Family Portraits 2008
Not in any particular order, this page features a collection of portraits of
us. That's what this website is all about, after all!
We begin with Alex on the left, expressing something about his birthday.
We're not sure what, but he was certainly expressing it with conviction!
Our guess is something between "Happy Birthday to me!" and "bug off!"
On the same day, Maman and Annie were in the kitchen, waiting for the party
to start.
Next, on the left a school portrait of Charlie, very well put together if we
may say so.
He attends a great local school. Someone who ran across our website was
horrified that we were using the names of the schools our children attended. So
we're reducing the number of explicit references to these names, but wonder if
the possibility of wierdos and crazies should affect us in this way. Schools
are already uniformly so very security conscious.
We are a family who spends a lot of time watching movies. During 2008, most
arrived courtesy of Netflix, but we still make it to the cinema every so often.
On the right, Marie-Helene with
Charlie and Alex outside the Regal Cinema 9
on Pacific Avenue in Santa Cruz after one such movie excursion.
Birthdays and other
special days are always a good time to take pictures of our older progeny. Not
only is the camera out, but also they tend to show up! We are grateful for these
small traditions.
Christmas eve gave us a bunch of good portraits in 2008, most notably
here, as well as the one on the left of Daphne
and Alban with her friend Noe.
Attendance is getting spottier as the years progress and the older children
live further afield. Tom was the only one missing from Alban's birthday, for the very good reason
that he was in Paris. We all missed his birthday too a few weeks later, for the
same reason.
On the right below, Marie-Hélène took this one
of Nick at the Ideal Café, where we enjoyed Alban's
birthday dinner.
He wasn't there, and our only sources of photos of Tom in 2008 are his
MySpace and Facebook pages, but below here's a Christmas portrait of Tom with
his girlfriend Maureen. It was snowing at her family's place in Normandie, but
this photo warms us here.
Other pictures of Tom in Paris in 2008 are here.
"And now for something completely different!" as they used to say on Monty
Python. Home in Santa Cruz features dozens of young
redwoods, that have grown since the area was logged in the late 1800s to build
houses in San Francisco and the rest of the Bay Area. We have two or three
enormous stumps that may have been logged at that time. Around each of them
grows a clump of young trees like those in this portrait below.
To complement the redwoods, we have learned a healthy respect for the poison
oak that blossoms, if that is the word, each spring on our property. If you are
allergic, as some of us are, it takes a week of cortisone, a very powerful drug,
to cure the body's reaction to poison oak. Yet it looks harmless, a sprig
of oak, little more than a bush at most, as in the photo below left.
Back to people. A couple of the best portraits of the year are to be found
here, one of the parents and
one of Alex and Charlie.
On the left below, one of the less auspicious portraits of the year, featuring
maman supporting a heavy weight! Needless to say, this
seating arrangement did not last long.
On the right below, Nick took this one on
Dad's birthday. Alban was sitting to his mother's left,
but as he was glaring at the camera, one of his bad habits, we edited him out!
Here are the other 2008 photo journal pages: Tom
living in Paris, Alban out and about in
Santa Cruz, Ian on a short visit to family in
England, Maman, Papa, Charlie and Alex taking a
long weekend down the California coast,
birthdays and other special days in 2008,
soccer in 2008 and, last but not least, the
main 2008 journal page.
