Blog Archives

Yesterday, Jeff and I took a short drive south to the Filoli Center…a Historic Trust home and 16-acre formal gardens…near Woodside, CA. We visited in the fall a few years ago, but never in the spring, when the bright flowers are at their peak.

FYI, those of you who watched Dynasty in the 1980s will recognize this home as the Carrington mansion. For our part, we experienced no melodrama on our visit…just throngs of Asian tourists.

Last weekend, Jeff and I pulled off a surprise visit to my parents house for my Dad’s 70th birthday. Fortunately, there were enough other family visitors in town to throw off my usually-suspicious father. This adorable shot of my Dad and my nephew Benjamin tells the story of the weekend…pure delightful fun.

And now…a quick slideshow…

First off, the birthday cake…baked by my aunt Teela…decorated by my aunt Sherry.

Next…an unexpected visitor…a white squirrel in the front yard. Its eyes are black…so does that make it only semi-albino? Such is the stuff of great debate.

Cliff and I had to get some items out of the attic and ran across our stash of old Atari games. Cliff and Jeff made a quick dash to Radio Shack to find a proper connector for modern TV, and we were soon taking a trip down memory lane. Funny thing though…the games were definitely full of nostalgia…but they only held our interest for about 60 seconds each. Still, the sights-and-sounds of simple pleasures like Pacman or Pitfall were well worth the $5 video connector.

Another discovery from the attic was an old school project from 1978…a book about me…my favorite topic 🙂 On the cover was this amazing old family photo taken at our old house…a true classic.

There were lots of fun items in the school project, including a story I wrote in 1978 about a baby bird we found and cared for: we called him Knee-Deep, after his distinctive call. The two-pages from this story are shown here…Jeff pointed out how similar they are to my blog style.

One last memory for now…a photo that my dad took of the pet rat I called Radish. I think he looks like the cute rat from the movie Ratatouille…Jeff thinks he looks like a rat 🙂

Jeff joined me for a few days in Northern Virginia. I had several work meetings to attend, and it served as a perfect excuse to get Jeff away from his daily grind.

We spread the visit across the weekend, so that we could surprise my Dad for his 70th birthday (details to follow). We ended up in two hotels on either end of the weekend…the Hilton and the Ritz Carlton. Frankly, I’m a Hilton kind of guy…I don’t need, nor truly appreciate the so-called luxury of the Ritz…even when the prices are the same. At the end of the day, they both provide comfy pillows to cradle your weary head.

In spite of a short visit, we were able to squeeze in two visits. On Monday, we ventured out in the rain to see James and Ginger…including some fun games on the Wii…fortunately, the Wii is entertaining even without skill 🙂 On Tuesday night, we drove into the District to meet up with friends Josh and Mark, who took us to the very popular Lauriol Plaza Mexican restaurant…and then out to a couple of nearby watering holes. (As an unexpected bonus, on our way to meet Josh and Mark, I drove Jeff by the Tidal Basin and the Cherry Blossoms, which were in full pink regalia.)

Somewhere along the way…Jeff caught a nasty cold 🙁 Given the timing, I think its fair to say he brought it from California, but we did enter several “virus breeding grounds” along the way. Hopefully, we didn’t create some new super-virus by joining west coast and east coast strains!!

Knock on wood…I’m still cold free.

Let’s be honest…there is very little exciting or interesting about tax season. And with Turbo Tax, the entire process has become rather mechanical, with none of the last-minute drama commonly reported on TV…at least not in our house.

But I did want to report on one curiosity that shows up deep within the California tax forms…an adjustment for income from “Ottoman Turkish Empire Settlement Payments”. (The Ottoman Empire was a powerful state for over six hundred years until it dissolved in 1922.)

Unfortunately, Turbo Tax offers none of its usual helpful explanations on this line item (in spite of the deceiving “Explain This” link.) But how could I let this one go 🙂

A little Googling reveals lots of other bloggers noting this item…so shoot, I’m not blazing new comic territory here. But still…no good explanation.

According to a 2004 press release on the New York Life Insurance website, these payments were part of a class action suit settlement to “resolve more than 2,000 insurance policies issued to Armenians in the Turkish Ottoman Empire prior to 1915”. The total value of the settlement was $20 million.

Damn. I guess I don’t have to check THAT box on the tax form.

We decorated eggs this morning…a colorful Easter shout-out to all of our nieces and nephews. We invited Chris over for a champagne Easter brunch, for which I made one of the recipes from our Kitchen on Fire cooking class. I made a flavorful mushroom, asparagus, and three-cheese frittata…with fresh rosemary from our garden. (The frittata was my first…made possible by a new frittata pan…Jeff’s Easter present to me 🙂

Happy Easter, everyone.