it was hard not to be rooting for the animals instead of the people). The white tiger that they brought out uncaged and unleashed to take photos with small children was so smacked up he kept falling asleep and the animal trainer had to keep poking him with a stick to make him put his head up for the camera.

There was one act that did have promise: they wheeled out an enormous steel cage in the shape of a sphere, into which went one motorcyclist. He went around and around and upside down and it was actually pretty impressive, if somewhat terrifying to watch. When he paused after his loops in the sphere, he was joined by a second motorcyclist, and the two of them zoomed around inside the sphere miraculously not creating a spectacular fireball collision. And then, to my horror, they were joined by a third motorcyclist. Amazingly, after a few minutes of zooming they all emerged alive.

Then came the blow: the three motorcyclists came out to take a bow and took off their helmets and they looked to be 11, 13 and 15 years old. Probably brothers. Definitely none of them was over 16 years old. And then they walked out into the audience with their helmets and begged for money. I wanted to cry.

We were so devastated and ill from this nightmare circus that we thought about leaving early, but I kept holding out hope that maybe redemption lay in the finale.

Not so.

The finale was all of the various performers from the spectacle running out into the ring waving silk flags and bowing. The end.

Let us never speak of it again.

Highlights from Mexico, part 4

Not all of the adventures from Mexico took place out and about on the town. One of them took place right on the balcony off our hotel room. And it featured "Instant Animal Capsules."

These were a birthday gift to me back in August but we hadn't yet found the right moment to play with them. This was it! There were 10 capsules in four different colors, each containing a small sponge in the shape of an animal - but you don't know which animal until the capsule is dissolved and the animal is unleashed.

We decided to make it a competition (of course) and here's how it worked: we each chose 5 capsules, and then one match-up at a time, we tossed the capsules into glasses of warm water. In each match-up, the more ferocious animal was the winner.

Some were clear-cut victories (coyote vs bat, alligator vs rabbit) but we also had a couple of tough calls: beaver vs deer. Which is more ferocious? It's hard to say.

Gross epilogue: we used two of the glasses in the room as the test pools in which we dissolved the capsules. The next day, after housekeeping had come and gone in the morning, I went to use a glass and discovered a thick, sticky clear film at the bottom of both of the glasses in our room: capsule residue! That's thorough work, Westin housekeeping. Ew.

Highlights from Mexico, Part 3

On the third day we went on a boat tour to Yelapa with stops for snorkeling, kayaking and a look at some pretty spots along the way.

Though we had purchased our tickets in advance, we were still required to wait in several long lines before we could actually get on the boat and go somewhere. My suspicion is that all this line-waiting was just a way to hold us captive while people tried relentlessly to sell us things. They had a sea lion propped up at a podium that you could go take a picture with and there were people carrying parrots around that they would put on you and take your photos which you could then purchase later. When the parrot guy approached Eric, Eric looked straight at him and said, humorlessly, "I don't like birds. Take that thing somewhere else." He did.

(At least part of the problem was that a cruise ship had backed into one of the cement docks that they usually use to launch their boats. It looked pretty badly damaged, so I give them the benefit of the doubt on this one.)

Our guide was Julio, and he mostly called himself Julio Iglesias. He spoke like a combination of a game show host, an MTV VJ and Borat and spent a lot of time chattering to us over the boat's speaker system. He was energetic and relentless, no - shameless, in his attempts to make sure we all had as much fun as possible. We did. In fact, just listening to his turns of phrase in English was enough to make you smile.

"How are your feelings doing!" he would shout over the speaker system to find out how we were feeling.

There were many highlights of the trip. Snorkeling was not one of them. The place they took us to snorkel does have fish, but the tour boats all seem to be in the habit of feeding the fish to get them to come play with the tourists and as a result the water is filthy and full of food scraps. It's quite disgusting. Further, there weren't really that many fish and there were that many jellyfish so we figured 90 seconds of snorkeling was about the right amount of time, and bee-lined for one of the three kayaks the boat was carrying for the 50 people on board to share.

We scored a kayak and determined that the only logical thing to do was to try to land on the small beach near the only private residence within sight - the only place we had been instructed NOT to go. We touched the sand there, saw some movement on the porch of the house, and hightailed it back out to sea as it was not out of the realm of possibility that we were going to get shot. Back on the boat, Julio Iglesias told us that house belongs to a bunch of narcos and he was probably not kidding.

Once we got to Yelapa, we walked around there and swam in a waterfall pool which was really, really cold and totally awesome. ("Refrescante!")
This child made a face at us as we walked by, so we took his picture.

The group with us on the tour was a colorful bunch. It included a gross couple maybe on their honeymoon or maybe just really gropy, a nice family that also lives in San Francisco and who gave us an awesome recommendation for a restaurant in town, and a woman who shared with me that she had delivered her oldest daughter (now 19 years old) when she was at just 26 weeks of pregnancy - exactly how pregnant I was at the time. Not cool. There was also a mishmosh of other typical American families (one father pointed out a dog in Yelapa laying in the sun and said "Look, it's a Mexican lazy dog.")

In order to make the long boat ride back from Yelapa as much fun as possible, Julio Iglesias hosted a rocking dance party in which he got the whole crew to come up and dance, and then got a bunch of the passengers dancing as well. The four hours of open bar prior to this impromptu dance party surely contributed to the healthy participation.

All in all, it was pretty solid as the "tropical boat-based day trip adventure" goes.

Highlights from Mexico, Part 2

The first two days of our time in Mexico were our surfing safari days: we drove our rental car about 45 min to where the surf breaks are, stopping to rent a surfboard along the way. We strapped it to the top of the car which worked great except at any speed above 5 mph when it made an intense humming noise as the wind vibrated it against the roof of the car (through a towel, which would occasionally flap, adding some percussion to the performance).

The beach we decided to check out was La Lancha and the way to get there is to look for the bridge that goes over the La Lancha river, park in the empty lot near the cement factory and then look for the trail across the highway which meanders along the river, making it about a 15 min hike to the ocean through jungly terrain.


The path is good and the trip is well worth it: we were rewarded at the other end with a pristine and nearly abandoned beach right on a nice surf break. Total paradise.


The first day we went we did chat with some of the other people there. I chatted with a woman from Ottawa who was there so her kids could practice surfing (they'd been brought in by a surf guide). Eric chatted for a bit with three older dudes who turned up mid-afternoon, stood for a good 20 min staring wordlessly at the ocean, and then hopped in to catch some waves. We learned that two of the three of them were musicians and they were playing a gig in town that night. They invited us to come.

We ran into them again the next day having not made it to their show the night before ("Um, we couldn't find it"). As luck had it, they were playing again that night. This time we said we would make a more serious attempt to get there.

We did. It was at the River Cafe and it turned out to be a lovely spot along the Cuale River, half indoors and half out, with trees making up much of the decor. It was a way nicer place than we had been expecting, but I don't know why.

We were seated at a table right up front and the musicians were already playing. We recognized the two guys from the beach: one playing the violin, the other playing classical guitar. When we'd asked them what kind of music they played they had said "world music" and that's as good a description as I can come up with. They are Willie and the Locos and apparently they were number 2 on the world music billboard in 1993.

Willie is the violinist and he is one of those incredibly expressive musicians who contorts, flails and experiences a thousand emotions throughout each song, each emotion playing dramatically across his face.

I saw the guitarist notice us as we came in and smile, and when they finished the song he pointed us out to Willie who said a big hello. "Hello friends from the beach!" He exclaimed to the entire restaurant, looking at us. "From surfing La Lancha to music at the River Cafe. Amazing!" He seemed sincerely excited that we had actually showed up. They came to chat with us during the break and Willie in particular was very excited that we are having a baby.

After the show we went to say thanks and good night and Eric mentioned that I had felt Belvedere jumping around a bunch during one of the songs. Willie's face lit up: "I know! We were totally connecting during that song. He's an awesome kid!"

And the thing of it is, it is entirely possible.

Highlights from Mexico, Part 1

We had far too many adventures during our week in Puerto Vallarta to fit them all into one blog post (one anyone would want to read, at least), so here's just a taste, with more to come.

The second day, we ate breakfast at the hotel restaurant which is outdoors and lovely. You get to watch the palm trees swaying and see the birds flitting around the lawn and trees. And you get to watch them very stealthily fly into the open air restaurant, steal packets of Splenda from the tables and then take them back to a nearby tree branch where they skillfully tear them open and stick their beaks in to get the sugar-like goodness inside. I don't know if they realize there is no nutritional value in the sugar substitute. I wish I could explain it to them.On Ericmas (day four), we spent most of the day lounging by the pool watching children play, fight, cry, be soothed, and repeat the cycle.

Per his request, I ordered Eric a large drink served in a coconut and mentioned to the server that it was his birthday. They made the drink extra strong (it was a Coco very Loco) and it took Eric several hours, literally, to drink it without getting himself in big trouble.

We sat there relaxing, enjoying the pool scene when suddenly small white granules rained down on us from the tree above. We sat there for a moment, both of us covered in this sand-like white substance, wondering what child was throwing sand on us, when we realized: it was Splenda. I licked a few granules off my arm and sure enough, we'd just been innocent bystanders in a crafty bird's afternoon snack.

The server came by again later with a twinkle in his eye, asked what Eric's name was and then disappeared with a wink only to return not too much later with a piece of chocolate cake on a plate decorated to say Feliz Cumpleanos "Eric". We don't know why they put his name in quotes- maybe they didn't think it was his real name?

Fond Farewell 2009 and Happy 2010!

After moving to SF in late summer 2008, we continued settling in here. The startup that I had been part of right after moving here didn't survive the financial crisis of fall 2008, so by the 2008 holiday season I found myself looking for a new job. It took a few months to convince them they needed me, but in March 2009 I started my dream job doing sustainability strategy consulting with Blu Skye. I am loving being part of the team there and feel so lucky to be doing exactly the work that I want to be doing.

At the end of May, I fulfilled a longtime dream: Eric and I climbed Mt Shasta, a 14,123 ft peak in northern California. It is not a technical climb but it does require crampons and an ice axe, so you can look and feel like a badass without actually having to be one. We had a great time climbing, camping "overnight" (8pm-1am) and summitting around 7am, with the sunrise. It was simply amazing and very satisfying to finally do it.

In August, Eric asked me to be his wife and I thought that sounded like a lot of fun, so we got engaged and planned a small, private wedding ceremony for late October.

On October 25, 2009 we were married in a hot air balloon over Sonoma county. The captain of the balloon performed the ceremony, with punctuating bursts from the propane jet to keep us aloft and on course. With us in the balloon were our parents and my brother. We learned later that everyone had been terrified of the balloon ride but us, but they all rose to the occasion and hopefully even enjoyed themselves. It was an extraordinary day and a totally perfect wedding.

Shortly thereafter, everyone who had suspected that maybe this was a shotgun wedding was proven right when we announced that we are expecting our first child - a son - at the end of March.* We have been calling him Belvedere just as a fun interim nickname, and I think there is a significant danger that it is going to stick. We will see.

In November we moved to a larger apartment in a more neighborhoody part of San Francisco - Potrero Hill - and we're getting settled in there, ready to add one more to our family in a few months.

So here we find ourselves: happy, pregnant, grateful and embracing whatever expected and unexpected adventures 2010 brings us.

With much love,
Ellie, Eric & Belvedere



*I think it is worth saying that while Belvedere may have impacted the timing of our nuptials, he was not the impetus for them. And the wedding itself was in no way diminished - it really was our dream wedding (though I am looking forward to finally drinking a very large glass of celebratory champagne when I am able to do so responsibly at some point in 2010)