Nina pants

Nina, originally uploaded by Simian Cephalopod.

The littlest one of the household is certainly the cutest, fuzziest and most pampered. Isn't she CUUUUUTTTEEEEE!!!!?!?!

surgery complete!

Isaac pre surgery, originally uploaded by craftyK.

Isaac's surgery to remove the 2 plates and 10 screws in his arm went well, and he's healing nicely. Here is a picture I took with my phone (excuse the poor quality) before the surgery. I LOVE that they wrote "yes" on the arm that needed the surgery. Don't want to open up the wrong one!

U-pick

UPick_Small, originally uploaded by craftyK.

Here is the sign that lured us in for the tiny strawberries... notice the ocean in the background. Yeah!

Strawberry Fields Forever

Strawberries Fields, originally uploaded by Simian Cephalopod.

So, Saturday was my 29th birthday, (woohoo, almost thirty! or something).. so anyway, Kerry and I decided to go on a little micro-road trip and explore some of the cool things off Highway 1 South of San Francisco that we had always just driven by. It is hard to find the right superlatives for the day. The weather was in the low 80's, the breeze was mild, the color of the ocean was as vivid as anywhere on earth, and we were just cruising down the coast with the top down stopping and going as the wind took us. It just doesn't get much better than that...

This was taken on one of our many stops. It looks a bit foreboding, but in fact, this is just a harmless image of a string of picked strawberry plants. One of our stops was at a "U-Pick" stop along the road. Kerry got a rad shot of the old sign at the front of the farm I'm sure she'll post in the next couple days.

Anyway, we saw some pretty awesome stuff, more to follow over the coming days.

Wayne's World. Party Time. Excellent.

Movie Night, originally uploaded by craftyK.

On Thursday night we went to see Wayne's World on a temporary screen in Dolores Park with one of Isaac's co-workers. We had just had a big sushi dinner and it was great to sit under the stars with a bottle of Sake and Garth singing "Foxy Lady". It's San Francisco's version of a drive-in.

salt ponds, shack and bridge

salt ponds, shack and bridge, originally uploaded by craftyK.

After seeing the brightly colored salt ponds, we saw an old bridge and some shacks nearby. It was too beautiful not to stop!

At the river Styx

At the river Styx, originally uploaded by Simian Cephalopod.

So, we were trying to figure out where to go on Sunday and it ended up coming down to a crazy S and M pride festival, a trip to see the new otter exhibit at the Monterey aquarium, or to see if there was any way to get close to the crazy colored ponds that you always fly over coming into the city, (don't ask why those were our choices...). So anyway, in the end, the salt ponds were the choice de jour so we hit the Saab and trucked it all the way down to the South end of the bay.

This shot was taken while hiking around the salt evaporation ponds in the southern end of the San Francisco Bay. An explanation about why it is colored the way it is (yes that is the natural color of the water, no manipulation!), can be found here.

I had always wanted to check them out up close and personal ever since seeing the radical colors from plane windows that you can see as you fly into or out of the city. If you have never done that, it looks like this.

Egyptian Tomb

Egyptian Tomb, originally uploaded by Simian Cephalopod.

Marcia and John were out visiting and one of the wacky places we visited was the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum down in San Jose. According to the museum it is the largest collection of Egyptian antiquities in Western North America.

Aside from the, how should I put this, quirkiness of the Rosicrucians themselves, the museum held its own in terms of content and presentation. I'm such a sucker for secret societies anyway that they could have had a plastic mummy rapped in toilet paper and I would have been satisfied, but thankfully there were proper mummies and other such old stuffs. Good times were had by all.

This shot is of John peering down into a tomb.