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MUNI Heritage Weekend 2024

Friday, Oct 4th, 2024 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Last year we missed MUNI Heritage Weekend due to the whole house being taken down by a COVID-19 infection, so with everyone feeling well this year, we made sure to make our return to the festival I love! This year marks the first time MJ and Aaron have attended, with me having gone a bunch of times, and Adam in 2019 and 2022. It was nice to have all of us there to enjoy it.

The day began with checking out a couple buses, and then getting in line for the Blackpool “boat” tram. The boys and I went on this one ourselves as MJ had to run off for an errand nearby. Aaron also had his Studio Ghibli Catbus with us all day, while I had my MUNI Catbus t-shirt, so we made quite the pair throughout the day.

It’s number 233, and painted with green livery (as opposed to the red) and came to San Francisco in 2013. I’m glad we managed to get on this one, as it’s the one that the boys have a poster of hanging in their room and have never been on before. In preparation for the day, I listened to the Ahoy! episode of MUNI’s “Taken with Transportation” podcast to get a refresher on these trams, and it made the adventure that much more fun as we sailed past Ferry Building on our journey down the Embarcadero.

At Fisherman’s Wharf we got off and got some great pictures while the operators took a break. To get back to Ferry Building we took one of the regular service F-Line vintage streetcars to mix things up a bit. Plus, it got us back faster, which was important because the boys were hungry. We met back up with MJ and had lunch at a nearby hamburger joint.

From there it was time to visit some vintage buses! I think the boys like buses more than trains, so this was probably their favorite part. We started off with a ride on the MUNI AM General 4154 from 1975. It took a loop through SOMA, making its only stop at the Caltrain Depot, which was a very specific stop for the day because Caltrain was also having a celebration: for full electrification of their San Francisco to San Jose route. As you’d expect, there was overlap in folks enjoying festivities for both transit agencies. Once that loop was done, we visited the booths in the plaza for a little bit to geek out with fellow transit fans.

Our final ride of the day was upon Adam’s request, the 2230 Mack Diesel Coach from 1956, with the very distinctive Pepsi bottle cap decoration on front. All the buses take the same loop, so the scenery was the same, but we all enjoyed it just the same.


Our final stop was the museum and gift shop, where Adam bought a boat tram post card with some coins from his wallet (and a little help from my Member discount). In all, a very satisfying day! And I was so happy to share it with the whole family.

Filed under: events, family, kids, rails, san francisco

After work with the kiddos (and without)

Wednesday, Oct 2nd, 2024 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

I talk a lot about our big weekend adventures, but what do people get up to with their pre-school and elementary kiddos on weekday evenings?

Activities with kids is one of those topics that I wasn’t prepared for at all as a parent. I quickly discovered that my own after-work hobbies are largely incompatible with small kids. There’s also the unexpected mental load of managing what we’ll do every evening, because if I ask them, they’ll likely reply with some grand adventure and a desire for cheeseburgers. So, every day, I think things to do and evaluate my energy level to make sure the options won’t cause additional stress. Once I have my list, I can give the kids something to choose when I take over from our au pair at 4PM.

This may seem like I’m giving myself too much work by being so prescriptive about this (“just let them play!” “when I was a kid I didn’t come home until sunset!”), so I’ll start out by saying “just play!” is definitely something that lands on my list. But overall if we don’t have plans to choose from it’s a whole night of me telling them “no” to whatever complicated thing they want to do, which is dreadful for everyone. And they’re only 3 and 5 years old, things will loosen up as they get older. Besides, it’s great bonding time, I am grateful for the ability to have so much time with them and if we can go on grand adventures in the evening, we will!

Loosely, this is our evening schedule:

  • 4 – 5:30PM: Activities
  • 5:30 – 6:30PM: Make and eat dinner
  • 6:30 – 7:15PM: Wind down activities, no screens (too close to bedtime)
  • 7:15 – 8PM: Bedtime routine

Here’s what I’ve come up with:

  • Just play! They have lots of toys and free play is so important to development that they use their imagination
  • Play outside: bikes, drawing with chalk, bubbles, toys
  • Outdoor picnic: we even bought little baskets and checkered paper to make it a whole event
  • Baking: banana bread! muffins! cupcakes!
  • Make mini-pizzas for dinner
  • “Pizza party” with a movie downstairs and pizza we order
  • Art: either a project I’ve put together, or their ideas
  • Play-doh or Kinetic Sand
  • Lego construction
  • Homework: it’s optional in Kindergarten, so it only really comes up when they’re in the mood
  • Puzzles
  • Board games
  • Chores: they sometimes like helping with dishes, or laundry, or taking out the trash, and I have to do this anyway…
  • House organization: they love seeing all the junk I can pull out of our closets and discovering new treasures
  • Limited computer tinkering: I have to be very careful, but Adam sat by while I replaced a failed harddrive in my desktop recently
  • Holiday decorating: Outside hanging lights, putting decorations in windows and around the house
  • Errands: Grocery store, bank, Target runs (via BART)
  • Dinner at the mall (via BART)
  • Go out to a playground
  • Gardening: water plants, weed lawn, plant new plants/seeds
  • Kitchen science experiments: So much baking soda
  • Lots of TV (good for when I’m sick, tired, or just can’t even, hah!)

This massive list was an evolution that started with nothing. There were several Google searches around things to do with kids, and then we had to tailor it to what our kids actually like. But we never spent much time around kids before having our own, so it’s all been a learning experience. Plus, these are pandemic kids, we couldn’t leave the house for two and a half years and had to get creative. No play groups, no library activities, nothing that I would have normally hooked into to keep the kids engaged with the world.

To help sort through this and make the kids less anxious about “what are we going to do?” we have a physical visual schedule that they can operate themselves by picking out pictures from the options I provide. We implemented the visual schedule over the summer to help bring some structure to their days so they knew what to expect, but it works brilliantly for evenings and weekends now that they’re back in school.

Still, as much as I value this time together and these activities, I miss my old hobbies and I’m an introvert who needs recharging time. A while back we decided to get a babysitter once a week so I could spend the evening on whatever I want, without parenting responsibilities. Unfortunately, we got busy, things came up, and I didn’t make an effort to prioritize these nights, and so they didn’t happen. I think I was getting a little burnt out over the summer after some rounds of sickness through the house and some extra things on my domestic plate. Lyz nights had to make a return! And this time, with a priority flag. I started taking them in early September.

I spent my first Tuesday just relaxing in the back yard in the hammock and some TV on my tablet. Another evening on my own I went out to the local one-screen theater in town and saw Beetlejuice 2 and then went out for sushi at our favorite local place.


Our local library is open until 8PM on Tuesdays, so that’s a nice place to spend time at if I’m just looking for a quiet place away from home to read for a little bit, which I often am. Last night I spent playing a Wallace and Gromit game on my Meta Quest 2, which I hadn’t touched in months! It needed updates and the controllers needed new batteries, hah. I then watched a little TV and picked up some pizza from The Slice House, which recently opened in town.

I expect to do some grander adventures in the future outside of town and with friends, but again, we’ve all been reeling from a series of colds and I’m putting a higher value on rest right now. Most importantly, having this time to myself allows me to look forward to tackling projects or just taking a break from the weight of responsibility that parenthood has brought. And this break allows me to recharge a little bit more, and be my best self for my family.

Filed under: family, kids, reflection

A horse, a donkey, and a Cessna

Thursday, Sep 19th, 2024 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

We have been busy lately. It’s just the time of year, there are always lots of events at the end of summer and beginning of autumn when the weather is perfect. It’s always been my favorite time of year.

Last weekend we took advantage of the beautiful weather by visiting one of MJ’s colleagues up north where his family has a bunch of animals, including a horse, mule, and mammoth donkey!

The boys haven’t spent much time near large animals, so it took a little time for them to warm up to the idea of entering their enclosure. Both of the boys enjoyed climbing into a dry riverbed in their back yard. Adam got to run around their back yard with a wheelbarrow and help sweep out a part of their [freshly empty] aviary enclosure.

The promise of getting to see inside the barn is what finally got the boys in with the animals, where they both got to brush the horse and donkey while they were munching on some hay, and Aaron got to feed the horse some carrots. I wouldn’t say they got comfortable with them, in fact Aaron got a little spooked toward the end and climbed up me screaming when the donkey walked by him, but they are big, and I think it’ll just take repeated exposure to them to reach the comfortable state. As for me, the mammoth donkey was an absolute delight.

The boys also enjoyed snacks and Adam got gracefully introduced to chess while Aaron found the drums in their living room, both precisely on brand for the boys right now. It was a fun afternoon, and I’m really grateful for them opening their home to us for a visit.

On Sunday morning we had swim class, but were then off to the annual Hayward Executive Airport Open House. We’d never been to this airport, it seems mostly focused on private aircraft and training, but we do drive by it frequently, and I suspect most of the small planes that fly over our house are based out of there. The event offered an opportunity to see the airport, and had a bunch of local government services, the parks department, library, and others with booths giving out little goodies for the kids and sharing about their community services. The boys got to hop in a helicopter, as well as various police and fire vehicles.


Aaron and I took a stroll around some vintage cars, and there were a number of small aircraft on display. We grabbed lunch from some food trucks, and then at 1:40 we had our slot to get a tour of the air traffic control tower! The boys were absolute champs getting up six stories of stairs to get to the top, but I think they were briefly amused by the lights and monitors in the tower, even if their patience quickly waned, and MJ and I certainly enjoyed it more.

After the tower, it was time for a plane ride! A couple local groups were giving 15 minute rides over the east bay in a series of small Cessnas. MJ and I have both been in Cessnas before, but I love the experience whenever I have the chance. Commercial flights are so detatched from the whole flying experience, intentionally so, but a ride in a small plane is such a delight, it really feels like flying! MJ went up first with Adam, and then Aaron and I took a ride in the same plane with the same pilot. I’m not sure that Aaron could really see outside the plane, but he sat up front with the pilot and seemed to have fun looking at all the switches and dials.


By the time the flights concluded the event was wrapping up, so timing worked out nicely. I had planned on getting some house stuff done when we got home, but my sleep hasn’t been the greatest lately and we were all pretty tired when we got home. Pizza was ordered and baseball was enjoyed for the rest of the evening.

This upcoming weekend only has one adventure planned, MUNI Heritage Weekend! So we’ll be up in San Francisco on Saturday, but Sunday we’re planning on just doing swim class in the morning and trying to spend a chill day tinkering around the house for the rest of the day.

Filed under: animals, events, family, kids, life

Our last A’s game in Oakland

Tuesday, Sep 17th, 2024 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

I attended my first Oakland A’s game on May 17th 2010, just a few months after moving to San Francisco. I wrote about it here: Art and Baseball and the A’s won 8 to 4. A friend of mine I met through the Ubuntu community brought me along and hooked me up with the opportunity to get a baseball signed by several players and the manager of the team. I was still learning the rules of the game and it was a great experience, My fondness for the team and baseball in general grew in the past 14 years I’ve lived here, especially since we moved to the east bay several years ago.


My first A’s game!

Over the years we’ve gone with friends several times, and made date outings as well. In the fall of 2021, one of the first big outings we had was taking the boys to their first MLB game there at the Coliseum in a rented suite. Sometimes when I just needed an afternoon off and some fresh air I’d grab some last minute tickets and take myself out to a ball game.

We celebrated my 40th birthday there, ran the bases on Father’s Day, and generally really enjoyed having a connection to the team and the stadium.

It’s been clear for several years that the owner wanted to move the team, and after rounds of negotiations, the deal was sealed earlier this year, the A’s would be moving to Las Vegas. This was their last season in Oakland. It’s been sad difficult to accept, but as the end of this era of Oakland baseball is upon us, we decided to see one final game at the Coliseum. On the afternoon of September 8th we took BART over to see the A’s play the Detroit Tigers.

We snagged seats in Section 122 and invited our friend James out to join us. Gaby also came with us, so the six of us ate helmet nachos and ice cream as we watched the game and took in our final laps around the stadium.

The boys definitely had their patience wear out toward the end of the game, but I get it, they’re young and an entire baseball game is quite long to them. They were kept slightly engaged only by the promise of walking the bases at the end of the game, one last time. That was a lot of fun too, even if there was a very long line for it.

We weren’t multi-generational fans, but there are memories and we’ll miss going to games so close to home. It’s not an end of baseball for us though. We enjoy the San Francisco Giants, and we’ve spent much of this season following the Phillies. Still, it’s sad for us and Oakland lose the last major sporting team.

Farewell, Oakland Athletics.

Filed under: events, family, kids, life, reflection

Summer joy through the clouds

Monday, Sep 16th, 2024 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Depression is something I feel like that even I fail to fully understand until I’m in the depths of it. I have to very carefully manage my priorities, because some days I just hit a wall and I need to make sure I get to work and that life-sustaining basics are done for myself and our family. There are things that help, like exposure to sunlight, going out, and staying hydrated, but they only recharge my battery a couple percent and then I’m down again. I don’t want to feel this way, I want to be happy and present and engaged. But I can’t just snap out of it. I just need to do my best every day, and ride it out.

Fortunately, I have a great life, so personal hardship doesn’t make it worse. I also don’t have depression that’s debilitating enough to keep me from work and from the care of myself or loved ones. I am grateful for this, I know how lucky I am. It’s very hard some days, but it’s still possible to cope, even if I’m not feeling like my best self. And keeping our lives activity-filled on weekends does help keep my mind off how I’m feeling.

Retail therapy and seeing something to completion also help a little, perhaps unfortunately, but it did mean that finally getting a couch ordered and delivered for my office was a high point. We’ve actually done this before, but the couch was moved into the family room and we really like having it there, so we ordered an identical one to replace the one in my office. It’s actually a sofa bed, but it’s not a traditional one with a thin mattress, it’s the Serta Ainsley (Monroe on Wayfair) and it’s quite comfortable both as a couch and a bed. Since my home office doubles as a guest room, it’s nice to finally have it back, plus it’s a comfy spot to work from when the mood strikes.

We’ve been getting out around town lately, and the end of August brought one of our favorite events, Castro Valley Cruise Night! People bring their antique, vintage, and tricked out cars from all around the area to simply cruise down the boulevard. It’s just a couple blocks from home, so it makes for a very easy event for us to attend. A few booths from local law enforcement and emergency services are set up to meet the community, big speakers for music are set up midtown, and the community really shows up with folding chairs and snacks to hang out and enjoy the cars. It’s one of those events where we really feel community, and it’s energizing and makes me proud of our diverse little town. After doing some walking, we ended up at our favorite sushi place for dinner, and then got to enjoy the rest of the sunset and walk home and keep the boys out too late, oops. But we all had fun.

Last weekend we made it back over to the Chabot Space & Science Center for their first Friday event, and this month it was Science Fiction themed! We’re members, so it was a free event for us, but it would have been worth the price of admission. We were delighted to discover that the Sacramento Astromech Builders brought a couple droids that responded to activity, so the boys and I had a great time engaging with them. They also had face and arm painting of space designs, which Aaron was eager to get, and then Adam was too once he saw how great Aaron’s turned out. Since the event ran from 6-10PM we got to peek into the telescopes before and after sunset. Before sunset we went to their two smaller, older telescopes to see a couple stars, which were just pinpoints of light. After sunset we went over to their biggest telescope and saw the Ring Nebula! Aaron especially really seemed to enjoy that it looks a bit like a doughnut.


I didn’t realize until I got home that I was also wearing R2-D2 socks!


Aaron sits for some arm art

That Saturday marked the Castro Valley Fall Festival, which, yes, is held at the end of summer. It was warm out, but thankfully not overwhelmingly so, and we were able to enjoy a couple of hours there. I bought a couple local themed t-shirts from an artist there and we had some good food truck snacks. One booth had watercolor paining that the boys enjoyed, and there was a petting zoo! Aaron got a pony ride while Adam spent some time with older kids on a climbing structure.



Every Sunday morning the day has begun with the boys in swim classes. We actually started when we were in Philadelphia back in June and did them through July, then took a break in August as we settled back into school routines here in California. They’re held at a gym that’s about a 10 minute drive or 20 minute walk and single stop BART train ride. So far we’ve done both, and the boys definitely prefer the BART ride when it’s warm enough to take a stroll through parking lots and down sidewalks in their bathing suits and towels.

I’m happy to say that as of yesterday, they both graduated the first level of swim survival classes! Next Sunday they’ll have their first “Minnow” lessons, having completed the “Starfish” level. Luckily for us, they had openings in the same time slot, so it won’t be a big change for any of us.

We’ve also been putting some thought into what other activities to sign them up for. I feel like this is one of those things that really blind-sided me as a parent. I vaguely of knew about extracurricular activities, but it takes a lot of work on the part of the parents, and there’s a lot of pressure to sign your kid up for the “right” one. I’ve watched with a bit of shock how hard it is to get into some activities and the lengths people go to in order to get on the right lists and programs. Then I discovered that ones that are almost as good seem to have open availability. I obviously want our kids to be served well by the programs they’re in, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned about parenthood it’s that the needs and values of the whole family need to always be factored in when making decisions about what we commit to. We’ll see what fits the criteria for us in the coming months.

Filed under: animals, castro valley, events, family, kids, life

IBM Telum II at Hot Chips

Thursday, Sep 12th, 2024 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Back in 2021 the IBM Telum processor, the heart of the IBM z16 mainframe, was unveiled at Hot Chips (video here). I watched the recording when it came out, absolutely glued to each little detail that was presented, even the ones I didn’t fully understand (after all, I’m not that much of a processor expert). Over the coming weeks, articles like this one from AnandTech would come out, diving deeper into the cache redesign: Did IBM Just Preview The Future of Caches? by Dr. Ian Cutress. Very cool stuff.

The truth is, every new mainframe has a new chip, and all of them have impressive new features that are innovative and exciting, but this is the first time in a long time that there was such a detailed technical splash with a named chip. What a roll out!

When I learned that Hot Chips would once again be hosted at Stanford, just across the bay from me, I jumped at the opportunity to attend for the next announcement: IBM Telum II

I was a little nervous about the event because of how deeply technical the sessions were on the hardware side, but I quickly found my stride. Since I haven’t kept up very closely on processor design, it was interesting to learn about Intel’s Lunar Lake processor, including the work they’ve done toward power reduction. But I’d say the general theme of the day was hardware accelerated AI on the processor. Telum II fit right in and Chris Berry gave a great presentation.

Now it’s time for me to geek out about it. As you can see, some of the big numbers that make this chip distinctive:

  • A new built-in low-latency data processing unit (DPU) for accelerated IO
  • 8 high-performance cores running at 5.5GHz
  • 40% increase in on-chip cache capacity
  • A new AI accelerator, the compute power of each accelerator is expected to be improved by 4x over Telum, reaching 24 trillion operations per second (TOPS)

See more on the full announcement from IBM and on the IBM Telum page.

This time there was a second announcement too, the IBM Spyre Accelerator PCIe attached card. If you’re at all familiar with mainframes, you know that the PCIe drawers make up a nice chunk of the system, with cards to handle various functions that are separate from the compute drawer, which houses the processors and memory. Having a dedicated AI accelerator card was a logical step forward, so I was really excited to be there for its debut.

Again from the announcement linked above, “The Spyre Accelerator will contain 32 AI accelerator cores that will share a similar architecture to the AI accelerator integrated into the Telum II chip.”

After the talk, I got to meet up with the other IBMers who were in attendance, which gave me the opportunity to meet Chris and Christian, who had spoken at the last Hot Chips.

At this event I also got to meet a couple folks from Chips and Cheese who were covering the event, and wrote an article that came out last week, Telum II at Hot Chips 2024: Mainframe with a Unique Caching Strategy, which was referenced in a recent Hackaday article Mainframe Chip Has 360MB Of On-Chip Cache and led to a few of my non-mainframe friends seeing it.

They also set up an interview with Susan Eickoff and Christian Jacobi, during which Susan shared view into development, beginning with how far out they have to plan (5+ years), a lead time that means its predecessor hasn’t even been released yet. I love these interviews because they give a public view into why certain things were designed in a specific way, which the community doesn’t often get to hear about from IBM. I wish we did more of these behind-the-scenes things at industry events that are so close to the tech community, there’s so much fascinating innovation happening at IBM and I still run into people who are surprised when they learn about it.

As I made my way around the event, I saw some more fascinating talks, but also got to meet a bunch of people. I spoke to a professor at Stanford and some of his students about open source and hardware architectures. I met Lori Servin of the RISC-V Foundation and got to geek out a bit over the talks I’ve been giving about porting open source software to various architectures.

I also got to spend a few minutes with Dr. Ian Cutress, who wrote the article on caches that I read three years ago (linked above).

In all, it was a great event and I’m grateful that I could attend. The following day I watched the live stream from home to check out what companies like Meta and Tesla are doing, plus a keynote from Victor Peng, President of AMD who spoke on our future of AI pervasiveness. It was a real stretch for me on a technical level, there are things I simply don’t understand and appreciate about chip design, but what I could follow (or quickly look up) made the event quite the learning experience.

Filed under: events, mainframes, tech, work

Our first visit to the Western Railway Museum

Saturday, Aug 31st, 2024 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

I’ve wanted to go to the Western Railway Museum for years. They do a ton of restoration work and have various rolling stock that you have the opportunity to ride on if you visit the museum. Most recently, they bought one of the old BART cars that were recently retired and are adding it to the collection. We decided to finally go up on August 17th because they had also advertised a classic car festival in their parking lot for that day, and since we missed our local one in June, it seemed like a good opportunity to do classic cars and a railway museum! Unfortunately upon our arrival we learned that the car festival part of the day was a total bust, there were two cars. Hah! We see more than that just driving around our town on a random Saturday! But hey, there was still a railway museum.

We got a family membership because with six of us it was actually cheaper than buying train ride tickets for all of us, and we definitely wanted to do that too. The museum has a small indoor section near the admissions and gift shop area that we didn’t take a very close look at since the boys were eager to get outside to see all the trains. The first barn you get to has a bunch of old street cars and trams in it, some of which you can climb into, which was a lot of fun.


We then took a quick ride in the San Francisco Municipal Railway 178 car, now affectionately known as the “Iron Monster“.

Once we concluded that journey, we got to go on the much longer, 5-mile trip, on their Key System 187 interurban train. The cool thing about this one (aside from it being a “slinky train”) is that these cars were used from from 1939 to 1958 to go across the Bay Bridge and in East Bay streets. The Bay Bridge routes are handled by buses now, but I do kinda of long for those rail days and it was a delight to finally ride in one of them. It was also funny to ride past cow pastures and wind farms in an interurban train, quite a different life than it had during service times! And probably surprising to anyone driving down the road when one is making a crossing over active roads.

As we were leaving, someone else on at the museum saw Adam’s BART shirt and noted that one of the control panels that was unceremoniously sitting near the entrance was from the BART system, so we enjoyed looking at all those knobs and switches.

I wish we could have stayed longer, but I was conscious of not keeping everyone out too late and we needed to get lunch. Next time I think we’ll bring a picnic lunch which will give us more time to check out the extra barn tours (one of which has that BART train in it!) and also visit their switch garden where you can play with some of the railway switches, which I know the boys will LOVE (me too).

Filed under: family, kids, life, rails

California summer adventures with my sister and nephew

Friday, Aug 30th, 2024 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

A couple weeks ago my sister Annette and my 12 year old nephew flew into town for a visit. We saw them over Thanksgiving, but that was at the townhouse in Philadelphia so it had been a full five years since they last came to our place in California. So much has changed! The family room they stayed in last time is now fully furnished and full of toys, so this time they stayed in my home office, which doubles as a guest room.

We went on a lot of adventures. Possibly too many. The first day they were here we spent a lot of time on public transit making our way around San Francisco. We took BART up in the late morning and then immediately took a historic street car over to Fisherman’s Wharf where we finally got to ride the SkyStar Wheel (Ferris wheel). From there they did a little tourist shopping before we headed up to Ghirardelli Square.

Someone remind me never to go to Ghirardelli Square for ice cream on a summer weekend again. It was never a calm experience, but now it’s pure chaos. It’s loud, you hover over a table to find seating, and it’s quite the opposite of relaxing. We did eventually find a table to enjoy our ice cream, but I think Aaron was a little tired at this point so I had to sit with him for a while to calm down after he had a huge tantrum over not getting to finish the brownie on the sundae (it was offered to him multiple times!). Honestly, next time I might just take visiting friends and family to the Factory Store in San Leandro, it has a lovely little ice cream cafe that is enjoyable to eat in.

Once Aaron had calmed down and everyone used the restrooms the next thing on our agenda was riding on a cable car. We hopped on a bus and made our way down Van Ness to pick up the California Street cable car at the end. Unfortunately that’s when we learned that the cable cars had shut down for the day due to the Vice President visiting for a campaign fundraiser that happened to be taking place at a hotel located on the cable car lines. Thanks, Secret Service. Taking a peek at the time, we made a diversion to a nearby Grubstake Diner that MJ had heard good things about. It didn’t disappoint! The bus ride to Civic Center there did disappoint though. It’s not the best part of town, the bus was late, and I think that particular adventure was a lot for my sheltered Maine relatives, hah! Still, it got us safely to BART and all three of the kids fell asleep on the train ride home.

Sunday I wanted to be a bit more chill since everyone was tired, so we had a quiet morning at home together, and then decided to head up to Joaquin Miller Park in Oakland to finally visit the Chabot Space & Science Center. It was amazing!

The gems of the center are definitely the telescopes, and we’ll be back for some of their telescope events in the near future. It was fun checking out the exhibits, and there was a lot of interactive and play stuff there too, which will be nice to take more time with when we go there with just the boys.

They also have a planetarium that does shows all day, and I love planetariums. It’s also a gentle introduction to a theater environment for our rambunctious kiddos, and just like our planetarium experiment in Philadelphia back in July, this one went pretty well.

On Monday I worked from the San Francisco office and then Gaby was kind enough to shepherd everyone from Castro Valley into San Francisco on BART before concluding her day with the boys and heading home. This was when we fixed our missed cable car opportunity! We waited at the Powell Street turnaround for a while, and then caught a cable car back down to Fisherman’s Wharf. We had a nice walk and discovered the San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park Visitor Center that has a surprisingly extensive exhibit about the history of the area, and everyone really seemed to enjoy it. From there my sister picked up some more tourist goodies and then we got on a street car to head home. Mission accomplished!

On Tuesday afternoon once Adam finished school I packed up my work laptop and we made our way over to the Oakland Zoo. I settled in near the bison paddock for a couple hours to finish work while Gaby and Annette took the boys around the zoo. I met up with them around closing to go on some rides in the area just outside the zoo.

We let everyone have a chill, local Wednesday and Thursday while I worked from my home office, and then took Friday off for some final adventures! In the course of the week, I discovered that going swimming was on their California list, but the beaches are far and not really swim-friendly, so I asked a local friend what she recommended and that’s how we ended up spending the afternoon at the Don Castro Swim Lagoon. It was perfect! I can’t believe we hadn’t been before! Admission for the six of us was a total of $15 and they have life guards and a very clean facility. It’s still beach-like, but it’s all man-made and effectively a big pool, which you notice when you swim out to the deeper parts since you can touch the concrete bottom of the “pool” out there. We had snacks at the beach and wrapped up around 4PM to clean up and eventually meet MJ for dinner. MJ was picking up the family car in Dublin, so we all hopped on BART and then caught a bus to meet him at Lazy Dog right on time to eat.

Our final adventure was on Saturday, to a railway museum that I’ll write about soon. They headed out on an overnight flight back to Maine on Saturday night. It was nice having them visit and seeing the boys bond over adventures, video games, and even chill TV time. I also enjoyed having some quiet time with my sister to catch up on family stuff and how she’s doing in general. We live such different lives so far apart, it can be tricky to stay connected, but these visits every year or so certainly help.

Filed under: animals, castro valley, family, kids, life, rails, san francisco

Concluding summer vacation in California

Tuesday, Aug 20th, 2024 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

I’m glad to be back at home in California. Spending 8 weeks over the summer in Philadelphia was an adventure, but I love our walkable town, the support network here (small as it is), and being back where all my stuff is here in California. Being home also means I’m back to healthier routines, including walking more, and getting out of the funk I was in during the tail end of our visit.

We came back about a week and a half before school started back up, with Aaron going back to his pre-school and Adam entering Kindergarten on August 7th. It gave us time for our au pair, Gaby, to take them out on some local adventures around town, over to the seed library at the Hayward Public Library, and to San Francisco. That Friday I drove them over to the Oakland Zoo where I settled in to work for the afternoon while they enjoyed the critters, and caught up with them at the end of the day to visit with their final remaining elephant, and then go on some rides outside the zoo once the main zoo closed.

We also got all the cars washed (an at-home car wash for our 2000 Alero, thanks boys!) and even jump-started one of them, since we’d been gone so long.

That first weekend back we went back to all our old routines. Saturday morning Farmer’s Market, we went to a book sale at the library and then a garage sale, had lunch at our favorite cafe. On Sunday I took them out for donuts and then we made our way over to the hardware store to pick up a couple plants and some soil to complete the dream Adam had all summer: planting a garden. I had gone out to Home Depot earlier in the week to pick up a garden box that was on clearance, and we assembled it, but quickly discovered that we didn’t have quite enough soil to fill it. Later in the week Gaby helped him with planting some seeds, which I’m happy to say have started sprouting.


Buying soil!

Freshly assembled garden box

Unfortunately it wasn’t all fun, MJ had an accident at the end of July that severely damaged his shoulder (thankfully no breaks) and that’s still healing, but he has been in a lot of pain for several weeks. Plus, he’s had to work doctors appointments and restricted driving ability into his schedule, which hasn’t been easy. A lot more childcare has shifted to me, but at least we’re back in California where I have some additional help around the house overall, so I’ve been able to manage the extra load, mostly.

Still, life kept moving along! While working with Adam on his planting adventure, and coming home after 8 weeks away, I realized how much our yard had gone to the weeds. It was bad. And honestly I don’t have the time or inclination to manage it, as much as I’ve tried. We ended up hiring a gardening service that pulled out all the mulch and weeds from the front, replaced a whole section along our front walkway with white rocks, and completed some weeding and tree trimming in the back. It’s still mulch, but it looks a lot better, and our neighbors certainly seem to appreciate it, and so do I.


Front garden before and after

The start of the school year was rather anticlimactic. Due to the arrangement of classes this year, Adam has the same teacher and classroom as he did in TK, so there wasn’t much to prepare him for, and Aaron went back to the same preschool. They both enjoy school right now, so there were also no tears. Aside from me coming close after we dropped them off, Kindergarten is a big step! Plus, it was nice to see us all get back to our routines, I certainly enjoyed being back in my home office here. Now we just need to get back to all our big home projects, the first of which is doing some furniture shuffling. But first, my sister and nephew came into town, and added on a few more adventures to the tail end of our summer!

Filed under: animals, castro valley, family, kids, life

Library fun, critters, and a final Philly train ride

Monday, Aug 5th, 2024 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Over all we had a good summer in Philadelphia, but a round of COVID, canceled Florida trip, a sunburn, and a few days of MJ coping with an injury definitely made for some challenges. I joked with a friend that “we had a phenomenal Instagram summer!” because of all the activities and fun we had exploring. The challenges were real challenges though, and since we’re both still working full time while we’re there, it adds up. I’m going to leave these challenges in the past though, and focus on the fun!

I mentioned that the boys had been earning badges from the local library through a free program to inspire kids to do challenges and activities. They each earned four badges, and it was a lot of fun for all of us. I’m not sure I’ve mentioned before how much I enjoy the library programs from the Bucks County library system, but their branches are incredibly kid-friendly and the play areas are more extensive than what I see in most of the San Francisco bay area. My sister in law Irina suggested it’s because there are more outdoor activities year-around in California, so there’s less of a need for a library on rainy or frigid days, and she may be right. The culture here in California generally seems to be more catered to adults and mature kids than young ones.

The Bensalem library definitely ramped up things for the summer, and Aaron particularly enjoyed a presentation from the Center for Aquatic Sciences where he got to pet a horseshoe crab.

In the evenings we also got really into some Lego builds. Aaron even helped out a little, but would mostly work on his creative Duplo creations while Adam and I focused on building a train, a firehouse, and a fire helicopter. I think we’re going to end up with a little Lego City there.

Seeing family is also obviously a big part of why we were there over the summer, so it was nice to head downtown one evening to have dinner with MJ’s cousin Lauren and her husband. I had met her husband once before, but only MJ could attend their wedding due to a bunch of unexpected circumstances last year. So it was our first time seeing them as a married couple. We met at Emmy Squared Pizza where I got the “Angel” pizza consisting of Truffleist mushroom cream, ricotta, mushrooms, and it was spectacular! I’m still dreaming of this pizza. And it was also great as leftovers. I think our only complaint would be that something went a little wrong with our order and we waited almost an hour for the adult food to come out, which made the boys a bit antsy as the evening wound down and they had finished their meal. It was nice to have the extra time to catch up though, and Adam got his wish of getting to see the sun set on the Philadelphia skyline so we could enjoy the beautiful nighttime lights of the city. He’s definitely my kid, I love those nighttime city skylines too.

In other family news, our regular visits with Irina and little Sam were a highlight of our trip. Sam and Aaron are roughly the same age, so it was nice for Aaron to have a summer buddy. One evening we were able to go over to their house to have pizza and catch up, and Aaron was absolutely enamored with her dog Maya, and both the boys enjoyed spending time with Olive the cat.

Animal-wise, our neighbors were rabbit-sitting, so one evening we went over there to catch up and get the latest neighborhood gossip while the boys got to play with the rabbit. Predictably, all of this has lead to a string of requests to get a pet. I really would love to, but we have a lot on our plate right now, and our extended visits to Philly definitely make having a pet tricky. We’ll see, I haven’t been pet-free in decades, and while the loss of Caligula still stings, the pull of getting another cat is getting stronger.

During our visit I also was able to sneak out one afternoon to meet with Kris, a former colleague from my Tyco days. We’ve loosely kept in touch via Facebook, but we hadn’t seen each other in over a decade. Some of my posts throughout the summer clued her in to the fact that we weren’t too far away from each other. It was a great to reconnect, and we’ve penciled in doing something more involved with the boys next time we’re in town.

The final Friday before we left we made our way back to the Churchville Nature Center for a moth-themed presentation and camp fire. It ran quite late, and I think the boys were on the young side to appreciate a lot of the introductory lecture, but they got to walk around outside at night, see some bugs, hear a screech owl, and finally roast a couple marshmallows over a camp fire. I did a lot of camping as a kid, but it’s hasn’t been something we’ve done yet, so it occurred to me that the boys hadn’t really experienced a camp fire before. What an oversight! There’s a campground not too far from here, maybe next summer we’ll spend more time in California and do a weekend adventure in a tent.


Our last day in town we did some final clothes shopping (tax-free in Pennsylvania!) and then turned picking up the rental car that we’d be taking to the airport the next day into one final adventure with a train ride to the rental car center at the airport. The plan had been for MJ and Adam to go down alone while Aaron and I went on our own adventures around town, but apparently there’s nothing more fun than taking a train, so we all went.

Some of my low-key stress around packing and preparing to leave bubbled up during our train ride, but I did my best to be present and enjoy the journey with everyone. I mostly succeeded until Avis was over an hour late with our rental and we had to sit at the rental car center trying to keep the boys entertained. I should have brought more snacks. Then the stress carried into Sunday as we closed up the house and began our journey home. I hope this gets easier as the kids get older, but I also need to keep working on strategies to manage this family travel stress, I hate that the conclusion of our visit is so tainted by such an elevated stress level when there were so many great moments throughout the summer.

Filed under: animals, family, food, kids, life, philadelphia, rails, travel
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