Happy New Year

We started 2009 in vacation mode. We were all off school/work from Christmas so managed a few days out:

We headed back to San Francisco to the Embarcadero skating rink. We decided that although it's smaller, that we liked the Union Square rink more because of it's ambiance. The Union Sq rink is surrounded by cafe tables, and cafes, as well as the big tree. The Embacadero rink seemed colder and less lively - although better musical choices.

After the skating we went down the the restored Ferry Building to mooch about and get some lunch. We also bought another olive tree from McEvoy Ranch since our previous tree has done so well (more on this another time).

We also took the boys to see the Leonardo exhibition at TheTech. The exhibition itself was very interesting to us, but less so for the boys. However, they did very well for an hour or so until we found the "Leonardo's workshop" children's section downstairs. Here they are using a pin hole viewer to create drawings with perspective:

and then tracing their transparency onto paper:

If you are an adult in the Bay Area, or, like us the recipients of free tickets (Thanks Jon), then I recommend a visit to the exhibit. It is running until the end of January. I think for those with young children it's hard to do justice to the exhibition with children in tow, and it's not cheap, so for an hour makes an expensive day out. The parts that we were able to see were excellent, and Nigel and I would have happily spent much longer at the exhibition.