bouncing

Right around the same time that we videotaped that playdate / very slow wrestling match between our 2 favorite then-almost-7-month olds (Jake & Kurt) we had the opportunity to document our favorite then-almost-6-month old (Elise) in her maiden voyage with Kurt's Bungee Baby Bouncer. It took her a little while to figure it out, but she really got the hang of it...

By the end, she was doing almost as good as Kurt.

Kurt & Jake had another playdate at our house recently and we get to watch Elise next week, so maybe we'll get some more video up one of these days...

in case anybody's still paying attention...

...I'm not going to feel too bad for not having posted in a while. I did say from the start that this was probably just a Japan blog, so we've already gone above and beyond. But we wanted to send a little treat out to anybody who's still paying attention...

If you've talked to Max or I recently, then you know that our lives are consumed with other people's babies. Don't get me wrong, we still watch a lot of TV and work like maniacs. But there are babies everywhere, and we love them!

Last week we were lucky enough to host a play date with our 2 favorite nearly 7-month olds, and here's a little bit of the gold we captured on video:

Goleta burns...

We returned home to find Goleta on fire... to be specific, the hills just to the north of Goleta, about 3-6 miles from our complex. These are some views from our complex around 6:00pm...




To top it all off, we keep getting rolling blackouts. Lame!

The blackouts (plus a slightly freaky smell of gas-leak in our apartment) prompted Danielle, Jeff, Kurt and I to seek out chinese food. We bounced from restaurant to restaurant until we found one on the mesa that still had power, and ate heartily. I do have to say that driving around in search of chinese food while one can see flames from the freeway, with ash falling everywhere, was a pretty eerie experience...

Yosemite Falls

Look how pretty

In Yosemite

We made it and can occasionally get Internet on the iphone. Here's a
pretty picture from our drive:

a charmed plane ride...

The very last leg of our Japan trip was a flight from San Francisco to Santa Barbara. Apparently these don't run very often because we had to wait in the airport for something like 4 hours. I was taking this picture of Nike getting in a nap after some 20 hours in airports or on buses & planes when I realized that I was ALSO photographing Pru, Piper, & Phoebe's dad from Charmed!

Here's a photo from imdb for comparison:

Anyway, I briefly considered telling him that I was a fan of Charmed and I thought the series finale was just about the best series finale I had ever seen. I'm not sure if it would have been nice to be recognized or annoying to be bothered while waiting around at the airport, so I erred on the side of not wanting to be annoying.

It turns out he was also headed for Santa Barbara, so when he boarded the plane with us, I couldn't help but speculate about the news reports if our plane crashed...

(...it didn't, by the way...)

Yosemite in 1 week...

We leave for Yosemite in 1 week.



We're meeting some of my family there.

We will rarely if ever have any cell service or internet access...

...but if we can, we'll post some pretty pictures & a note that we made it safely. (The pictures are from the last time we were in Yosemite -- 2 years ago.)