Straight Outta Davis: November 2008

Happy Thanksgiving!

The kids have had the week off school. Mostly Dan has been home with them. We will be heading to Berkeley tomorrow morning accompanied by some pumpkin pie.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Turkey Trot

On Saturday morning three friends and I ran in the Davis Turkey Trot 5K, very slowly. (One of the three just had a c-section 6 weeks ago, but I have no such excuse). It was fun. It's the biggest road race here in town. It was quite foggy and cool Saturday morning, which made for decent running weather.

First basketball game

We went to the first UC Davis home men's basketball game this afternoon. They were playing Portland State.

All the usual suspects were there, like the Cal Aggie Marching Band-uh!, playing the Aggie Fight Song, (you can hear it at the link)

The cheerleaders, of course...

Owen had fun cheering them on.

Up, up, up!

Douglas enjoyed about the first half but got bored after that. He barely made it to the end of the game.

But all that cheering was not enough, sadly. Portland State won.

Re-creating the woolly mammoth...

Now wouldn't that be cool? Dan suggested they should make a herd of them and put it here in Yolo County where woolly mammoth bones have been found. That would be pretty nifty. Violet might not like it very much though, or the coyotes we see from time to time between Davis and Woodland. We saw another last weekend.

The girl we know slightly who was hit by a car on her bike is not doing very well. Her ankle was "shattered" and she is suffering personality changes as a result of the serious concussion she had. I hope she is better soon.

Owen's class is on a field trip today to Sutter's Fort in Sacramento. No doubt the first of many such field trips. He likes history so hopefully it won't be too boring, although the only time we have been it looked awfully fly-blown.

Jelly bean o-rama

We went to Fairfield today to take the free Jelly Belly Factory Tour. It lasts about 40 minutes and you get to look down on the factory floor at about ten million jelly beans. However, the factory only runs 5 days a week so it was quiet down there today.

On the way there we were flipping around the radio and found a station that was playing the "Essential" (i.e. fairly complete, but excluding "Revolution #9") Beatles from A to Z. So we were listening and having fun trying to guess what song would be coming next - from Happiness is a Warm Gun to Hello Goodbye to Help to Helter Skelter to Here Comes the Sun, on and on. On the way back they were playing "Love Me Do" and we were trying to think whether there was anything between that and "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds." I asked Dan whether the Beatles ever wrote a song about lox and he pointed out they were from Liverpool, not Brooklyn. (As it turned out, "Lovely Rita" was in between.)

This link lists all of them in alphabetical order. There were definitely some they skipped, such as Doctor Robert. Instead we went straight into Don't Let Me Down. We would have preferred Dr. Robert.

In other news, the sister of a classmate of Owen's was hit by a car and very seriously injured while riding her bike home from school on Friday. Scary. Apparently her helmet saved her life, but her ankle is broken in multiple places and she had various other bruises and so forth.

I just finished An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England, which is a funny pseudo-mystery about a guy who accidentally burns down the Emily Dickinson house and inadvertently kills 2 people inside, goes to jail, and then when he gets out a lot of other writers' homes start burning down and he is trying to figure out who is behind it. While he was in jail he got a whole lot of letters from people all over New England asking him to get out and burn down another one. E.g, Please come burn down Robert Frost's house; I live across the street and I'm tired of people parking in front of my driveway. That kind of thing.

Another movie

Owen and his friend Caleb made this movie on Friday.

Hooray!

Happy election day

from the Village People in Legos!

Since Dan and I have already voted the actual day is a little anti-climactic. But looking forward to the returns.

Dan is still in Ventura County. I talked to him last night. He spent all day yesterday dropping door hangers with a team of volunteers, and today they are spending from 6 am to 8 pm monitoring polling places, keeping track of the vote, and contacting those who have not voted yet to see if they need a ride to the polls. He was expecting to be pretty exhausted by the end of the day today. He will drive back up here tomorrow.

Happy Sunday

I voted on Friday afternoon on campus. There was an hour long line to do so. They got more than double the number of early voters this year at the campus location as they had in 2004 (when it was around 1100).