Happy New Year!

2011 ended with the one-thousandth puzzle piece completing Yosemite Valley and another day of snowshoeing. It was a week of indoor activities, helicoptoring and reading, and sporadic outings on either snowshoes or cross-country skis, but mostly it was a week of resting for the year to come.

Unlike the last two years, Baleen and I were with my parents this year, not the Garetts, so we didn't get a chance to give each other New Year's Resolutions. Instead, we reviewed last year's resolutions and learned that Baleen had met hers, I hadn't, and that Grizzly had spent the last two weeks cramming for what he had neglected over the previous fifty, daily push-ups and sittups.

Here's hoping that 2012 starts off well for everybody and is full of happy, healthy and well-behaved babies.

Night Walking

We're cursing La Nina and Ken Duncan over here in the Beehive State. La Nina's keeping our skis in the garage as there's a dirty ridge of high pressure stationed over the Salt Lake City area. That comes from our resident meteorologist, Margarine, who's getting into fisticuffs with Grizzly over the location of this jetstream. They're settling this little disagreement like they've always done in the Old West, by pulling out dueling iPads.

Wherever the jetstream is the result is the same, cross-country skiing in slush and snowshoeing after dark. It's a couple hours of activity a day, which just might be enough in this high altitude, with the rest of the time filled with books by the fire and eating, especially eating.

Our other nemesis, Ken Duncan, comes courtesy of Margarine, who gave Grizzly an 1,000 piece puzzle of Yosemite Valley for his birthday. We're about 100 pieces in. At the current rate, we just might finish by 2012.

8,350 feet

There's more snow up on the mountain so Grizzly led us on a hike through the woods. It started at Empire Pass's 7,900 feet just as the lifts were closing and headed up, turning right and left so many times that 0.6 miles only gained us 365 vertical feet.

It is Grizzly and Wood Duck's home course, and they're happy to share it with the skiers, but back when they arrived in late November, they had it all to themselves. They told us about breaking their own trail through the fresh powder and all the different routes they'd tried before settling on the one they showed us, the Loopty-Loop.

Baleen and I want to go back soon now that we know about what to expect and especially what to wear and try it again. Because the Garmin, the very same one that makes sure I get the biking jerseys I deserve, said that our entire hike was 1 hour and 20 minutes, but that our moving time was only 43 minutes. That's a lot of time for pictures, nature stories from Grizzly and water breaks.

6,371 feet

Shrimp Jr, Grizzly and I got out the garage sale skis and ran 4.2 miles on those long skinny things. It was my first time on the new course up by the Olympic ski jump, and I enjoyed it, but we'll really need some more snow to still be skiing there at the end of the week.

Doesn't look like I'll downhill this week, not with the thin cover and modest amount of terrain open at each of the mountains, which is just fine by me and also by Baleen with her swollen belly, but there is something missing in a ski town without any snow. It's like being in a fishing town where all the boats are docked.

It's all anybody talks about, the lack of snow. It's not so bad when it's you and another couple flown in from Dallas chatting over the shade grown coffee at Whole Foods, but when it's the guy in front of you at the gas station who's filling up the tank instead of giving private lessons on the mountain, that's where it's felt a good bit more.

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas to those in Park City, Fort Worth, Birmingham, San Francisco, Princeton, Wisconsin, Chicago, Atlanta, Milano, Los Angeles and Newport Beach! And to everybody else, a Happy New Year!

A Day's Labor

Baleen and I shredded sixteen pounds of cheese today, all in the name of that traditional Christmas favorite: mac and cheese. I'm hoping there will be some left over around noon tomorrow when I wake up. A hundred and fifty people are expected at Carole's house tonight, hopefully rotating through with no more than a hundred at a time, and I don't think I'll get to bed until well into Christmas Eve, better known as Grizzly's birthday.

He'll probably wake up early out there in Park City and wait down at the kitchen bar for Shrimp Jr to come downstairs and wish him Happy Birthday. Then he'll put on a modest amount of clothing in a great huff and cross-country ski out his backyard with Shrimp Jr in tow, perhaps with Wood Duck there also.

He'll lead the group of three for as long as he can, saying he's cutting the trail and doing extra work up front, but really hoping as many people as possible see him leading the way, until Shrimp Jr decides she's had enough and passes him by. They'll get back to the condo where Wood Duck might already be, waiting with something hot, and Grizzly will be the first to say something, probably something like, I'm improving, I got second, or, if I hadn't of cut that trail at the beginning I might have had you on the back stretch. All Shrimp Jr can do is just nod.

Baby Strength

I'm on vacation. In the morning I dance around the tides, leaning a little toward the ocean as I head down the beach. North of there it's a concrete sidewalk for a few minutes before reaching the driveway at 984 Hale Street. It's a slight climb, nothing like Hawk Hill, nothing at all, but that's what I'm thinking of when I turn back for another go.

I also did thirty push-ups this morning, thirty more than I normally do, as Baleen's been saying my equilibrium's off. I'm bottom heavy and I'll need some baby strength up top to swing Baxter about.

The stroller, which we already have, will carry the load when we're outside the apartment, Baleen says, but when we're inside the apartment, I'll be carrying Baxter around. Though he'll come out at around eight pounds, he'll double that weight in just a few months. Makes me want to do some more push-ups right now.

Pages

We're actively leisuring up here in the North Shore. It's a comfortable rotation from bed to couch to alternate bed to table to couch in front of the fire and back to bed again. A few diversions are thrown in here and there, some that even require us to change our outfit, like a run down the beach or a walk to Dunkin' Donuts, but what most happily got thrown in to today's laundry was Baleen's pajama bottoms.

She's somewhere in Minnesota right now, confirming that Freedom isn't the next great American novel with her avian concerns, but still a great one while I've gone from Montana with Wood Duck's Christmas present to an Alaskan winter with Carole Morley Bruce's reward for top marks in the Fifth Form (I won't tell you the date), Call of the Wild, to west Arkansas for a little True Grit.

It's pleasurable leisure but what I really should be reading, and am saving to cram just before the test, is the 100 page instruction manual on our new camera and that other instruction manual, The Baby Whisperer, so we can sleep through the night come March. I've still got a few more months.

Ipswich Date Night

Baleen and I sampled some of the North Shore's best on Tuesday night. We shared the Riverview with the St Johns hockey team, college kids back on break, and three generations at a single table, the youngest usually crawling over the grandparents or dancing around the pies and drinks pushed to the table's edge.

We liked it, though not quite as much as those fervent Yelp reviews or that single review which came from inside our own house. It seems like what they were really describing was nostalgia, some memory of a first date, a championship celebration, or the way an old couch feels down in the basement where you could disappear from your parents for a few hours.

The pizza was fine, and I'll tell people it was good if they ask, but what I'll remember is pulling out the calendar on the iPhone and sketching out visitation rights for Baxter's first few months, all in the town that Baleen and I got married in just sixteen months before.

Bridge to Cam

I saw Dario's father, the Professor, at his workplace. He's the new guy there, or really, the hasn't even started guy, so he had to look smart, which means dress like he normally does, including a jacket with the collar absent-mindedly turned in, but with leather shoes instead of sneakers.

Cambridge is still a college town despite the city real estate prices, as they've got bookstores and even a few record stores. The cars are proudly unkempt with years of parking permits crawling up the windows, advertising your tenure in ways you can't in conversation. There's organic sandwich shops with the sections of the New York Times spread amongst the tables and the Dunkin Donuts' where the panhandlers warm themselves and stare at the Massachusetts Avenue passengers through the window seats.

But my favorite part of Cambridge is the Mass Av Bridge, not just because you've gone from gown to town in half a mile (and let's not kid ourselves about the town part), but because whatever agency that regulates the Bridge has let MIT tastefully tag it. You see, as I understand it, some fraternity, two kegs deep, was discussing units of measure, as MIT students do, and decided that feet or meters or even fractions of miles was inappropriate, that the Mass Av Bridge should be measured in body lengths of their smallest fraternity member, Smoot. So they laid him out, head to toe, starting on the Boston side, until they reached land in Cambridge, determining that Mass Av wasn't 4/10 of mile, but 364.4 Smoots and one ear.

JoyLibs

I'm knee deep in Cheerios and risotto over here in Inman Square, Dario's castle, doing today what I meant to do yesterday. It's a preview of things to come, I'm sure, as Baxter's not even here yet, and I'm falling behind on the basics. On Thursday night and Friday morning back in San Francisco, it was a rush to get everything done that needed to be done for two weeks away, first in Boston, then Park City, and, well, the non-essentials didn't get done. Baleen put this on the list.

Then United split us up, Baleen going to the front of the plane, me staying behind, and we didn't get the chance to simultaneously watch The Help on the iPad with the split headphones, or do what we normally do, which is create our own Hangman. Instead, we'll just to resurrect the last one, with the guessed words from Hopalong in CAPS and the whole thing written by Baleen.

Baleen's water broke at 8.43am and it was a TREMENDOUS sight. Hopalong first started SKIPPING like an OCEAN and then realized that he should take Baleen to the hospital by grabbing the overnight bag and JUMPING there. Baleen exclaimed on the way that her belly felt like GLASSES and started EATING. Once at the hospital, Hopalong continuously exclaimed, YES, I feel DASTERDLY. The actual pushing went CURIOUSLY and the new parents were DELIBERATE with joy. Hopalong claimed the newborn looked like an ORANGUTAN but later stated he was delusional with the SYMPATHY of fatherhood and ORNERY with love.

28

Shrimp Jr turned twenty-eight today. I think she's past the age where she's measuring her height each December 15th though she still has homework and gets report cards, just not the kind that require Grizzly and Wood Duck to sign them.

I could have used her this morning up Hawk Hill as it was 2011's last assault on 7.36. Rain and cold kept everybody except for Asprilla and another away, but the rain meant Asprilla brought his cross bike which meant that I was taking the hill on my own.

It was a good ride, enough to earn me two digital jerseys in the absence of most everybody else for the way up and the sprint through the Presidio, but to break 7.36, it looks like I'll need some help. 7.50 is all I could do solo. Here's to Hawk Hill in 2012 and Shrimp Jr continuing to get report cards she can happily put in front of mom and dad.

Pizza Pizza

Baleen's got the best home kitchen pizza dough recipe in the English speaking world, created by somebody with strong ties to those indebted places. It takes forethought, which Baleen has plenty of, as you imagine today what you would like to eat tomorrow, and organization, which is where I come in. I'm the one who goes to the grocery store, and when Baleen's work won't stop calling her through the night, I'm the one who gets out the electric mixer with the dough hook and does the day before prep.

But having the best base doesn't mean you'll do right by the top. That takes restraint, which I think I have enough of, but also vision (cooked pancetta also helps). The vision thing is where I fell short. I had the right idea, don't overload, as I kept it to tomato sauce, mozzarella and green olives, but mine was swimming in tomato sauce. When I tried to slide it all onto the pizza stone, the sauce beat the dough off the peel.

Mother is the necessity of invention! Baleen could have cried, but didn't, as she rushed in with a metal spatula. She folded the back of the dough over its innards so that my once perfect pizza was sealed off like a perfect calzone, which, we found out, takes just a few minutes longer than a pizza to cook.

6 More Seconds

2011's giving me one more chance to best 7.37. I gave it a shot this morning with 7.42, my second fastest time, and the third consecutive morning of improvement. Thursday just might be the day. It better, because after Thursday, it's two weeks of turkey and a few quarts of egg nog before I try again.

I'll know on Thursday about how I did, but not exactly, as frequency has led to familiarity these past two weeks. I feel it mostly on the sections where I used to relax for a seconds. If I can push through those moments, it just might be. Before, it felt like, pain, pain, pain, now it lets up and I can ease up, and I'm easing up, now it's rising again and there's pain, pain, pain, and a little less pain now because I'm letting up, and now it's over.

But to get 7.36, it'll have to feel like, pain, pain, pain, now don't let up and keep on pushing through the False Flats, hard through the circle, then more pain, staying in the saddle but keeping 10mph, then ninety more seconds of pain, then sixty, then thirty, and a final frickin push out of the saddle to the finish.

German vs German Engineering

Oh, the immeasurable satisfaction of doing what you're told you can't do. Dario's Father knows what that's like, having biked to Inverness when everybody told him to drive there, or maybe even take a cab, and Baleen does, too, when she got plenty of counsel against moving to London, which meant she almost certainly never would have gotten that job and been transferred to California and we might never have met.

Those are big ones, but the small ones count, too. When the Audi dealership told me it would be $80 to replace a broken bulb, I figured I'd do it myself. When the instruction manual told me I really, really shouldn't, I got all Dario's Father on them and decided I had to.

Ten minutes on the internet and three trips up and down the stairs to stare at Audrey, our car, then back to the internet was what it took to get the light off. $5 was what it took from O'Reilly's to get what I needed. So with the 75 extra dollars in my pocket, I did a little solo dance in the garage and told Baleen to put on that blue dress, the one with the gold buttons on front as I was taking her in Audrey, the Audi with two fully functioning tail lights, to Wayfare Tavern, the new Tyler Florence restaurant downtown. We didn't have reservations, but hey, you don't really need reservations when you get there at 5.45, do you?

MC

Margarine's gone all Mission Chinsese on us. Back when Baleen and I lived in the Mission, back before Bon Appetit and the New York Times had annointed Mission Chinese as the next best thing and way before Ferran Adria stopped by for a bite, Baleen and I used to pop in every now and then for the Ma Po Tofu and a cold beer.

If you didn't want Tsingtao, which I didn't, then the other choice was Bud, which was fine becausae we didn't need something that stood up to the food, just something to cool us down. But last night, when we took Margarine there during his 18 hour work visit to San Francisco, I ordered a Bud after Baleen had ordered far more things we could eat.

Oh, we've stopped serving Bud, the waitress said. She listed a number of microbrews, all of which I like, but just hadn't expected to have alongside Broccoli Beef Cheek. The next morning, as Margarine headed out in his Sebring convertible to interview an expert witness, and I hugged him goodbye, telling him, Later, as two brothers do, it was easy to see that he, too, looked a whole lot better in his nice suit, tie and shoes, than he did back when Baleen and I used to live in the Mission.

Foghorns

500 feet gets you through the wet, dark fog of a San Francisco morning to something like a clearing. If you're going that far, might as well keep on going to something like 805 feet and the top of Hawk Hill. And if you're headed to the top of Hawk Hill, might as well try and get there as quickly as you can, which today, was 7:50.

That's twenty-three seconds faster than Tuesday and just thirteen seconds behind my fastest ever time. Gloves and a heck of a push from Asprilla on the first half of the False Flats got me there, though he wasn't there at the end to yell at me like he did on Tuesday.

In the end, it was a double jersey day with a winning sprint through the Presidio, my first lead from beginning to finish. Packie Bonner's flat and the continual cold helped winnow the field and when we got to the start, instead of finding a wheel to hang on to, I found the front and just kept on going.

Oh My Sole

Well, get me a cable knit lambswool sweater stiff with sea salt and call me Cap'n. It's fish and greens week here in the Mission suburbs. After a cautious month or two as we figured things out and a hopeful attempt with predictable results of asking a Greek fisherman if red snapper was good for pregnant ladies, it's been nearly ten straight days of fish for Baleen.

Sunday was king of the Pacific night with a wild sockeye over pureed peas, the peas served at room temperature, the sockeye warm from the pan, which Baleen thought wasn't right, that the peas should have been warmer while I liked the peas as they were, just as I mostly like white wine at room temp so I can taste it, while tonight was sole with rice and spinach.

Oh my beans and rice. Sole, the flounder like fella that loves the seafloor, supposedly spends all its time buried in the sand with only its eyes and gills exposed, according to Alan Davidson, while at night, and on very dull days, it's the Summer Olympics. Pity the poor sole, bored to death and ending up on a dinner plate near you, and near me again, hopefully.

35 Degrees

It was damn cold out there this morning. For those needing a little more that means it was somewhere between I can't feel my fingers and the digits are losing dexterity, but warm legs is what you need on Hawk Hill, not warm fingers. Full of hope, I took off after Christopher Robin at the gun, 3 yards behind him, and immediately 50 in front of the rest, but at the first turn 3 yards was too much to make up at the pace he was going and I fell behind.

As Christopher Robin pointed out afterward, that left the two of us tied with a King of the Mountain on the Hawk Hill Start, the 0.2 mile 12.2% grade that took us 1:03. But for me, as I couldn't keep up, that's like saying I had the fastest quarter mile in the one mile race yet dropped to eighth at the finish. There's no joy in that.

On the False Flats I was in no man's land so I stood up and waited for Asprilla and John Wooden and rode their wheels to the top where Asprilla, in his first ride since the birth of his second son 3 weeks ago, told me to "push until I puked." I didn't, but I did come across the line first in the Presidio Sprint, thanks to a nice lead out from Christopher Robin, making that 2 jersyes in as many months. Hot bananas.

Yeast

Vegemite bites. It might be my fault, I could have applied it wrong, but I don't like it, and I'm justifying it by saying it's legitimately bad, not like when George Bush 41 said he didn't like broccoli and as president, he didn't have to eat it. Broccoli's good. Vegemite's bad.

I had it at The Wedge, a sandwich shop in Glebe that any Mission Cycler would have been proud to have sponsor their jersey alongside Bi-Rite or Tartine. There were two pieces of toast with a few ounces of Nutella, Vegemite and butter. When the toast was gone so was the butter and the Nutella, but not the vegemite.

I checked a bag through security on the way back so Baleen could sample two different jars of vegemite, and it's been two straight mornings of butter and vegemite on toast. That's where I could have gone wrong, slathering a healthy chunk on there without any butter, but the way things are headed, there's a good chance I'll soon be outnumbered in my own household 2 to 1 by Vegemite loving family members.

With Hopalong Gone...

Unlike when I was traveling for work and Hopalong was home alone, my evenings were not filled with a swim in the frigid bay, a pound of pasta and 25 minutes of my legs propped up against the wall and back on the hardwood floor in order to "get the lactic acid out."  In looking back on my first solo week in over a year, I am delighted and amused to see how I chose to spend my alone time in my new "maternal" state.  Where 3 years ago I would have booked dinner (definitely kicked off with a glass of champagne) with a different friend every night, this week was marked by healthy dinners, online shopping with a warm cup of pregnancy tea or a Trader Joe's Chocolate bar (which won the Baleen and Hopalong blind taste test against several European and New Zealand contenders, by the way) and a few "bouts" of productivity. I am chuckling at how almost "stereotypical" I unconsciously was!

For dinner, I made myself a salad with spinach, asparagus, boiled egg, parm cheese and wild sockeye salmon.  I entertained myself by buying adorable silk maternity pants that I don't see leaving my wardrobe even post-maternity and I closed the gap on the list of Christmas gifts remaining to buy.  In one of my fleeting states of productivity, I framed the pigment reindeer print we bought for Baxter's nursery!

Enjoyable week, but definitely nothing compared to my weeks with Hopalong.

xo, Baleen

My Salmon Salad

                                  My new silk pants from Hatch Collection.

Baxter's first piece of artwork

Corella Hill

My Australian bike rides are over, thankfully, for Baleen, who worried incessantly that I'd have a head on collision with all the cars driving on the wrong side of the road, but it worked out fine as I just tucked in my chin and followed the wheels in front of me, leaving them only to push my way to the top of whatever hill we were climbing.

There were no jerseys at stake, just a roll through places with funny names, and English ones, too, like Woolloomooloo and Paddington, and enough rain to keep my hands on the bars and away from my camera, even as we descended down Watson's Bay with the opening to the harbor in sight.

I finally paid back a few Aussies, too, like the couple in Santorini who gave us a ride in their cab from the port to the airport, as I bought a round of cappuccinos for the two Chrises, my Aussie biking hosts, at Parc Cafe on Clovelly, where people in spandex outnumbered those wearing pants 3 to 1.  It's like buying a round, but for the early, active crowd.