Our day at the Academy of Science

On Friday, the kids had off from school, so we went to Golden Gate park to check out the new CA Academy of Science, along with a few thousand other families apparently. Yes it was crowded, but it was fun nonetheless. The living roof is so cool! It reminds me of my 3rd grade project, about an underground solar home built into the side of a green grass hill. Check out the CAS web site.


The new Steinhart Aquarium is really cool too. I played with many camera settings that day, but still have not found the ideal set up for getting a good shot of a moving fish with no flash and no blurring. Also, I could use a better zoom lens, to get those detailed shots. Here is the CAS photoset on Flickr.



Being in the four story Rain forest was pretty amazing, and the highlight of the day really. Just watching the butterflies zoom around the place was mesmerizing, no to mention the cool lizards and snakes on display as well. We did skip out on the penguins that day, in favor of leaving the museum to find some food, but I am sure we will be back soon.

Sally thirty years in the future!

Sally drew this picture this week in her art class with Mittie Cuetara at Glenview. Her assignment was to draw a self portrait of herself, thirty years in the future. It appears Sally is a Super Veterinarian who lives in a land where animals float on fluffy white clouds to rest and recuperate. That sounds like good medicine to me!

Pizza time with Chef Mark

I like to cook. Not the every day gotta put food on the table before my children crumble type of cooking, but the fun gourmet type of cooking. One item I have gotten good at making is Pizza. The kids are happy & I get to play with dough. Everything I know about making pizza, I learned from the Cheese Board Collective cookbook.

We enjoy making the Potato pizza with Yukon gold potatoes and lots of caramelized onions! Making your own pizza is a great way to empty out your veggie bin before you lose your vegetables to decay (which happens to me a lot, since I forgot they are in there). I also suggest that you use artichoke hearts, they make any pizza somehow even better! I am also fond of fresh mozzarella, heirloom tomatoes, fresh basil, Aidells Sausage and olives too.

I think I will add my cooking photos to my flickr account and add an item or two that I have made each month, but we shall see. Time to take a break from the computer screen!


The Cheese Board and Arizmendi rule!

Artist of the week: Joseph Cornell

This week I thought that I would choose an artist that uses found materials and such since all the money in the world will soon be gone. Hang onto those glass beads and wampum, people!

From Wikipedia >>
Joseph Cornell (December 24, 1903 – December 29, 1972) was an American artist and sculptor, one of the pioneers and most celebrated exponents of assemblage. Influenced by the Surrealists, he was also an avant-garde experimental filmmaker. He lived in New York City for most of his life, in a wooden frame house on Utopia Parkway in a working-class area in Flushing, Queens. He lived there with his mother and his brother, Robert, who was disabled by cerebral palsy.[2] [3] Cornell attended Phillips Academy, Andover, in the Class of 1921.

I had the pleasure of seeing his work at the SF MOMA, Joseph Cornell: Navigating the Imagination. It was really inspiring! I got that super charge spark of ideas you get from great art, and wanted to go home and create something right away. Some day I will make my own box and it will say Thank you Joseph Cornell on the inside.


More links to explore >>
The Joseph Cornell Box
The Guggenheim Collection

Ballyhoo for Buckaroo!

On Saturday afternoon, I took the kids to the Pacific Pinball Exposition in San Rafael for a few hours of pinball madness. It was incredible. If you are local ~ I strongly urge you to get over there NOW! I am still hungering for more pinball action after the meager 2 hour session yesterday. They have 250 machines set on free play, it is a thing of unsurpassed excellence on Earth. I could go on, but I will get to the point. Classic pinball rules! It's strange for me to say this, since my favorite games have always been part of the last generation of pinball ~ games like Attack from Mars, Funhouse, Twilight Zone, Medieval Madness, Creature from the Black Lagoon, and The Simpsons. But since most of those games were swarmed with people, I stayed away from the crowds and tried my hand at the classic pinball machines from the 60s. They had some incredible machines there, which were painstakingly restored to pristine condition. One game that I absolutely fell in love with was Buckaroo.

Buckaroo features a horse kicking a cowboy in the butt on the back box when you hit certain shots, which you think would get old, but no ~ it's funny every single time! This game is a lot of fun, and has this cool twin Roto spinner in the middle which you need to hit in the middle to spin and then hit the numbers 1-7 on the sides. I could go for days about how incredible this game is but I think I'll just head back there tonight and play for four or five hours! Pinball is mighty, let its luminescent radiance wash over you and its electro-mechanical charms seduce your soul, you might even achieve enlightenment this way, who can say for certain? Well, that's my plan at any rate.


Here are my photos from the Pacific Pinball Expo >>

Then Comes Marriage

Here is a recent poster that I designed for a friend that I have known since Junior High, Gerry Beyer. The main image was taken from Mary Blair's The Up and Down book and modified to suit the happy couple. I have some more poster designs, but I will show them all later when I have more time to add another page to my web site. Enjoy!

Life on Cat Planet

It's time once again, to admire the work of my beloved daughter, Sally! (I would admire some of Xander's work but he has his own blog). Here we have a cat plane flying in the sky. Sally is getting great at creating borders as well. Below is a picture of cat planet, which apparently orbits near Earth. I can only assume, one would find a cat plane on cat planet, but I could be wrong about that. Sally named her Spore planet, "cat planet" as well. Her creatures in spore resemble something like flying scorpion dogs though. Fun game, that Spore!