Weekend Visitor

We had a special visitor this last weekend. Mallory's father Casey stopped in at the tail-end of his business trip to the States, and it was great to have him! We have actually had quite a few visits from both sides of the family the past year, we have been very blessed. Here are a few snippets from the visit.

This is the Palace of Fine Arts at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. Very European, and very cool.

Do we even need to explain this one??

Nice walk along the beach...

Photo Op with our Top Model...

When you're happy and you know it -- drool on your chin!

Minor adjustments... and onward we go. In all, it was a great weekend. We were able to see a few things, eat some good food, spend some quality time, and make some memories. On Sunday we drove up to Vacaville, CA to meet up with one of Casey's old band mates in his rock days. It was fun to hear them swap stories about the past and the things they were up to back then.

Tribute to the Livermore Library

Although I just wrote this post, I have been thinking about writing it for a while now. It seems today, April 23, is World Book and Copyright Day (thank you, Lucy), which means it also seems like a very fitting day to publish it!

We have an awesome library here in Livermore. It's amazing. Really, I think the most incredible library I have ever seen accessibility- and resources-wise. (Although I am not seeing "The Wizard of Oz" in their movies collection, but it might just be checked out.) It's also a beautiful library, inside and out. The best part is we live only a three minute walk from it through a lovely little park.

Madie loves this mosaic on the outside walkway of the entry. It has characters from history and stories--old and new--all over it. And it's surrounded by a stone bench which is supported by stack of stone books.

Woah, Dad! Check it out!

It's ME!

The library has story times for "lap-sitters" and toddlers, preschoolers, and kindergartners during the week. Madie and I went on Wednesday this week and she thoroughly enjoyed watching the other kids. It's nice for her to see kids crawling, etc. Hopefully it will motivate her.

Another cool aspect of the library is a cafe in the east wing with a little outdoor area too. Mike and I keep meaning to try it, but we haven't yet. There's also a used-book room where you can buy any of the books, magazines, movies, and audio books the library no longer needs or wants. My favorite feature though is the large selection of foreign language children's books to choose from, all conveniently located in one sweet little section of the children's area. It's exactly what I've been looking for since I've started learning Russian, and now Madie and I read between three and five short Russian stories or poems every morning. We look at the pictures, translate what we understand, and then pull out the dictionary and translate the rest.

Sheeeee's Lost It!

You see this face? A crazy person like this is heading for only one place:

The Rock.

We spent Saturday visiting Pier 39 and watching all the crazies and street magicians and vendors, etc. Madie was pleased to be with her own kind, namely the eccentrics of San Francisco.

You see those giant flat things through the window there? Crepes. Oh yes. We found lunch.

And we quickly found dessert as well. Thank heavens this sign is hoisted high or we might not have made it. It's like the star of Bethlehem, leading the way.

Finally we went to Fort Point underneath the Golden Gate Bridge. (Well, I guess "finally" would be accidentally driving over the bridge, hoping to find the bridge on the other side that would take us toll-free back to Livermore. Whatever.)

Fort Point is actually really cool. It's a California Historic Civil Engineering Landmark (we have a picture of the plaque and I forgot to put it up here. Look on FB in a couple days) because it is the last brick-and-mortar fort to ever be built in the United States. It was built right before (or at the beginning?) of the Civil War, which proved that brick-and-mortar forts are unable to withstand assault from rifled artillery.

It's a beautiful fort. Really beautiful. And it has great vistas of the city.

And it's smack-dab underneath the bridge.

Here we are accidentally driving over the bridge. Unexpected but pleasant nonetheless.

Ya know, I was just going to not post any more pictures from this trip, but we have so many I may do another short post tomorrow or something. For now I just don't have time. Either way, I'll put extras on Facebook for sure.

Taking Care of House Ghosts

Last weekend we went to the Winchester Mystery House. It's this HUGE old house built by Mrs. Sarah Winchester--widow of one of the Winchester Rifle heirs and makers. The short story is that after the death of her 6-week-old daughter and (years later) her husband, she went to see a psychic who told her that the only way to appease the spirits of the people killed by her husband's weapons she needed to build a house that was never finished. So, she moved into an 8-room farm-house in San Jose, California and just kept adding rooms, remodeling, closing up, re-building, etc, etc until she ended up with an ENORMOUS house with the most bizarre layout. Some people say they're mostly mistakes because she wasn't an architect. I say that's crap. It doesn't take an architect to know you shouldn't build your staircase into the ceiling or have a door that opens into a wall. I'm with the other people who thought she was just a really superstitious old lady who was trying to confuse the spirits or was just doing "what the spirits said."

We weren't allowed to take pictures inside, but the grounds are beautiful. The wisteria grows like crazy! There are plants from over 100 countries all over the world represented in the garden. The woman was loaded. (With money that is. Not lead.)

Quick interruption for a picture of me and Madie-Fi.

This shot really doesn't show how big the house is. It has 160 rooms, including 6 kitchens, an indoor greenhouse, a couple of dining rooms, a ball room, who knows how many bedrooms, a laundry room, and lots of glass-doored bathrooms. I didn't really get that. The grounds also had multiple buildings. The whole estate was self-sustaining.

On a totally separate note, Madie and I are loving our walks together. Here's Madie with her summer reading. We're looking for a good spot to settle down.

And this video was just cracking me up! I didn't know it would get her laughing so hard!

The Move

We are finally in California together as a family! After six weeks of only seeing each other on most weekends, it is definitely nice to be back together. Our move went really well actually. Luckily Mallory's mother MariLou had most things boxed up for us to load into the truck. Luckily again, my father Bryan flew out to help us load up the truck and drive it to California.

We were debating between traveling the northern route (I-80 west from Salt Lake through Reno and over Donner Pass), or the southern route (I-15 south from Salt Lake through Las Vegas and through Southern California. There were some storms coming in that involved a lot of snow and rain, so the northern route ultimately won due to the less severe roads. Turned out to be the right choice! We left at 5 am from Grandmas house in Orem, UT and the roads were so bad that one could hardly see the lane divisions! Snow was really bad until we got out of Salt Lake. After that, it was smooth sailing. The only 'eventful' part of the trip was when the windshield wiper on the moving truck came off on the drivers side. Thankfully Dad was able to pull over to fix it safely.

We didn't get many pictures of the actual move or of the trip unfortunately, but the few we got are priceless.

Madie really likes to kick her feet up. Seriously, she pulls the visor of her car seat down so she can rest her feet on them. (As if they don't stick straight up into the air all the time anyway.)

View from the front seat.

She also loves birds, as Papa found out at Monterey.

And we ALL love scaring birds!