No social gatherings amid the pandemic of course, so a rather limited Halloween this year – just in costume to go pick up some take-out food, play a board game, watch a movie:
Darlene and I ventured out as Gandalf and Galadriel for Halloween this year. We spent the afternoon with Jon and Siobhan, who is recovering well from some complicated and unpleasant oral cancer removal surgery and associated tissue transplants. As a hopefully amusing distraction, we took them on a little adventure playing Tales of the Arabian Nights. Let’s see, I think Siobhan’s character was crippled and driven insane, Darlene was imprisoned and repeatedly unable to arrange an escape, I was scorned for a while before under going a sex change and Jon stumbled into marrying a passing stranger and somehow into respectability and eventual success.
Later that evening, we joined Kathie, Dave, Kevin, Vanessa, Lisa and Rachel for more gaming while awaiting the very few trick-or-treaters who dared knock on the door. We got in games of Welcome To… and Decrypto as well as a few rounds of Jackbox Games’ Fibbage XL via the AppleTV.
Alas, no other pictures for Halloween this year!
Darlene and I managed to make it out to the local Renaissance Faire last Sunday (near Casa de Fruta). Click through for a handful of pics:
Darlene and Marvin the Martian joined Resi, Troy and Aiden for the closing ski weekend at Homewood in Tahoe this past Easter weekend:
Click through for the full gallery:
For Darlene’s birthday we went to see a performance of the musical Hamilton at the Orpheum Theatre in San Francisco – in costume of course. The smiles are mostly due to the very enthusiastic and zealous person who insisted on taking our picture for us afterwards!
I haven’t been skiing at Mammoth since the early nineties, after college, but it’s where I learned to ski in high school from nearby Bishop. And I had forgotten what a great big and diverse ski mountain it is – though I’m sure I also wasn’t skiing as much of any mountain’s terrain back then either. Anyway, driving to Mammoth from Santa Cruz/San Jose in the winter isn’t very convenient (given all the Sierra passes are closed) and you have to essentially drive by many other great ski resorts to do it. However, with an extended stay at our new place in Tahoe last week, it was easy to hop down to Mammoth for a couple of days (just a three hour drive) and make use of our Mountain Collective passes.
We got some nice, typical spring skiing conditions: overnight frozen snow, following the sun as the slopes softened up from east to west to north. Plus Mammoth is so high (peaking at 11,000 ft), it was easy to avoid any sticky slush that would develop lower down.
Click through for the full gallery:
It was Darlene’s turn to host her family’s holiday gathering this year in Wisconsin – Halloween-themed this time. Click through for the full gallery:
Pictures from last night’s Halloween/birthday dinner party for Kathie – with Dave, Rachel, Dan, Lisa, Kevin, Vanessa, Darlene and myself:
Pictures and video from this year’s annual Pirates of Cache Creek event with the Outdoor Adventure Club – click through for the full gallery:
And a short video montage of the weekend:
(Three minute video montage, 122 MB)
I’m posting here to share a collection of images of Gina that I’ve gathered together in this photo stream:
I’ll add to it if I find more pictures. Here’s information on her memorial life celebration, this Sunday, March 20th.
Here’s the pictures and video from our annual week of skiing and tabletop gaming, this year back in Tahoe again with Jon, Jim, Bill, Kat and Brin. We were unfortunately in a bit of a very warm and dry spell for California at the end of February. This kept us to the freshly groomed runs, rather firm in the morning, soft in the afternoon and refrozen over night, but we hit up Squaw Valley, Alpine Meadows, Sugarbowl and Northstar over the course of the week.
Mike & Nanci hosted a Halloween party at their place in San Jose this year. Mike showed he was practicing to be a member of the Blue Man Group and Nanci tried to make rain as El Nino but it was more of a dribble. I showed up as an Arabian desert prince with my lovely genie-of-the-lamp, Darlene.
Click through for the rest of the picture gallery.
Pictures and video from this year’s annual Pirates of Cache Creek event with the Outdoor Adventure Club – click through for the full gallery:
And a short video montage (130 seconds) of the weekend:
Last weekend, Darlene and I attended both nights of the Edwardian World’s Faire and Ball in San Francisco again:
And then on Sunday we spent the day at the California Academy of Sciences:
