Look what I can do!

Here's a recent picture of M... :)

It sure does look like she's almost finished building the pyramid of blocks but she's actually saying, "Look what I can do! I can knock down this pyramid of blocks in one fell swoop!"

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Baby Friendly Restaurants

As we try to take M out to more restaurants, I am starting to note which places are more baby friendly. The trend is to go to less "fancy" restaurants, and more "chain" restaurants. Shopping mall food courts always work.

Barney's Gourmet Hamburger (on 24th St, San Francisco, CA; hopefully they'll renew their domain name which expired on 2/27/06)
Small restaurant with non-carpeted floors creats a relatively loud environment to mask out baby noises. Spicy curly fries are yummy.

BJ's Restaurant & Brewery (Tanforan Shopping Center in San Bruno or SSF; also located at Bridgepointe Shopping Center in San Mateo, CA , and Lahaina, Hawaii)
This place is famous for their Chicago style deep dish pizza. Yummy! The restaurant at Tanforan Shopping Center has music to mask out any loud baby sounds and the TV screens are a nice distraction for baby.

Elephant Bar Restaurant (Serramonte Shopping Center, Daly City, CA)
Predictable food in a wonderfully noisy enviroment (music & conversational white noise) that is perfect for drowning out baby/toddler noises.

Crepevine (on Burlingame Ave in Burlingame, CA)
Delicious crepes served with potatos & salad on the side. Music is fairly loud which drowns out baby noises. Baby changing station in restroom (one room). Lots of high chairs available.

Max's Opera Cafe (in Stanford Shopping Center, Palo Alto, CA)
Decent food; you'll never leave hungry. Music drowns out baby noises.

Mimi's Cafe (in Bridgepointe Shopping Center in San Mateo, CA)
There's a lot of stuff on the walls for baby to look at. Moderate noise level, plus lots of patrons bring their babies/toddlers so it's not TOO quiet such that people will be bothered by baby noises. They offer a small plate of cheerios & crackers for babies/toddlers, and they have an activity place mat to keep toddlers occupied. Restaurant at Bridgepoint Shopping Center has a changing table in the handicap restroom stall.

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Snow in San Francisco!

Look at the snow in the picture above. There's snow on that car! This rarely happens in San Francisco... we received hail & snow in a big thunderstorm tonight at around 7 PM. The thunder was the loudest I had ever heard in many decades; it scared our baby girl who was getting a diaper change at the time. Poor girl, probably wondering what was going on. I don't blame her. I thought there was a big explosion in the neighborhood. Then I heard it again a couple more times (following big bright flashes of lighnting). Then it started to hail. They sounded like golf ball sized hail, but were probably smaller than that. :)

I have never seen so much snow in San Francisco. The last time I saw snow was when I was in New Hampshire. I don't mind the snow too much, however I can do without the thunderstorm and hail.

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New Toy!

We had been shopping around for a new digital camera since the one we had was flaky. Popup flash didn't always pop up. Camera froze up a few times, fortunately recovered by "rebooting" it. Possible Smartmedia card failure?

Well, about 3 weeks ago, the camera died for good. There was no reviving it at all. The thing will NOT turn on. The lens is still protruding and we can't get it back in.

So we did a little research on some websites: http://www.dpreview.com and http://www.imaging-resource.com/ , and http://www.dcresource.com being the main three. There is another one, but the URL escapes me at the moment. Go to http://www.pbase.com/ for a good place to look at pictures other people have taken with specific cameras.

We were leaning towards one of the small Canon Digital Elph series (SD450, SD500, SD550), and the Fuji FinePix F10, and later the F30. We needed a camera ASAP, so that nixed the F30 which comes out in a couple of months.

Would like a digital SLR type, to try to learn photography. Thought about the Nikon D70S & Canon Digital Rebel XT. But I don't think I'll have the time or energy for this right now.

We loved how small and sexy(!) the Canon SD450 camera was (plus it didn't hurt that we've played around with our inlaws' SD400). But we ultimately chose the Fuji F10 because we got the impression that it offered better image quality. We got the camera yesterday and we're still getting acquainted with it. It seems to take pretty good pictures without using the flash most of the time. I love the "natural light" mode. And the Macro mode seems better than our previous camera (Fuji FinePix F601 Zoom). We even took a picture in a pitch dark room and it came out bright as day! Cool! The camera starts up very fast! And it has a nice large 2.5" LCD.

Both these pictures were taken in Macro mode. The top one shows some veggies my MIL cooked. DH took the other picture by randomly choosing some mundane objects to see if he could make them look good. We can clearly read the the small text on the globe in the full size version of that picture!

There's a lot of photography info on Philip Greenspun's site. I find it inspirational to look at his photos. He has a section for learning photography.

Some other photography sites I like include FujiMugs and the DP Review Fujifilm Talk Forum.

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