avocado8

We're Back

After spending a week in San Francisco with friends I dearly miss (many of whom also now have babies Austen's age), I've been having fantasies about moving back there. Upon landing at PHL, however, I learned that Philadelphia had a plan to win me over with the same weather we had in SF (upper 50s and low 60s, bright sunshine, low humidity), lower gas and food prices, and a house we love. Of course, then I did our taxes and discovered that in addition to paying local wage taxes, we were also on the hook for over a thousand dollars in Philadelphia school taxes—and the schools here aren't even that good. Harrumph.

Anyway, we were so busy cramming last-minute visits and activities into our San Francisco schedule (and the line for the computers at Tressider on the Stanford campus was long on Wednesday), I haven't had a chance to write about what we did on our last day.

Al was scheduled to work a booth at a job fair at Stanford, so we went a little early and had coffee with Beth, who's a professor there. She and Matt got a dog since we last saw them, and every day Moxie makes the commute from San Francisco to Palo Alto with Beth.

After coffee Al went up to the job fair, and I went to Stanford Shopping Center to buy Austen some more cute Gymboree clothes (thanks to Al's parents for financing the baby-clothes shopping spree). I found a great hat and onesie from the same robot line as the bleep bleep shirt—on sale!—and also got him another cute golf onesie. When I got bored at the mall I went back to the Stanford campus and noodled around until Al was finished at the job fair.

From Palo Alto we drove down to Los Altos, where we met John and Kathy for dinner at the Los Altos Grill (formerly Bandera). Kathy is pregnant with their first child, and it was exciting to swap pregnancy stories and show them what'll be coming their way soon. :) What I didn't intend to show them was my complete ineptitude when it comes to changing a diaper in public. I left the wipes in the car and didn't notice until I had Austen on the changing table and undressed; luckily, I hadn't removed the poopy diaper yet (mainly because I normally get the wipes out first before removing the diaper). I had to come back out of the handicap stall (one of only two) so I could let the next person in line pee and so I could call Al at the table and ask him to go get the wipes. Of course, I had the keys to the car, so Kathy had to come get them while I held a squirming, half-naked Austen. Al returned with the wipes a few minutes later, I waited in line again for the handicap stall, and despite the fact that I blocked the lovely spot lighting in the stall every time I leaned over to wipe Austen, managed to get all the poop out of his folds (I think).

Anyway, after the diaper incident, dinner progressed normally. I had a wonderfully tasty vegetable plate, the corn bread was delicious, and the conversations about Project Greelight and parenting were stimulating as ever, if too short. Wish we had more time to visit.