Week One

The hotel is quiet and mellow, and the ebb and flow of Googlers from Sunday afternoon to Friday morning keeps me regular. Otherwise, our life is crazy and chaotic and loud. I come and go through the lobby apologetically, always on some pretense to avoid conversation with the concierge, but the reality is that they are all cool with our presence. They love the kids, and they laugh when Chas climbs all over the fancy retromodern furniture in the lobby, reaching out to grab bottles of wine from the rack on the wall. But someone has to hear them downstairs when they jump off the bed like kid goats or stampede across the room with the foam basketball towards the net I hung from the minibar closet. And if I don’t get out of the hotel room by ten o’clock, all of us reach a critical mass and someone has to have noticed the screaming tantrums when we’ve missed that deadline. Half-dressed baby dolls on the floor in the corner of the room. Marbles in the toilet. Cream cheese on the rug. But every day we return in the evening, after a long day of house hunting, to find Petey and Baby (the boy’s dolls) tucked properly back into bed, and a replinshing set of little toiletries standing in array in the bathroom, telling us to go ahead, shower off, relax. There’s an apricot beer in the microfridge. This isn’t so bad now, is it?

Friends. We return to very loved friends here. Alis is now a mother and I enjoy watching her on her home turf. She’s beautiful and photogenic and while she may wonder why I chose this photo out of many others, it is because I just love it for some inexplicable reason. She’s thinking about something while we wait for food at the Upper Crust Pizzeria in Santa Cruz. And this is Seth, Chas’ partner in crime, so you’d better look out.

Jim is Alis’ husband and is telling me that I have a sweet camera but that my fisheye lens is really not a fisheye lens. And I’m about to tell him that it is a fisheye lens, but that it cost less than $800, so it’s just not an expensive one. Santa Cruz, at a popular local coffeeshop that I can’t remember the name of.

Jerry, our best man, bester than ever. In counting our blessings, having Jerry back in our company is at the top of the list. We pick up just where we left off, just like that, and it’s fun to watch him study our new parental habits and hurdle the chaos we create around him. Always benevolent, here he is with a peace offering for his girlfriend, because we kidnapped him for an entire day down to the beach to skateboard and watch clustering monarchs and buy panoramic cameras at SwapMeet.