Today we got a nasty surprise in the form of an email from my next-door neighbor informing me that somebody had attempted to break into our home¹! An hour later (while I was on my way home from work), we got another email indicating that the suspect had been arrested.

Apparently, someone was messing around with the lock on the gate to our backyard and my next-door neighbor yelled at them. They hopped the fence, so he called the police and yelled at them some more. They fled. The police came² , patrolled the neighborhood, and caught the guy …

I went up yesterday with my wife's family to hike around on some Sonoma Land Trust property up in the North Bay and brought my camera. It's amazing to see the hills green and growing after so many years of drought! You can see a smattering of photos in this flickr album, but here are some of my favorites:

If you're in Northern California and are physically-able, you should try to get out and enjoy this; it's gorgeous!

Hello infrequent readers: here's a piece of good news for once: as of October 27th, I've moved! $SPOUSE and I now live in the Elmwood neighborhood of Berkeley, California in a nice little two-bedroom one-and-a-half-bedroom single-family residence. It's a little surreal; even though where we live has a pretty nice mixed-use vibe (there's an apartment building around the corner, a bunch of restaurants nearby, and a Whole Foods only a few blocks away), it's still practically rural compared to the apartment in the Tendernob that I've lived in for the last eight years¹.

It's been a stressful move; the …

As most of you probably know, I got married last month! The wedding was in Claremont and went great, and it's probably worth a post of its own; however, what I've come to write for you is a description of what followed — our honeymoon in France. We visited Paris, Beaune (in Burgundy), Avignon (in the Southern Rhône Valley), and Saint-Raphaël (in Côte d'Azur). Read on for more pictures and anecdotes than you could've ever asked for!

(Unless otherwise noted, all photos taken by me with my E-M5 and the Olympus 12-40 PRO lens, or my iPhone 6. All of the …

As I alluded in my last post, I've had a fair bit of extra time on my hands for the last couple of weeks. That's because I've been quite ill. This post is the exciting story of what I've been sick with.

Starting in the evening of Friday, 2014-01-10, I had body aches and a fever. Now, at first, I didn't even know if anything was wrong — I'd slept poorly the night before, and maybe I was just feeling poorly because E was going back to school. Unfortunately, when I woke up on Saturday, 2014-01-11, the fever was worse, so …

Hello dear readers. I just thought i'd give you a life update, since it's been nearly a year since my last post. In no particular order, some things that have happened since then:

• I've been dating a lovely young woman for the last eight or so months who actually gives me a reason to go home from work at the end of the day. Which is a refreshing change!
• I got some new musical instruments and computers and things (my custom shop '52 reissue tele is pretty much the most pleasant guitar I've ever played, even if it is ridiculously …