I took the time to write reviews on Tripadvisor about the hotels we stayed at in Las Vegas last week, since one was godawful and overpriced (The Sunset Station in Henderson), and another was a bargain and loads of fun to stay in (the Luxor.) But I couldn’t write about the show we saw, because [...]
Last weekend, our family went to see a movie in a movie theatre for the first time in 2011. It also happened to be the weekend fewer people went to see a movie than had done so in the two weeks after 9/11. So how did we get to this situation? I love entertainment, and [...]
I don’t typically think of other people as stupid. I realize they may have different information or a different background than my own, or that the information they’ve been given wasn’t as clear as it should be. But every so often, like last Friday, I do run across someone who is epically stupid, to the [...]
Until recently, the Mexican Day of the Dead was something I’d only read about in old Ray Bradbury stories. More recently, it’s become an artsy event for urban Californians, and this year we went to the San Jose Art Museum for their Day of the Dead festival. One of the highlights for us was making [...]
Peter chafes at absurd rules, and one of these is the rules that we can’t buy or shoot off fireworks for the fourth of July in our Californian town, despite the fact that budget cuts have also cancelled the annual downtown festival where we had a public display. So, one recent weekend, he drove all [...]
Peter’s been jonesing for a break from his consulting gig, which was recently extended for another 6 months; Kelly had a school break at the beginning of November; and Neil’s Legoland comp tickets were about to expire. So, we booked several nights at an inexpensive motel in Anaheim and planned on seeing 3 amusement parks [...]
We haven’t gone on field trips for a while, and when I offered the chance to Neil, his first choice was the Lawrence Hall of Science. Of all the science museums in the area, it has the most puzzles. It doesn’t update or rotate its exhibits as much as other science museums in the area, [...]
Via Bill Gosper and the regional math circles, Neil’s gotten to know Julian, another homeschooled boy his age who loves math as much as he does. So we naturally included him our round of adventures during Kelly’s winter break and invited him to join us at the Exploratorium on Friday. I wondered whether they’d relate [...]
I’ve always been a Star Trek fan, which is a complement to Peter, who’s a Star Wars fan, and we both take part in properly educating our children to our respective geek pop cultures. Peter sat the children down to watch the original set of Star Wars movies (technically IV, V, and VI, though they [...]
Kelly’s been eager to visit Oakland’s Fairyland, which I agreed would be a wonderful place to her. On Wednesday, I took here there, since I was already almost halfway there, having dropped Neil off at Stanford for his Maya camp. Fairyland is all I could want; and it makes me miss the old Happy Hollow [...]
