The San Jose Grand Prix was so loud I could hear it as an angry buzzing here in my home, five miles away. This is the third year the city of San Jose has hosted this farce, and I hate it. I can’t go near downtown from Thursday on, because the streets are blocked off, [...]
Peter saw the Simpsons movie last week, and he loved it. Just the week before, we’d stumbled upon the 7-11 in Mountain View that’s been transformed into a Kwik-E-Mart as a promotion for the movie. Shiaw-Ling and Loretta have been there a few times since it opened, and brought Simpsons-themed goodies, like Buzz Cola and [...]
A few months after my friend Chris moved to Salinas, she called me in a panic. Her husband was still in China, in the interminable wait for spousal visa, and she’d just found out he’d been arrested. As any spouse would be, she was upset. He’d been arrested for practicing Falun Gong: it’s incomprehensible for [...]
Today we drove up to the Exploratorium for one of their special Make Magazine’s Saturdays. This Saturday happened to feature a special exhibition where Exploratorium visitors could make magnetic toys, and a Webcast featuring the founder of the Tech Shop talking about the shop’s tools and a gear-driven LED clock he’d made at the shop. [...]
So, Peter got involved with our American Revolution studies and volunteered to set up a game of Jeopardy, with all questions related to American Revolution, as per the excellent text we’d used. Shiaw-Ling was our scorekeeper and the categories Peter set up were ones like “Four Letter Words” (where the answer was a four-letter word [...]
As part of my summer homeschooling curriculum, I had Neil write a speech. The date was December 1, 1776, one of the darkest periods for American revolutionaries, and as a colonist, he had to make a speech to his fellow colonists to either continue fighting for American independence (the patriot argument), or whether to throw [...]
On Sunday, I did two things I had promised myself I would never do: I went to Fisherman’s Wharf in the summer, and I went downtown during a ballgame.
The last time we were at Fisherman’s Wharf, Neil wanted to go to the Ripley’s Believe It or Not Museum, but he complained so much about having [...]
Shelly tagged me. I tend to be fairly forthcoming in my blog, so I didn’t know if there were eight things about me others didn’t know already, and if there were if they’d be eight things I’d be willing to share publically as well. But Shelly’s were clever and interesting (and I only knew one [...]
