Arrival of Glass Panels for the Breezeway

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Originally uploaded by Greg Kidd

Breezeway Glass is In!

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Originally uploaded by Greg Kidd

Daddy Date Night

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Originally uploaded by Greg Kidd

Sasha and I on the way to Madagascar II

Ila With Static Electricity Punk Rock Hairdo

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Originally uploaded by Greg Kidd

The Little Witch on Halloween

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Originally uploaded by Greg Kidd

Age and Youth on a Santa Rosa Outing

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Originally uploaded by Greg Kidd

Halloween Parade

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Originally uploaded by Greg Kidd

How Could This Girl Ever Spell Trouble

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Originally uploaded by Greg Kidd

The Splits Needed to Do a 3 Hour Karapoti

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Originally uploaded by Greg Kidd

Pete has sent me the split times necessary to crack the 3 hour mark at the Karapoti classic in New Zealand on March 7th. Pete was just off that pace last year, partly because he stopped to help a wounded person. Only one person my age has ever cracked three hours. I was very happy with my 3:27 last year. My goal this year is simply to help Pete get to his 3 hour goal. No beers Pete from now till March 7. On yer bike.

Sisters Ila and Sasha at the Hoped to Be New Home of Heidrun Meadery

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Originally uploaded by Greg Kidd

Blonde Indian

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Originally uploaded by Greg Kidd

Jeffra Introduces Matilda to the Kachru Girls

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Originally uploaded by Greg Kidd

Sasha Swinging at DayCare

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Originally uploaded by Greg Kidd

The SMART Train Resolution Passed!

That means $91 million in spending for bike lanes in Marin -- hooray!

1. Measure Q: SMART Train and Pathway Victory!

Yes on Q CampaignersOn Tuesday, November 4, Measure Q passed with a 69.5% district-wide (Sonoma and Marin counties) victory for the SMART Train and Pathway!

After more than 10 years of hard work by the Marin County Bicycle Coalition, Marin County voters passed Measure Q with 62.6% voting yes, a 5 percentage point increase over the 2006 vote. Sonoma County voters passed SMART with 73.5% voting yes.

The SMART train will be running in five years and includes the creation of 70 miles of bicycle/pedestrian pathways and lanes. The SMART train will have 14 stops and 9 bus shuttle routes to ensure connectivity to surrounding residential and business communities.

The MCBC expresses our deepest gratitude to the many people that helped get Measure Q passed. In particular, we wish to thank Campaign Co-Chairs Cynthia Murray, Steve Birdlebough and Marge Macris for their exceptional leadership, Bonnie Moss of Tramutola for her superb strategy, Ben Lowe for his volunteer coordination in Marin, and Denny Rosatti from Sonoma County Conservation Action who led a strong campaign in Sonoma County and strongly supported our efforts here in Marin. We also express our thanks for the tenacity and careful planning of the SMART District, including Lillian Hames and her staff, and to the SMART Board of Directors, including President Charles McGlashan, for their visionary leadership and for fully funding the $91 million pathway in Measure Q.

We also thank the countless donors, large and small, that helped fund this campaign. And finally, we thank the hundreds of volunteers that tabled, installed yard signs, phone banked, wrote letters, attended meetings, and helped with a multitudes of other tasks. Please know that all of you are supporting visionary, green transportation solutions for Marin and Sonoma counties. The transportation transformation is happening!

To stay abreast of the next steps that the SMART District will be taking, or to learn more about specific elements of the SMART train and pathway, please visit the SMART website.

Carrie Snags Tickets to the Warriors Game

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Originally uploaded by Greg Kidd

My first trip to a pro basketball game in the Bay area courtesy of Carrie. She scored some top tickets from the assistant coach. The warriors did the local fans proud recovering from a 17-4 starting deficit to close out the game in the fourth. I'm out of my sling, but Carrie is still in her foot brace for her stress fracture.

This Said it Pretty Well for Me on the Election: Perfecting the Union by Roger Cohen (NYT Nov 5)

Beyond Iraq, beyond the economy, beyond health care, there was something even more fundamental at stake in this U.S. election won by Barack Obama: the self-respect of the American people.

For almost eight years, Americans have seen words stripped of meaning, lives sacrificed to confront nonexistent Iraqi weapons and other existences ravaged by serial incompetence on an epic scale.

Against all this, Obama made a simple bet and stuck to it. If you trusted in the fundamental decency, civility and good sense of the American people, even at the end of a season of fear and loss, you could forge a new politics and win the day.

Four years ago, at the Democratic convention, in the speech that lifted him from obscurity, Obama said: "For alongside our famous individualism, there's another ingredient in the American saga: a belief that we are connected as one people."

He never wavered from that theme. "In this country, we rise or fall as one nation, as one people," he declared Tuesday night in his victory speech to a joyous crowd in Chicago.

In that four-year span, Obama never got angry. Without breaking a sweat, he took down two of the most ruthless political machines on the planet: first the Clintons and then the Republican Party.

An idea has power. John McCain had many things in this campaign, but an idea was not one of them. At a time of economic crisis, he could not order his thoughts about it. Hard-hit Ohio drew its decisive conclusions. It was not alone.

McCain flailed, opting on a whim for a sidekick, Sarah Palin, who personified the very "country-first" intolerance and Bush-like small-mindedness of which many Americans had grown as weary as the world has.

Gracious in defeat, McCain seemed almost relieved, free to return to himself and escape the rabid fringes of Republicanism.

Obama's idea, put simply, was that America can be better than it has been. It can reach beyond post-9/11 anger and fear to embody once more what the world still craves from the American idea: hope.

America can mean what it says. It can respect its friends and probe its enemies before it tries to shock and awe them. It can listen. It can rediscover the commonwealth beyond the frenzied individualism that took down Wall Street.

I know, these are mere words. They will not right the deficit or disarm an enemy. But words count. That has been a lesson of the Bush years.

You can't proclaim freedom as you torture. You can't promote democracy as you disappear people. You can't stand for the rule of law and strip prisoners of basic rights. You can't dispense with the transparency and regulation essential to modern capital markets and hope still to be the beacon of free enterprise.

Or rather, you can do all these things, but then you find yourself alone.

Obama will reinvest words with meaning. That is the basis of everything. And an American leader able to improvise a grammatical, even a moving, English sentence is no bad thing. Americans, in the inevitable recession ahead, will have a leader who can summon their better natures rather than speak, as Bush has, to their spite.

I voted in Brooklyn. There was a two-hour line. I got to talking to the woman behind me. I told her that as a naturalized American I was voting for the first time. When I emerged from the voting booth the woman said: "Congratulations.:

That single word said a lot about citizenship as an idea and a responsibility, rather than a thing of blood or ethnicity or race.

And it occurred to me that Obama's core conviction about the American saga — his belief in the connectedness of all Americans — stemmed from his own unlikely experience of American transformation.

A Kenyan father passing briefly through these shores; a chance encounter with a young Kansan woman; a biracial boy handed off here and there but fortunate at least in the accident of Hawaiian birth.

Obama has spoken without cease about his conviction of American possibility born from this experience. He intuited that, after years of the debasement of so many core American ideas, a case for what the preamble to the U.S. Constitution calls "a more perfect union" would resonate.

He was rarely explicit about race, although he spoke of slavery as America's "original sin." He did not need to be. At a time of national soul-searching, what could better symbolize a "more perfect union" and the overcoming of the wounds of that original sin than the election to the White House of an African-American?

And what stronger emblem could be offered to the world of an American renewal startling enough to challenge the assumptions of every state on earth?

The other day I got an e-mail message saying simply this: Rosa Parks sat in 1955. Martin Luther King walked in 1963. Barack Obama ran in 2008. That our children might fly.

Tough days lie ahead. But it's a moment to dream. Americans have earned that right, along with the renewed respect of the world.

Obama Election Night Gala

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Originally uploaded by Greg Kidd

Pesky Deer Making Themselves at Home @ the Barrel

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Originally uploaded by Greg Kidd

Skeletons on the Prowl

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Originally uploaded by Greg Kidd

Pete and the CupCake Gal

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Originally uploaded by Greg Kidd

Note that the tattoos are not part of his outfit.....

Not Quite the Zoe's Mom that I Meet at Daycare

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Originally uploaded by Greg Kidd

Pete & Emily Borrow Sarbada for One Night

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Originally uploaded by Greg Kidd

And look what happens. Here they prepare for the "Day of the Dead" party on Treasure Island