Apple snakes and Vampires

Somehow 6 weeks has gone by since my last post. This is what it's like when you get close to 40— time speeds up and then you have to piece together what happened. Luckily, there are some clues in the form of ye olde iPhone camera roll, so here's a short list of events since I last went on about that silly bridge:

• Liz and I spontaneously produced a child (OK, we went for a hike with Britta, Emily and Hugo in the lovely Redwood park)

That's our little Hugo.

• Spotted some New Mexico green chile in our local supermarket. Decided not to trust it.

The flags were a nice touch, tho.

• I read the fabulous new young adult novel, And Then Things Fall Apart by my dear friend Arlaina Tibensky. (Do yourself a favor, folks...) Coincidentally, while drinking wine with our neighbors, Tiffany brought out her nail polish collection. So, inspired by said YA novel, I painted my nails blue. 

Punk Rock

• I won a prize in a drawing for the first time in my life! The prize was entry to an ePublishing conference. Don't make fun—I got to go to Chicago. The conference was actually really useful (if I want to stay employed, that is) even though the McCormick center in Chicago is a miserable, miserable place. Luckily, I had my evenings free to wander around downtown and hit up 3 local breweries (Goose Island, Revolution, and Haymarket). Traveling for business means eating alone, so I've found that it's more comfortable to do so at a bar. I even found time to do a couple of 3 mile runs along the lakeshore which made me feel like a serious runner since I was making it happen in a new city.

The Palmer House. I stayed in this fancy place after a housing CF courtesy of Graph Expo. Long story.

Goose Island Brewing

Bagel + Pretzel = Bretzel. Brilliant.

• I got to go to an A's game with my ex Maggie and her 2 kids, Lucas (5) and Sora (3). I admit, I was a bit worried about taking little kids to a game, but these 2 were super fun and totally engaged. Lucas patiently absorbed all of my explanations about how baseball works and asked really great questions. For example, he asked how we picked which team to root for, and I explained that the A's are the home team, they're underdogs, and so on, to which he replied, "Yeah, but which team practices more?" Touché. By far my favorite moment, though, was when Sora asked what the vampires were doing. We looked at her like, "Vampires?" and she said, "The guys in black that hang around." Somehow "umpire" morphed into "vampire" for her and now I cannot stop thinking of them as the undead, lurking around, making judgements.

Lucas and me

Sora and her favorite part of the day, a lemonade

There were other wild moments in the past 6 weeks (including a whirlwind overnighter to the faded glory that is Reno, Nevada), but that's probably enough photo-narrating for now.