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…
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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…
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“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…
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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.…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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2003: maximum youth soccer!
By the fall of 2003, we had five out of our six children playing soccer every week. That is all of the boys! For the parents, that meant at least one match per…
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Home in 2003
Marie-Hélène chose May 2003 to put together a library of photos of our home. My guess is that her doing so indicates that she was satisfied with where it was by then…
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“Everybody’s going surfin’, Surfin’ USA ..”
And if you don’t recognize that Beach Boys tune, you clicked here by mistake! Everybody went surfing except the parents, that is, and except Alex who was only a year old. Charlie,…
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Moving House
Sounds easy doesn’t it? But it took more than three years for our furniture to move from La Bellanderie to Santa Cruz. Why? First and most importantly, Tison S.A., the furniture moving company based in…
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Young Charles (1995-9)
Charles was born in August 1995 in Malestroit (the nearest town to La Grée) at the end of our summer vacation that year in Brittany near Brocéliande. Our little world gelled around Charlie from his…
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Young Alexander
Né en janvier 1998 à Santa Cruz, Californie (toujours le bébé!) Toujours le coquin aussi ! On dit “toujours le bébé” parce que maman a annoncé la fermeture de l’usine, un fait déploré mais…
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Nick and Tom back with us
For me, one of the absolute high spots of our collective lives together was the day that Nick and Tom came back to live with us in Santa Cruz during the summer…
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Fighting corruption in Santa Cruz
Our third big fight on arriving in the US was initiated by Sunshine, Nick and Tom’s mom. She is the daughter of a very successful litigator, and jumped on her opportunity to cause…
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Alex arrives in 1998
First things first: Alexander Marc Edward Stock was born in January 1998 at Dominican Hospital in Santa Cruz. His arrival was a bit of a shock for Charlie. One moment Alex wasn’t…
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Our first years in Santa Cruz . . .
Occasionally, magazines or web media like Yahoo will list sources of possible stress in a person’s lifetime, and attempt to compare them or rank them. There are terrible life-changing occurrences on these…
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Nick and Tom in Paris: the rest of us in Santa Cruz
It was Christmas 1997 before Nick and Tom paid their first visit to the rest of us in Santa Cruz, where we had moved in June 1997. The intervening six months had been a…