Neptune Landing

I am an uncle again. Little Maggie Grace Burns was born on Monday, February 18, 2013 weighing 7.12 lbs. Here are pics with my nephew, Sean, and my niece, Emily, holding her. I'm proud of Emily, in particular, because this will be a whole new level of responsibility, having a baby sister! I can't wait to meet her come November! In other news, here out west, I've stepped it up and purchased my first adult car. The last one I owned was "Kit," a 1981 cream-colored Buick Skylark that I shared with my siblings during our high school and college years. His days were always numbered. Later on, as an insufferably liberal young adult, I was happy to take 'the T' everywhere around the Boston metro area but was also too eager to borrow the car of anyone close to me, be it my brother, my dad or my ex. Now my name is attached to a machine of financial gravity. Looks like little Emily is not the only one who has to show responsibility! Daedalus is the ...

Opinions of finding romance in San Francisco diverge wildly. This city is known as Israel for gay men and there is often an expectation that love will be found, a sort of cold calculus when you look at the numbers. Certain on-line applications like OkCupid, Grindr and Adam4Adam have gained prominence but these all carry a frustrating degree of separation. Fear not, fair lads, for west coasters love to hike. There are several hiking clubs in the Bay Area that venture out of the weekends (most rendezvous at the Starbucks/Safeway parking lot on Market in the Castro/Duboce Triangle). What's great about hiking is that about 40 men will hit the trail and it becomes almost like an interpretative dance of lingering and picking up the pace. People naturally alter their walking speed in a good or struggling conversation so you're never stuck with the same person unless you want to be. I accompanied a friend to go on the 3rd Saturday Hiking Group  and we woke up at ...

So the Niners lost. Something tells me that SF will survive and that Baltimore needed the boost. [Lavender, Poppies, Marjoram] Meanwhile, in a quieter corner of the city, I have been meditating on growth and sustenance. Michael Pollan , my new intellectual crush, has given me a lot to think about on that topic. Out of the journalism department at Berkeley, the aptly-named Pollan has written a string of best sellers dealing with agricultural ethics like "The Omnivore's Dilemma," "In Defense of Food" and "Food Rules." He easily marries a poetic narrative with his West Coast depth of soil and agricultural knowledge. I can't put him down. [Rose Bush] One of his books, "The Botany of Desire" covers the mythology and history of several of our green friends. I cannot recommend this book enough as he surveys four critical plants in the development of human evolution. Each of these plants has played a role of manipulating our strengths...