And there it is, my old apartment renting for just $1,000 more per month than I was paying in December. I love that they proclaim it has a new refrigerator and linoleum floor, when neither is true.

Gotta love San Francisco real estate.

Yesterday a friend called me up to say that one of the songs that I recorded with Nick Waterhouse was used during the opening scene of the NBC television program, "Parenthood." As with most musicians, I won't see a dime from it, but it is the first time that any song I've performed on has been used for a national broadcast. Quite an odd sensation ( Read more... )

My daughter is not yet speaking, but she babbles and has vowel movements all the time these days. This morning I was hit with the realization that it's a lot like living with R2 D2. I have this short little creature in my life that makes all sorts of strange sounds, to which I make replies such as "that's right, that's daddy's shoe," or "Uh huh, we ( Read more... )

Years ago a therapist called it magical thinking ( Read more... )

And so it is, that after eight years in San Francisco I'm about to bid farewell to the city. The family and I are packing up our boxes and heading across the bay to Oakland, trading our current one-bedroom city apartment for a 1912 Bungalow on a tree-lined street. It is time ( Read more... )

Last Saturday evening my daughter was acting restless, and so I took her downstairs for a walk. It was dark outside, and the windows in the old Victorian houses were glowing in the late November darkness. She stumbled down the sidewalk in the amber sheen of the streetlamps, pausing here and there to examine a pavement stamp, or to peer inside a ( Read more... )

My daughter is now officially one year old, and has celebrated this milestone by becoming bipedal. Most mornings I wake up to her stumbling down the hallway in a manner that is not entirely unlike the drunks who stumble by our apartment on Saturday nights. In fact, both my daughter and the drunks are similarly inclined to loud, and largely ( Read more... )

Throughout this entire housing bubble bust, I have repeatedly said that whenever you read or see a news report on the housing market, you should always insert the phrase "except in San Francisco" after the first sentence. For example ( Read more... )

A recent observation on parenting a nine-month-old:

A baby will put virtually anything in its mouth, EXCEPT actual food that you've placed on a tray in front of them.

In the course of my work as a historian, I'm occasionally asked to work on some rather novel projects. For example, in 2009 I worked on a historic survey of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. And last year I was hired to prepare a National Register of Historic Places nomination for John Wayne's yacht, the Wild Goose.The process of listing a property on ( Read more... )