Brad’s Sketchpad

So, I’ve been reading Goodnight Moon a bit lately - every night for four months, to be exact. And here’s the strange thing. I’m always discovering things I haven’t noticed in the book. Here are a few:

The little mouse is hiding in nearly every picture. He’s the original Where’s Waldo.

Time: both clocks record the passage of time, as does the moon through the window.

The painting of the cow jumping over the moon in the room is itself the painting within the painting of the three bears sitting on chairs! Meta!

Goodnight Moon is itself the book sitting on the night table in room. Even more meta!

The little bunny has a telephone in his room. Okay that’s not a hidden secret, but it is sort of strange.

This is a shock. The girls have rejected the MacBook.

Cuteness abounds in photos of the girls, posted here.

Isabell and Calista Stone, fraternal twins, were born on 12/8/2007. I’m posting photos at IzzyandCallie.Shutterfly.com. I expect Jen (when she recovers) will post about the whole experience on her blog.
– The proud papa.

For Halloween this year, I dressed as Rorschach, from Alan Moore’s The Watchmen. Not many in the arts crowd at the annual Mystery Ball in the Marin Headlands knew who I was. Truth be told - in the mask, I couldn’t see all that well anyway.

Jennifer, meanwhile, 35 weeks pregnant, dressed as the elusive and nearly extinct California Puffin.

As birth of twins nears, we are gathering advice and wisdom from all corners of the animal kingdom.

Feel free to recommend other approaches.

The O’Reilly publication is called Security Power Tools and she contributes a chapter about the ethical and legal factors surrounding network security.

For the last five years, we’ve competed in San Francisco’s Chinese New Year Treasure Hunt, a four-hour-long scamper through the floats, crowds and firecrackers of the annual Chinese New Year parade.

In yesterday’s competition, our Year of the Pig team (”Boar to be Wild”) took second place — out of thousands of entrants. The accomplishment was particularly sweet because in previous years we have finished quickly but made minor mistakes that ruined our chances. We won a cake, champagne and a certificate.

A few years ago, my friend (and now colleague) Matt Richtel suggested we teach a writing class at the local pirate store, 826 Valencia, which doubles as an after-school study center for young students. It was tremendously fun and inspiring, and since then we’ve guided several groups of eager, sometimes hyperactive, 10 and 11 year olds in writing memoirs, mysteries and sci-fi adventures. Last spring, we tried a class in writing comic strips. This fall, we got even more experimental– video game writing.

We had about a dozen boys (the girls all fled, for some reason) and designed the game as a group. The biggest challenge was getting their young minds to think not about gory 3D shoot-em-up but about a text-based maze, similar to the old Choose-Your-Own Adventure books. To break things up, we had our students illustrate the various scenes.

It wouldn’t have gone any farther, if it wasn’t for our mutual friend, Fred Sharples of San Francisco’s Orange Design. Fred co-taught the class with us and afterward took all the material and created an actual game. We posted the game on the 826 site, and you can actually play it here.

Have fun. We did.

Jennifer and I, with my brothers Brian and Eric, just returned from a glorious week rafting the Colorado river. We started at Lee’s Ferry and traveled through the Marble Canyon, all the way to Phantom Ranch at the fat midsection of the Grand Canyon. On Thursday, we hiked up to the South Rim: a five hour, dauntingly vertical trek along the side canyon carved by Bright Angel Creek. In all, it was a lovely, adventurous, occasionally heart-pounding trip. Here are my Flickr photos. Here are Jen’s Flickr photos.

One note: we were extraordinarily fortunate to have as our guide Michael Ghiglieri, the co-author of the best selling Over the Edge: Death in the Grand Canyon. As you can imagine, his observations and experiences made for an interesting trip.