Yayabiko

Yayabiko has gone pink in honor of the big news.  Yesterday’s trip to the doctor’s office, Haidee’s belly was smeared with goo and an ultrasound wand traced the curves of her expanding abdomen.  We watched the flat screen and witnessed the first true glimpses of the beautiful stranger growing inside.  We saw an arm wave.  There was a yawn.  A rapidly beating heart.  Lungs, kidneys, fingers, toes, a nose, and long, perfectly complex, spine.  It’s a girl by the way…

Located three hours north by bus from Mexico City, Querétaro is a quiet Spanish colonial town with twisting cobblestone streets, delightful squares, and hidden courtyards ready for exploring.  The founding of the city is dated as July 1531 and it was recently marked as a UNESCO World Heritage site. Haidee and I boarded a plane on Christmas Day for our first trip to Mexico.  The location was suggested by Rene and Laura, friends of ours from Mexico, who joined us one day, taking us on a tour of nearby San Miguel de Allende, an artist’s town one hour north.  Our first trip to Mexico was an overwhelming success.  We fell in love with the food, the architecture, the art, and the people.  This will certainly be the first of many trips to the rich cultural experiences awaiting us south of the boarder.  Click on the photo to see the best 55 shots of our adventure.

Around xmas time a buddy of mine handed me his “Favorite Albums of 2011″ list.  Comparing lists at the end of the year was something we used to do many years ago after MP3s had first hit the scene and there was a lot of peer to peer sharing going on.  This got me thinking about the albums that sucked up the most of my time for 2011.  Documenting for posterity, I offer up my favorite albums of the year.  Are these the *best* albums of the year?  Hardly, I feel like I missed too many albums to judge that.  These are simply the albums I spent the most time with — my personal favorites.  Let me know in the comments if you agree or disagree with these choices.

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Got out to my first show since arriving back Stateside.  Tapes n’ Tapes came Bottom of the Hill, which literary is bottom of the hill from our apartment.  A great band bow-tied with a great location.  I rang up my old SF show buddy DK to see what he was up to, and he was game.  Dinner at Chez Maman then short walk down the hill to the venue.  First band, the Glaciers, came on at 10pm, Dale Earnaround Jr. Jr. started their totally entertaining show around 11:15, and Tn’T didn’t start until 12:45am.  Are shows starting later or am I getting older?  DK was a hero hanging in there as long as possible, an unexpected 8am drive to the airport loomed in his short term radar.  He was great to showing up at all considering some events that cropped up in the last week for him.  DK drifted out around 1:15am and the band raged on until 1:45am.  Great show, great venue.  This certainly won’t be the last show at Bottom of the Hill for me.

The weekends are becoming more normal for us.  The move activity list is well scratched off at this point.  We’re looking forward to getting back into a weekend routine in our new city.  If we were in Europe, we’d wake up on a Saturday morning, have a hearty breakfast, and then head out to the organic markets for shopping, sniffing, tasting, browsing the local farmer’s offerings for the week.  So that’s what we did this week.  We grabbed our shopping bags, hopped on the scooter and went to the SF Farmer’s Market at the Ferry Building, one of the best known, and well loved, Farmer’s Markets in America.  What we found was very familiar to our European weekends including a long and fascinating chat with some locals over wine.  Click on the picture to see more.

Out of our temporary housing, Haidee and I are settling into our new house and neighborhood.  Click on the picture too see more photos as we readjust to life in the States.

Walking down the alternative, trendy Valencia street in the Mission neighborhood you may catch the glimpse of people ducking in and out of a small alleyway.  While Valencia itself is well populated, even at night, the dark alleyways leading away from the light evoke caution.  What is making people go down there?  Perhaps this is a corner for drug deals?  Prostitution?  You see a light bulb flash and you think it must be a crime scene.  Exploring under the safety of daylight uncovers the SF Murals Project, an alley turned loose to SF’s best graffiti artists to showcase their work.  Click on the picture to see more.

Nobody warned us that we’d get reverse-culture shock when we came home after living abroad for four years.  In the last two weeks, we’ve had to let go our quaint and cuddly Amsterdam and warm up to a noisy city, full of wide streets, crazies on the bus, and horn happy drivers.  Thank God for the sun.  It’s been spot on beautiful for 12.5 of the last 14 days with more sunshine and blue skies than we’ve seen in a long time.  So we’re adjusting; to the sun, to the crazy handheld electronic device envy, to city wide composting, to hidden taxes, to overhead wires, to organic gluten-free non filtered beer, and all the other weird and wacky odd-ball stuff that makes SF such a joy to be a part of.  Click on the photo to the left for a random sampling over these last two weeks.

Anyone who’s slept over at our house in the last decade has had to put up with a mosquito like whine of a computer fan throughout the night.  The whine belonged to a computer, a small desktop at first, running Linux, then later graduating to a swarm of mosquitoes as the hardware was upgraded to a server running ESXi and three virtual machines.  The computers have been serving up these pages, yayabiko.com, faithfully from my office for as long as I’ve had a website to run.

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