L. r. californicus

L. r. californicus in the creek! Not the first time we've seen it--we spotted one nabbing a squirrel a few weeks ago--but first time we've recorded it. Looks like we're in its territory, and it in ours.

The Family Christmas Letter, 2017

Welcome again to my annual (ha!) Family Christmas Letter, your best way of keeping up with us, short of any other means at all.  As with previous year, we'll take it person by person, but begin now with a quick summary of the last 12 months:  WTF?

TALIA:

Talia joined the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater where she premiered "Dances-with-Tents," for which she won the Nobel Peace Prize. No, not really, but almost as improbably she took a contract with the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where she encountered software that actually discourages you from working too hard (this explains why visa processes take as long as they do, were you wondering). In spare moments, Talia made VW buy back our cheatermobile, got the whole family to be strictly vegetarian for a week, and more than once slept in the barn.

GIDEON:

Yes, well, that happened, nor was this day, camping near Bodega Bay, the only such. As Gideon's pants attest, he continues to live life to the fullest, and then some. A second grader, he is knife self-certified and uses the word "hypocrite" correctly in conversation with my mother. When not disrespecting his elders, Gideon likes to ignore them. He's friends with a fish, a remarkably good rock climber (Gideon, not the fish), and wears glasses despite having perfect vision. Make of it what you will.

FELIX:

Felix, now in 5th grade, has discovered role playing games (shown here in character as a twelfth-level bouquet). This means he's happily entertained for a couple of hours each Friday night, and the rest of us get to hear about it in excruciating detail for twenty or thirty hours thereafter. A star student during the week, he continues to bring home worksheets with one, two, or even three gold stars on them. Having not paid much attention to his sports doings, I was surprised to find myself watching his team in finals, from which they emerged Champions of the World (or the part of it that calls the sport "soccer" anyway). Even more thrilling, he stood up on a surfboard for several seconds a couple of months ago.

ALEC:

This year Alec just gave up and let himself sink into it without further struggle. It's a relief. When not enmired, Alec is busy hunting pirates on the virtual seas and making infrastructure uncomfortable. For some reason he found himself floating down rivers repeatedly this year, which is a nice break from struggling against the tide.

THE HOUSE:

Speaking of sinking, our aged property likewise reached new depths, from which we are still trying to extricate it. Shown here, Talia attempting to levitate new drywall into place, just one of the many incidents that finally convinced us to get a roof. Also on our To Do list: doors, windows, insulation, and right angles. But first we must save the barn and the land upon which it sits from washing away downstream--there is a limit to how many rivers I wish to float down.

THE VACATIONS:

Faithful as always to the Christmas letter tradition, some pictures from this year's travel, of which there was a great deal. More to come in 2018, too. A crazy year for we inhabitants of planet Earth, but a wonderful one for us and, we hope, for you as well.

Hamual

Every year they get bigger, the hams and the boys alike.

The best in town

It's been a while since my family has won a "best in Fairfax" award (2010 Halloween "Best Family" to be exact), but the combination of Talia and her skills plus Gideon and his cute is still unbeatable. Go team!

Ash

A colleague of mine lives in Santa Rosa, or did before the fires came (that's his neighborhood, just chimneys and ash now, above). Now he, his wife, and two baby girls are in a rental they were lucky to get in another town in Marin, happy to be alive, but faced with the colossal task of rebuilding their lives. One of the many challenges they face is documenting their insurance claim, and one of the ways you do that, it seems, is to sift through the wreckage for evidence of the possessions that were destroyed. That's something I can do as well as the next person, so I joined him and a few others at his former house last weekend.

The destruction in the area is unbelievable, as these photos attest:

But that's just the economic destruction--houses, vineyards, orchards. There is the social damage--Santa Rosa alone has lost something like 5% of all its housing, and that in primarily (though by no means exclusively) lower income neighborhoods that will never reform as they were. Then there's the impact on the watershed of the heavy metals and other toxins created and released in the fire; the rains which will bring those pollutants into the waterways are just beginning and the impact is much feared. We wore our N95 masks and gloves for work in the ash--a full Tyvek suit would have been even better--and I was there for only a few hours, but the crews and homeowners who face weeks and months of work in these places will surely suffer for it.

And the work, what a heartbreak it is. There's no question of salvaging anything, all you can do is look for fragments of metal or ceramic--absolutely nothing else has survived--in the hopes that it will provide evidence of what once was. Here's an example, see if you can guess what this is:

The answer, believe it or not, is "a motorcycle." And most of what you see there is actually roofing tiles. When the hammer of the gods falls, it comes down hard.