My dad is a funny guy… not like haha funny though. Here’s an example. My dad has this habit of sudden departures. You’ll be walking around with him in a store, and suddenly, without any warning to the people he is with, he will depart. And he’ll do this whether you are merely window shopping around town… or in a foreign country, without any money, or way of contacting anyone if you got lost. When Dad is done, he is simply done, and that is all there is to it. Best keep up.
I took this photo of my dog Chip one foggy morning in Stinson Beach, CA many years ago. He has since passed, though he is remembered fondly.
My favorite memory of Chip is from the time we had been driving seven long hours from the Bay Area back to Newport, and just as we hit LA and Chip got up from my lap, where he had been laying the whole drive, walked over to my mom’s lap, peed, and then went and lied down on his bed until we made it home. My mom and I still laugh about how much Chip loved me, even though she was the one who fed and walked him.
This is a picture of Belle, our other Yorkshire Terrier, in Stinson Beach on that same day. We got her after we had had Chip for awhile. I believe it was around the time I left for boarding school because I distinctly remember the impression I was left with was that I had been replaced by a six pound dog. Belle tragically passed in Stinson some years later when we were renting a house in Seadrift.
This was taken in the early morning in Stinson Beach, outside one of the yurts on my aunt’s property there. Her home has been featured in many magazines and catalogues because it is so stunning. I lived with her for almost a full year while I was in college. I loved living in Stinson. My commute to San Francisco was often stunning and stimulating, as I would make up games on the drive and blast whatever music my Stanford friends had introduced me to most recently. My favorite games were: see how long you can drive in neutral, and see how many cars you can get to pull over so you can pass them. (Much of the road is long, winding, and just a single lane between redwood trees and a rocky drop off into the ocean, so if you were unlucky you could get stuck behind an uneasy driver that would go well under the speed limit the whole way, with no way around them.) Some of my favorite songs from that time were by a band called Disclosure, who turned out to be terrible when I saw them live at Coachella.
When I was living with my aunt in Stinson Beach, I became infatuated with this man that I met online who had graduated from MIT and was now working in tech in Silicon Valley. I was really interested in what his parents had done when he was growing up that contributed towards him being able to attend MIT for computer science, and one of the things that he mentioned was that he had grown up playing chess. I didn’t know the first thing about chess but I downloaded an app so we could play chess together, hoping I could learn by playing, but he would mate me in three moves, so the chess didn’t workout — neither did he and .
Don’t you wish you could be this carefree again?
I don’t know why I liked this shot so much. I took it on my Canon Rebel T2i, which was a really high end camera at the time. One of my favorite features was that it was so user friendly (i.e. I didn’t have to adjust shudder speed, exposure, aperture, etc.). This was one of the few times when my subject was out of focus, and yet it captured this seagull mid-flight in such an interesting position that I quite liked the photo anyway. Mostly I love this color scheme though. Foggy blues and pale greys. (I’m partial to spelling “gray” with the English way.)
This may have been my cousin John, or else I surely zoomed in from a far to get this perspective. Perhaps I took this after getting my first sports lens (which was really generous of my family to indulge me with). I no longer remember.
Surfing is something I enjoy watching quite a bit more than doing. On this particular morning I’m sure the water was bitter cold, and even those booties and a wetsuit wouldn’t be enough to get me in those great white shark waters, with the Farallon Islands just offshore. But you don’t have to twist my arm to watch “The Endless Summer,” “Riding Giants,” or “Step Into Liquid.”
This is from the Rose Garden at the entrance to my old boarding school, Cate, in Carpinteria. Carpinteria, Montecito, and Santa Barbara are just beautiful. I loved being outside there. I would run three miles from the top of The Mesa into town almost every day, and longer, down to at least the Seal Sanctuary on weekends. Carp was a small town where I usually felt very safe, which meant getting to run without my phone or headphones, without feeling exposed and self-conscious.
Sophie's External Brain 