Salmon Creek Beach

feeling for the undertow

Today we drove up to Sonoma and headed towards the Sonoma Coast Beach. There are many beaches up there that we look forward to visiting: especially Goat Rock Beach. We picked one relatively close, near Bodega Bay, called Salmon Creek Beach. It was a warm, sunny, perfect day. We frolicked and such (what are becoming) normal activities. Hope everyone had a beautiful weekend. Flickr set here.

Mary being Inspi(red).

Mmmm Vodka Sauce

My mom sent a recipe for a vodka sauce. A while back.

TOMATO VODKA SAUCE.

2 Tbsp. olive oil

2 Tbsp. butter

4 garlic cloves,chopped

2 1/2to 3 lbs. ripe tomatoes, peeled, seeded and chopped

3/4 tsp salt,1tsp. black pepper,or to taste

1/2 cup vodka

1/2 cup fresh basil, chopped

1 cup heavy cream

1 lbs. peeled shrimp or crawfish.

Small penne pasta (Barilla)

In large pan put oil, butter and garlic.

Saute on low until starts bubble.

Add tomatoes, salt and pepper.

Cook covered on low for 30 min.

Add vodka.

Cook uncovered for 25 min.

Add shrimp or crawfish--cook 5 more minutes.

Add heavy cream and basil--cook 5 more min.

SERVE IT NOW !!!!

Over cooked penne.

Sometimes I sprinkle chives over it.

Also instead of shrimp you can use 1/4 lbs. chopped prosciutto. I have made it that the sauce was little running and had to thicken it a little.

It comes from how the tomatoes are I think but the taste is the same.

Hope you will enjoy cooking and eating it!!

+_+_+_+_+_+_+_

Mary prepared it last night. She kept the seeds and peels on the tomatoes (heirloom) and kept it vegetarian (sans shrimp). It was incredibly tasty. Thanks Mary and Mom.

been a bit quiet lately.

Hey, so I've been blog-quiet a bt (for me anyway). But, still sharing.

Mary put some pictures from Sam's birthday up on my Flickr. And Sam wrote a post about the party. Thank you to everyone who sent him treats and nice birthday wishes.

Unfortunately, Sam has also been a bit sick: fever and a cough. So we rested considerably this weekend. The travel and busy-ness probably wracked his immune system some.

Another blog addition has come via my introduction to Shelfari (thanks Herb). I have started a shelf of my graphic novels/visual stories/comics. I have actually been looking for something like this for a while. Somewhere to store my library so I knew what I had, especially when surfing Amazon. On the sidebar widget, I'll try to keep up to date what I am currently reading. Hopefully, the program will expand to have additional shelves (i.e. detective fiction, great fiction, non-fiction, etc.) Right now it is a bit broad in sectrum, but not bad for a beta.

Last thing. I found out a beautiful thing this morning: my wife cooks a mean mushroom and asparagus quiche. Thanks babe

Now that one I felt.

Sam has not been feeling well, so he has been coughing a touch at night. We were up a bit early due to this and just general mind-racing sorts of things. At 4:42 the house shook. We felt it. It was quite impressive, I mean it was actually earth-shaking.... Everyone seems to be okay, which is good. Now, I don't feel so bad about missing the last one. So, I can cross that off the list; if I could get to Alcatraz I'd be done with that first list.

the joy of being a grown up

when you are a kid, it seems there is nothing better than opening up your christmas/birthday presents. Then you grow-up and realize that the real joy is in the giving. Well, we took Sam's cousin Patience on her first trip to the ocean ... we had just as much fun as she did:

39 trillion gallons of fun

Blue wave

We just got back from celebrating Sam's 10th and his cousin Patience's 11th birthdays at Lake Tahoe. It was incredible. I hope to get pictures up over the next couple of days and posted in a Flickr set. (I have been Flickring even when I'm not blogging - FYI).

P.S. Happy Birthdays to Dad, Liz, Mary Lu and Pablo as well ... Geesh the middle of July is busy!

Virtual Territory

My latest craze is this idea of the Internet as a Territory. I have grown as a marketer in an age where there is a significant emphasis on the intangible.

When I was at JWT, I was focused on time:

And, I have been reading about how we are shifting our emphasis from stuff to ideas. Dean Kamen (find more in link):

We're moving from a world of stuff; from the idea that there's a finite amount of gold out there, a finite amount of almost anything out there. Throughout all of history, people fought over stuff: land, fuel, stuff. But in your generation, most value that will be created isn't stuff anymore. It really is ideas. The Internet is an abstraction, and the value of Google exceeds the value of all the car makers. In a world that's about ideas, it's not a zero-sum game. You don't have to win by someone else losing, where you have the gold or oil or water, and somebody else doesn't.

I look into Gamers and see virtual territory everywhere. "After we kill you, we plant a flag ..."

I have spent a SIGNIFICANT amount of time in the past few years carving my own territory in the web.

The time thing is the freaky element. Because these other two intangible shifts are going from finite to infinite.



stuff ----> ideas
physical space ----> virtual space
time ...

And do we create ideas and virtual space to exist beyond time? (I thought about this a lot while watching Children of Men; how would I act if I knew there was no "legacy.")

Did human society create an "afterlife" in order to deal with the seemingly inescapable limitation. How do we escape it? And really, can't we only make relative jumps? Does Kamen's ideal collapse under our scramble for time? I hope not.

Is there any greater treasure than time? I don't think so.

Finally.

Off to the city

What's that in the distance? A city? Yes. San Francisco.

And you are heading towards it? Yep.

After more than a year in Marin, Mary and I finally took a trip to San Francisco as tourists together. Not to drive through on the way to the airport or work ... a whole afternoon dedicated to being tourists.

And we were TOTAL tourists. Landed at the Ferry Building, took a cable car to Chinatown, walked through Chinatown and North Beach, up Greenwich to Coit Tower, walked down Lombard up the crooked hill, across Russian Hill to Fisherman's Wharf where we sat and watched the bay and ate some overpriced, mediocre food (we just weren't hungry in Chinatown or North Beach ... poor planning) and then took the ferry back from Pier 41.

It was fun to get a lay of the land so we can enjoy more fully in the coming weeks, months, years? who knows?

We hiked a lot ... up and down too! For our memories, we posted a Flickr set here.