In 2009, the Isle of Wight Festival was headlined by Neil Young, whom some present at the time complained was too old. We beg to differ! This odd conjunction prompted me to action.…
Do you want Search?
Search
-
-
2009: Daphné & Alban’s Summer Vacation in France
Daphné and Alban spent a a couple of weeks of most summers that they lived in the US with Pierre, their dad, and his family in France, mostly in and around Paris.…
-
Tom in Paris in 2008
Tom left to go on vacation after Christmas in 2007, and ended up spending the whole year of 2008 in Paris. Then all of 2009. Etcetera. He was gone. When he left…
-
La famille de Marie-Hélène !
Marie-Hélène’s family were kind to us all during our initial years together in France. There was a flattering curiosity about us, expressed with a French reserve but nonetheless expressed, in particular about…
-
2008: Ian visits aging aunts . . .
One of the pleasures of middle age has been discovering my aging aunts. Taking advantage of the low fares, I spent five February days in England and visited Aunty Vi (Violet Rose Eliza: how’s…
-
Papa
I love being a dad. No doubt about it, it’s a wonderful thing to be a father. Especially in this family! But you would be forgiven for suggesting that I would be…
-
Pacific Grove and Point Lobos
We have the good fortune to live about ten minutes from the Pacific Ocean in Santa Cruz, which is at the North end of Monterey Bay on a lovely piece of California coastline. One…
-
Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk!!
Yet another of the assets of our little town (population around 60,000) is the Boardwalk, named after the American word for a promenade along the top of a beach. The walkway used…
-
La Grée
La Grée will be our vacation home forever, in my mind at least. The first version of this page was written in French with a lot of help from Marie-Hélène. During the…
-
“Our house is a very, very, very fine house. . . ” (Graham Nash, with CSNY).
From 1997 to 2010, home was in a forest, with trees literally growing through our deck! The house was built in 1979, the year I graduated Berkeley, on a knoll, with the hillside…
-
Marlow in Bucks
Marlow is where I call home. I moved away for good in 1974, making my first move to California to restart college there, but always came back regularly to visit mum and…
-
Marie-Hélène Berhaut (born and raised in Paris)
I have to admit that it would be very hard for me to paint any kind of complete and balanced portrait of Marie-Hélène at this point, even a miniature one. In part,…
-
Grand-Père
Our children were a little short on grandparents. After my mother died in 1996, just two years after Marie-Hélène and I and the four older children had moved in together, just one year after Charlie…
-
Maman
Being a mother is the center of Marie-Hélène‘s life. She was the office manager at Kevorkian & Rawlings, the law firm where we met in Paris, and has been at various times…
-
Santa Cruz County Breakers’ 95 Boys Fall Season 2005
First, a little background. Santa Cruz County puts a lot of effort into organizing its youth soccer. There are several different structured recreational teams, and several different structured competitive teams, as well as more informal arrangements.…
-
West Cliff, a Santa Cruz Esplanade
It’s a place for a Sunday afternoon stroll for us, the home of the Surfing Museum for others, the home of Steamer Lane and Lighthouse Point, and for the Hanlons, it’s a hundred…
-
Ian’s Friends
My friends are the ones that keep going, come hell or high water, and through the ups and downs. There are a few, at least one or two, from each period in…
-
Ian Stock (born in Buckinghamshire, England)
So what did I bring into this extended Brady Bunch? Well, first, Nick, Tom and I. We were our own little family back in 1994, living in a forest southwest of Paris,…
-
Happy Valley School, Santa Cruz
Happy Valley School is the wonderful elementary school where Daphné and Alban started in September 1997, Tom in 1999, Charles in 2000 and Alexander in 2003. (Nicholas went directly to Branciforte Junior High School when…
-
Brocéliande
In the interior of Brittany, the peninsula that is the westernmost part of mainland France, France’s Cornwall if you will, is la Brocéliande, the magic land of Merlin and, if you believe the…
-
Santa Cruz, California: 1997 to present
“We’re all here because we’re not all there!” I rather like that one. But the humorous side of it really does not apply to Santa Cruz. Not that we don’t have our…
-
Soccer: hobby #1
Look at the expression on Charlie’s face! Pure, unadulterated glee! That’s what soccer did for all our boys, more or less. Alban, our first soccer fanatic and star, started it all off…
-
Russ, Annie and Brendan, the Hanlons
Russ and I met at law school on the East Coast in the fall of 1979, introduced by my Guinness sweatshirt. He walked right up to me and asked if I’d like to share a…
-
Alexander and Charles are Baptized
On August 12, 2004, l’abbé Texier, until his retirement a catholic priest in Bordeaux for over 20 years, baptized Alex and Charles in the Church of Sainte Anne de Tréal. L’abbé had retired to…
-
Les copains de Marie-Hélène . . .
D’abord, les plus sérieuses, Camille et Amélie en état de grace, halloween 1999. We were spoiled by Amélie, as were the children. She was a student locally who moved in with us…