12.26.2010 Where is parking more difficult than Valley Fair on black friday?

It was supposed to rain today, it didn't.

June, Evan, and I had an early lunch with June's friend in Cupertino village.  We were supposed to meet at Chef Woo at Bollinger/Wolfe, but they were closed, a new restaurant was to open soon.  June's friend brought his wife, sister-in-law, and a 14 months toddler.  Evan behaved quite well at the table, it was his first time in a restaurant.  He was munching away on his fingers the entire time and didn't pay too much attention to us.

Seeing that the weather was holding up, and in fact - sunny, we decided to go to Rancho San Antonio for an easy hike.  When we got there, all of the parking lots were completely full.  We drove around several times but no luck.  Wherever a car was leaving, there were several cars waiting to take its place.  So we gave up and was going to head to the Stanford Dish (3-mile loop) when we made a stop at Gates of Heaven Cemetery to visit a friend who passed away a year and a half ago.  After that, we drove to the street-side parking area of Stanford Dish and all of the 'closer' spaces were occupied.  It was a rare day of dry/even-sunny weather in late December, and with the holidays, it wasn't unusual to see everyone out enjoying the fresh air.  So we didn't get to hike at the Dish either.

Instead, we drove to Stanford campus itself, starting from Palm Drive through the main entrance.  Lots of tourists were there today (again, quite expected).  I'll try to post some videos of the main courtyard later.  The campus is enormous and well-groomed; the buildings easily some of the best in academic architecture of the west coast.  We walked around (with Evan in the bumbleride stroller) for about 45 minutes and then headed home in time for Evan's feeding. 

We gave Evan a bath tonight, he again relieved himself while in the bath so we had to hold him off of the water so he wouldn't be dipped in soiled waters.  We helped Evan practice sitting up and lying on his stomach afterwards.  He can't sit up by himself yet but has learned in the last two days to support himself with his two arms/hands while leaning forward, for about 5 to 10 seconds.  On his tummy, he can easily lift and keep his head up, but he starts getting quite frustrated after a few seconds as he's unable to move.  Instead of drawing in his knees so he can push off on his toes, he leans down on his tummy and his legs go up in the air like he is surfing.  That position, of course, is not conducive to crawling.  We'll try again some other day.  In the meantime, here's a video of Evan practicing:

I spent the rest of night copying files from my (really) old desktop to my (newer) laptop.  I've copied over about 150 GB's of data so far - mostly photos and web pages (for signite.com and others), and there's still a lot to go.  I'll need some additional storage for sure.