I love jazzy singer Matt Dusk’s vocals. He has fabulous diction, pitch and phrasing. He’s often compared to Michael Bublé, but if you listen to Matt Dusk, Michael Bublé sounds like a drunken karaoke singer, IMHO. If Matt Dusk sounds like anyone, he sounds a carefree cross between Frank Sinatra and Shirley Bassey. Since I…
Queen of the Pool
It’s summer again, which means I’ve returned to my Sisyphean quest of getting the perfect chemical balance in my pool. Just as background, if you hire a pool guy to take care of the pool, he typically siphons the dirt off the bottom and sides and throws in some chlorine with each visit. I fired…
Shakespeare in the Redwoods
Yesterday was Open House at Neil’s school. As part of their Open House presentation, his grade 4/5 class selected 5 scenes from Shakespeare plays and performed them. We saw Hamlet fight Laertes and die by Laertes’ poisoned sword; Romeo grieve and commit suicide when he finds Juliet, seemingly dead; and Neil, as Petruchio, ably teasing…
Round and About at Happy Hollow
Kelly’s been asking me to take her to Happy Hollow for a few weeks now, and I figured it would be a pleasant thing to do today while Neil and Peter were at the Maker Fair. We didn’t get a chance to see the zoo part today, which was probably good news for the zoo’s…
Walking the Tightrope at the Lawrence Hall of Science
I promised Neil a trip to the science museum of his choice if he got a good grade on a book report. His teacher took a good 6 weeks getting his February book report back to him, but he got the requisite grade, and requested a trip to the Lawrence Hall of Science. My friend…
Earthquake!
A few minutes ago, the house rocked enough for me to run down and grab Kelly. As usually happens with earthquakes, by the time I moved, it was already over. I checked the USGS data and found out there was a shallow 3.4 magnitude earthquake about 8 miles away. I must be getting hypersensitive in…
Steve Coogan Karma
On Friday, Neil’s school had a movie night where we could it on the lawn and watch “Night at the Museum” on a large screen. It was a lot of fun being outside with other families, and “Night at the Museum” is a great movie. However, as Octavius, a Roman general appeared on screen, Peter…
Random Friday Musings
Biking, reading and researching has taken up time I used to devote to blogging, but there are a few tidbit musings I thought I’d throw out to regular readings. First of all, my friend Shelly managed to get her mother, the guru of the “IHHEBY” philosophy to make a more in-depth appearance on her podcast….
Mangled Garbage Carts
Last week, early in the morning, we heard a horrible screeching noise as our garbage was being picked up. I worried that it was our regular garbage cart, which was full of construction debris from our downstairs bathroom floor, coming apart under its weight. As it turned out, it was merely the sound of one…
A Guitar Hero Party, Mother’s Day, and Winning the Chicken Dance
We had quite a full weekend of fun, and I’m just going to try to encapsulate it in this one posting. On Saturday morning, Peter took Neil to the Scout-o-Rama, while I took Kelly to the Stanford Powwow. And afterwards, we had a barbecue party! Shiaw-Ling is our party enabler, so she organized it, and…