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Pete Sr
Pete Sr. was the next to arrive and pay his respects to baby Alina. I know he had been out of practice for nearly 30 years, but he jumped right in and within a very short period of time was taking care of Alina. She's a pretty good baby so they mostly spent a lot of time playing, and then getting tired and taking a nap. But there were also a lot of dirty diapers that got changed too.

Mostly we've been hanging out at home and around the neighborhood. But we were able to get out and about a bit. Taking a walk along the trail from Seacliff, around Land's End and over to Cliff House, about three miles roundtrip. The idea was to go to Cliff House for lunch, but even at 2p on a not-so-nice day it was packed as was Louis'.

For lunch on Sunday we took Alina up to 24th Street to Boulange. Then up and over the hill to Dolores Park. There was an encore presentation of POSIBILIDAD which Tatyana and I had seen several weeks earlier. This sparked some conversations on how unionization has failed in America and what alternatives might be out there to balance the interests of the worker with the companies that employ them. We all agreed that large hierarchical unions tend to get corrupt and or mismanaged , so what about a distributed union. A company could mandate that 60% of their voting shares of stock remain with employees (via some sort of preferred stock offering I suppose). So rather than having union leaders, the power is distributed to the employees and they make their voice heard via stock proxy voting.

On Labor Day we took advantage of some really nice weather to go to Berkeley and take a look at the sailboat. I hadn't even been over to the boat since shortly before Alina was born. I was a little worried that the batteries had discharged completely, or the bilge had filled, or some other unpleasantness.

The boat was dingier, and there was some growth along the waterline, but nothing fundamentally wrong that some elbow grease can't take care of. Somewhat surprisingly the engine started right off with no problems. With it started I quickly prepped the boat finding that I was woefully underprepared. All the handheld VHF's were dead, I had no idea what the tide/current situation was (except that it was high-ish tide), and I was still missing some dock lines. The Bay was glassy, no wind at all, so we started motoring West, hopefully towards a little wind or to put us in position for when the wind did start.

After a little bit of time catching some rays at the bow, Pete Sr. came back and took the helm. He quickly got the hang of the steering, adjusting for the over steer and changing wind directions. We sailed for a few hours and then turned back, ending with a flawless docking.

Taking a break from dirty diapers, my dad was headed to Carmel Valley to stay with friends for a couple days. There were a variety of options to get down there. The old standby would be to rent a car, another option was a shuttle VAN from SFO to Monterey airport. But dad surprised me and accepted the idea of taking the train down. It was about 40 minutes longer than driving, but was on-time and allowed him to relax, read, and watch the scenery rather than being stuck in traffic on the 101. I'm interested to try it myself sometime.