At the end of the day, I dropped Kevin and Mason off at the Milbrae train station for their trip back up to SF. I think this was Kevin's first opportunity to try out his new skateboard.

4x4

After go-karting, we made a pilgramage to In-n-out, where Kevin and Mason, in arms-race fashion, tried to outdo each other by ordering a bigger burger than the other. Kevin won by ordering the 4x4. Four patties of beef, four slices of cheese.

Catching rays 

Photo op

We stopped by our house for a quick photo op with Louisa. Abby in no way tried to upstage Louisa or draw attention to herself. Why do you ask?

With Louisa 

Driving Ms Abby & Louisa

Kevin tagged along with his friend Mason on a boondoggle to SF, and since he wanted to go karting again, stopped by to visit us so I could take them ;-). First stop after their train ride down from the City was lunch at the local Spanish Tapas restaurant, Cascal. After lunch, we trekked through downtown Mountain View (pictured above) to Gelato Classico for dessert.

Gymnastics camp

Abby had her last day of Gymnastics Camp today. She actually really liked it. Who knows?

It's official!

No, the adoption hasn't gone through . . . yet. But Louisa's hair is officially long enough to be put into pigtails. As you can see, she couldn't be happier.

Abby pushes Louisa...

. . . And it's OK. At Castro Park near our house, while mom tidies up the house for Sunday.

Bathing Beauties, part 3

Louisa swam for the first time today, and although whe was trepidatious at first, she quickly warmed up to it. She especially enjoyed slapping the water and splashing it in dad's face.

What's on sale in your town?

I ran across this site today that can search all the sales in local stores in your area. Looks like you can be vague (I tried "watches" and came up with watch sales) or specific (I tried "Harry Potter" and came up with sales on the new book) as you want. Pretty nifty.

Houston we have a . . . Google Map

In honor of the 36th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, Google has launched a Google map of the sites of the Apollo missions that made it to the surface of the moon.

Speaking of the future of Google maps of the moon, they had this to say:

"We usually don’t announce future products in advance, but in this case, yes, we can confirm that on July 20th, 2069, in honor of the 100th anniversary of mankind’s first manned lunar landing, Google will fully integrate Google Local search capabilities into Google Moon, which will allow our users to quickly find lunar business addresses, numbers and hours of operation, among other valuable forms of Moon-oriented local information."

Zoom in all the way to see what the moon is really made of.

You're Breaking Up

Today Abby learned the existential pleasures of singing into the fan. Another rite of passage checked off the list.

Willy Wonka

Saw the new version of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. I was working putting a few Saturday hours in at work, and Jenna, hot and restless back home, had Abby call me at work and see if we would go to the movie. So we went and got out of the heat.

Crazy Jet-powered MR2

A post today on Jalopnik conjured up a chuckle of astonishment. Some crazy person installed two GE jet turbines into a Toyota MR2 and is selling it on eBay. Current bid: $18,650. Crazy.

Louisa practising her Mogli pose on the couch. 

Abby jamming to Moby. Since her pajamas lacked pockets, we had to wax inventive. 

New Tubing Pics

We finally got the photos from the waterproof disposable camera developed. See them in the revised Yellow Belly entry about our float down the Guadalupe river.

I've also added a post for the day at Schlitterbahn.

Google Earth

We downloaded Google Earth the other day and have been having a lot of fun with it. If you haven't tried it yet, I definately recommend you check it out. Basically, it is a virtual globe overlaid with satellite images of the earth that you can spin and zoom in real time. The images stream to keep it updated, so it probably works better on broadband than on dial-up.

There are a lot of other things you can do with the software, including getting driving directions, finding restaurants, etc. Sometimes we just use it to virtually "fly" back and forth to grandma's house. In fact, Google Earth is now up there with MS Word and the Chinese vocabluary game as Abby's favorite software package.

I also found that people are already starting to come up with "hacks".

Swimming solo

This week is heating up in the stress department as a deadline looms at the end of next week to finish designing the engineering prototype for my current project. I have much more than a week's worth of work left to do, so my hair is starting to turn grey.

Luckily, due to a loophole in the swimming lesson bylaws, Abby moved on to the next class in swimming lessons, which doesn't require a parent in the water with the child, even though she steadfastly refused to do a back glide and consequently failed the parent and tot class we took over the last two weeks. Turns out that four-year-olds, whose ranks Abby recently joined, don't have to pass the parent and tot class to move on to Water Readiness, the class in which she is now steadfastly refusing to hang from the wall. So I'm back to getting in to work at an early hour . . . usually around 9:30.

Hopefully Jenna will pick up the developed pictures from the disposable waterproof camera I toted to Texas today. Besides photos of the brothers' wet escapades, it has a shot or two from the last session of swimming lessons.

Edit: Jenna came through, but the pictures weren't all that great. Above are two of Abby's classmates from the first class and her three teachers.

Abby's Birthday Party

Impromptu party flying a kite

Impromptu party opening presents 2
 

Impromptu party Louisa swinging
 

Impromptu party eating ice cream
 

Impromptu party opening presents 1 

Abby "Pescado" Adams

With her chaw stuffed with Ikea salmon.

The view from up here

The view of the choir from our nosebleed seats.