One of the things I love most about Venice Beach is the skateboard park.

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When we were in Melbourne, I woke up each and every day some time between 4:30 and 5:30. I’d go back to sleep, but it was odd that I woke up so consistently every morning at such an odd time. This is the view from our hotel room one of those mornings.

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Melbourne, Australia has quite a few stunning features, one of which are these modern freeway overpasses lit inside in blue. I don’t know what to call them, exactly, so I’ve been calling them “hoops.” This was a rare break in the late winter cloud cover.

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For the last two weekends, we’ve visited the UCSC Arboretum, which specializes in plants of the southern hemisphere, specifically South Africa, New Zealand, and Australia. One of my favorite discoveries is this Banksia. At first, I thought someone had added the brown “elf,” but then I realized it was a dried flower.
More photos.

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One of the reasons I wanted a better camera is the options for faster lenses. Most point-and-shoot lenses are slow, slow, slow, and I'm a fast glass kinda gal. Sure, you can take brilliant photos with a point-and-shoot. This photo Rick took is an example:

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I got my new camera today, a Panasonic Lumix GF-1 in pink. I had to test it out, right?
So I took pictures of our garden, which can be found here.

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Three years ago, I bought a Canon SD 700 IS. As the saying goes, the best camera is the one you have with you. This whimsical shot in Heathrow airport is one of the first I took with it.

Last month, I got an iPhone 4. (more)

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Friday, we visited the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Had a great time, walked myself to exhaustion, and got a couple of cool pictures, including this one of a cuttlefish. Not bad for an iPhone photo!

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NB: Common Ground in Palo Alto is sadly no more.

Saturday, we’ll be going on Common Ground’s Edible Landscaping Tour. If you’re in the SF bay area and interested in organic gardening, it’s worth the day’s crawl. Last year, two of the gardens were Jesse Cool’s and the Warnocks.

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Sure, fountain pens are a bit fiddlier than your average ballpoint. But they do have their advantages.

1. The colors you can write in is not a direct function of the manufacturer of the pen. Like the look of one pen and the ink colors offered by someone else? You can do that.
2. More ink colors. For those of us with acute color discrimination, this can be really useful.
3. Washable ink. For those unhappy accidents. Sure, some ink colors do stain.
4. …which brings me to: waterproof and forgery-proof inks. Sure, there are ballpoints (Uniball Signo) that do that as well, but not in as many colors as are currently available for fountain pens. Note that these are not washable from clothing, so you can go to both extremes. Here are some torture test results.

I’ve seen fountain pens from $1 all the way up to “Oh my God!” levels, where that was seven figure to the left of the decimal point. Most expensive I’ve held in my hands was five figures. All of them can use the same inks.

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