Star anise pods, a photo by cynren on Flickr. Via Flickr: Atmospheric shot of my new favorite spice. Shown here as a great accessory to my new cutting board! Cross-section of daikon radish. Making dinner takes a long time when you get distracted by how beautiful vegetables are.

Beautiful! Love going downtown and revisiting treasures like this.

Sergio’s roof, a photo by cynren on Flickr. View of Sergio’s roof from the upstairs window this morning, reminds me of art school assignments of making a painting in all white. It was still snowing this morning, but has stopped now. The heavy snow yesterday caused some chaos during commute time, and it took me about 1.5 hours to get from Hyde Park to Miles, then it took Miles and I another 1.5 hours to get home. Miles read and then took a nap on the way home.  

Lourdes is in labor (maybe), a photo by cynren on Flickr. Via Flickr: I found this file folder during a recent cleaning event. Ah, urgent communications pre-cell phones. Despite the urgency of this note (scribbled on a manila folder which was probably the first thing I could grab to write on, the all caps, the exclamation mark) I think that "maybe" was the key word here. My memory of this is pretty sketchy, but I don’t think Lourdes was in labor after all.

We got snow at last! It was very pretty and sparkly last night, light and easy to shovel, and only about 6 inches. A perfect snowfall.

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.  See the most popular posts of 2011!!  Happy New Year Everyone! Here’s an excerpt: A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 3,100 times in 2011. If it were a cable car, it would take about 52 trips to carry that many people. Click here to see the complete report.

Myself and Cynthia were at a great little 2nd hand bicycle shop, looking for a new bicycle frame for my winter cycling.  This is not an easy item to find, you want good handing, with lots of clearance for big wheels and fenders, with no gears to get messed up by all the salt on the roads.  Cynthia found this bike in a pile of others and it was perfect, an old GT Rapid Transit Cruiser with internal gearing (three gears all in the hub so they can’t get salt on them).  Here it is after I put on the…

We’re still debating whether it can be called a party or not, but we went on a fun Christmas outing last night. First, dmk burger bar for dinner (super delicious everything, including a toasted marshmallow smoothie for Liam and a home made ice cream cookie sandwich for Miles). Then we went over to the Music Box cinema for one of their annual screenings of classic Christmas movies. The cinema is really ornate and they decorate it up with lights and tinsel. Santa started off the night with a singalong of carols (including one with local flavor that lamented the loss…

Described as a Christmas miracle by Beatriz next door, Miles opted for a short haircut yesterday. Turns out he had eyebrows and ears and a forehead under all that hair! And they are quite delightful eyebrows and ears and a lovely forehead! Liam and I got our hair cut too. Here are the three piles of hair after we were done. Miles won the most hair off contest (his is the middle pile). (subject line of this post is a nod to an excellent book by Nancy Farmer that we just read, called The Ear, The Eye and the Arm)