Thing 1 — Taming Wild Beasts

Thing 2 — Scooting

Thing 3 — Enrolling a Large Part of our Family into a Scooter Gang

Thing 4 — Being Photographed at Night

Thing 5 — Riding on a Taxi that Floats

I ask you, what did you do on your weekend?

For more evidence of our doing astonishing things, go here.

We’ve discovered some excellent Pita baking techniques. We’re using the recipe from The Bread Bible, only since we don’t plan ahead, we don’t raise it for anything like the time suggested in the book. Then, we’ve been baking the pitas on our grill outside. Most of the time they rise into beautiful little pockets like you see here, and the whole process takes about an hour, including rising and baking.

We’ve also been doing some Dodo flying. Friday afternoon I bought a new motor for my Dodo and Joe and I took both our planes up for some tandem Dodo flights. It was not to be. Mine was far underpowered and took a quick nosedive into the brambles. I took it home and did some repairs, and replaced the propeller with a larger one. This morning, while Alyssa was rounding at the hospital, I took the Dodo out by myself and had an excellent flight.

Of course, as always seems to be the case, that flight ended with a serious nosedive into the concrete, but the nosedive was preceded by some beautiful moments. Loma Linda’s almost beautiful at 7:30 in the morning.

Joe bought the same kit that I used to create the Dodo, but his creation turned out to be far less flightless; which is to say that it flew.

I’ve been inspired to resurrect the Dodo, and see if I can’t make it soar once again. We shall see.

Despite not having our own functioning plane to fly, we had a pleasant time watching Joe fly up in the hills above Loma Linda.

Quite a good time.

We decided that it was time for another sadieshoot. She did quite well.

You can see the entire set here.

We have been to Baja, and it was excellent. I’d highly recommend it. We saw many things, many of which you can see on our flickr gallery of the trip, or on Jesse’s.

The video above is of diving Pelicans near Bahia De Los Angeles, excellent birds in an excellent place.

But that’s not what you’re here for.  You’re here to see photos of Sadie and Thomas.  Go ahead.  I know you want to.

Potting

We took some time last Sunday to re-pot plants. Alyssa worked on her herbs, I worked on the Kumquat Alyssa gave me for Christmas.

Read on for more.

“Flying”
You may notice that the word Flying is in quotation marks above. That is because the dodo, pictured below, hardly flew at all. After many hours of construction, my first ever remote control plane immediately gave me my first ever remote control plane crash. Most of the plane is fine, but the motor is completely done for. I expect a new one in the mail any day now.

There is a video of the event, but the pain is too fresh for me to release it to the internets just yet. Stay tuned for that.

Hiking

Alyssa got a pair of trekking poles, and we convinced some friends to enjoy the snow in Idyllwild with us. After a filling breakfast we made our way up towards suicide rock, but the rocks proved elusive.

More photographic evidence of the end of the world after the break.

This weekend was my office Christmas Party. When I think of Christmas Parties I think of going over to someone’s house to awkwardly exchange gifts and drink cider. For our Vertical Advertising Inc. office Christmas party, we all met at a hotel in Laguna, ate four courses in a private dining room on the roof of a hotel, and stayed up until far too late. Alyssa and I were loathe to leave the beach this morning and return to the smog-ridden harsh realities of the Inland Empire.

To ease that pain, I decided to take on an afternoon project. It is true that generally any time I I take on a project, more pain is inflicted than relieved, but I was feeling lucky.
I followed the vague guidelines from Make Magazine, spent far too much time and money at Lowes (the workbench was supposed to be a deal, and the actual materials were only $30 or so, but that was before I bought a square, and drill-bits, and several hundred wood-screws, and a measuring tape, and hooks to hang our bicycles from the celing, etc..), and then spent a happy couple of hours in the driveway putting together the workbench. As you can see, the experience was generally a success.
I feel as though the next step should be to paint it, but I’m undecided as to the colors. Any suggestions would be appreciated.