Kyle and I on New Year’s Eve 2008.

I had a great New Year’s Eve. We went to a 1933 Prohibition Party in Valley Ford. We dressed up like the 30s and danced to the musical styling of the Bluebellies. Then we stayed up until 4 a.m. talking and the next day went to McNears for lunch. Having a good New Year’s is such a relief. I hate downer New Year’s.

Just for the record, I thought 2008 was a great year. I’m a little tired of people complaining about it. Very few people I know had bad things happen to them in 2008, so I don’t get all the good riddance stuff and the hiding from New Year’s Eve.

I don’t feel like writing a long survey like I’ve done the last few years, but here are some highlight from 2008:

Kyle and I spent the first year in our own house and did a lot of remodeling. It wasn’t as hard to adjust to the financial burden as I had anticipated, although we did cut back on some of our usual indulgences. Still, I had a lot of fun. I saw art and science. I went canoeing and snow shoeing and camping. At home, I planted a huge garden and read over 70 books. We got a free trip to Las Vegas and went on a couple of road trips. In September, we went to Kentucky to visit friends and family. While there, I went to a writer’s conference and saw Joyce Carol Oates speak. We also had parties throughout the year, the most fun of which was an impromptu election party to watch Barack Obama take the presidency.

Our silhouettes at an art exhibit in Kentucky

Professionally, both of us did well this year. I wrote a lot of articles, including ones for magazines like Entrepreneur and The Writer. I got to interview writers and artists such as Anne Lamott and Nellie McKay. On top of that, I published short stories, judged a book contest, and held a literary reading. Kyle got a book deal with Pearson Publishing, became a columnist for Linux Journal, and gave a lot of speeches, including one at LinuxWorld. He also got a promotion—he’s now Systems Architect at QuinStreet.

Squash from the garden

The year wasn’t perfect, of course. Obviously, there’s the economy, which is depressing. There were some projects that didn’t work out and some minor disappointments here and there. And some things were just lame. Still, a good year.

I will answer one question from the survey: What are some things you would like to do in 2009?

I’d like both of us to finish our larger writing projects before April. I’d like to go to Puerto Rico, be more active, and save some money. I’d like to be more involved in the art community as a whole, whether that means supporting other artists or just playing around with art myself. And I’d like to emotionally win over the onslaught of negativity and fear the news is throwing at me every time I turn on the TV. That last one is a challenge indeed.

Redwood tree from my Humboldt County road trip.

Sorry I haven’t blogged. I can’t blog when there’s a heatwave. I can’t do anything during a heatwave except hide from the sun and moan about being hot.

But I have been meaning to tell you about our mushroom farm. We bought it at Maker Faire a couple of weeks ago. It looks like a molding loaf of bread in a plastic bag, but it is actually sawdust and rice bran that has been cured of bacteria and infused with water and mushroom culture.

We bought the organic Shiitake Mushroom farm for $19.98. The guy who sold it to us said that they guarantee one pound of mushrooms from the farm. I was a little doubtful, because $20 for one pound of mushrooms is pretty high. However, that is the minimum amount that they guarantee, and the farm is supposed to go through 3-5 cycles, and besides, it’s just cool to watch.

We took it home and put it on our kitchen counter. Within two days, lumps began to rise out of the farm. Within three days, something that looked like mushrooms began to emerge:

Within a week, we had huge Shiitake mushrooms coming out of the bag. We harvested 15 in all, over a pound of mushrooms, and we have 2-4 more cycles on the farm to go.

Even better, the mushrooms were fresh, tender, and clean in a way I have never had before. I guess like all other food, they are best when fresh. We had them in a mushroom ragu over pasta and then a mushroom strudel wrapped in phyllo dough.

Now the mushroom farm is supposed to rest for a couple of weeks before we get our next crop. Hurrah! If I get as many as I did in just the first cycle on the remaining cycles, I will definitely buy this thing again.

Let me start out by saying that I’m a fan of O’Reilly Media. After all, Kyle has written several books for them. I have gone to the Maker Faire for the last two years. In fact, Kyle had a booth at Maker Faire last year, which I wrote about here. So, having gone and enjoyed it every time–especially the craft fair aspect of the event–I was happy that Marcia invited us to go again this year. She even offered to drive.

The sign that something was wrong started at the freeway interchange to San Mateo, where Maker Faire was being held. Suddenly, there was a lot of traffic. After slowly driving through it for a half hour longer than felt necessary, Marcia and Kyle started suggesting that maybe the traffic was because of the Maker Faire. I didn’t think so. It seemed impossible that this many people wanted to look at crafts and lasers. The whole DIY aesthetic and geekiness that Marker Faire represents still seems too grass roots and small to me to attract this many people. I mean, this was like being caught in traffic for a football game, not a cute little geeky fair.

But when we pulled onto the off-ramp for the Maker Faire exit, I saw that I was wrong. The off-ramp was jammed full of cars and moving at a glacier pace. For an hour and 40 minutes, we sat on the off-ramp. We were trapped. We stopped and started, stopped and started. People were parking their cars on the shoulder and peeing in the bushes. I was dying of boredom. All I saw for nearly two hours was this:

FINALLY we got into San Mateo, but the craziness continued. Traffic was clogging the streets. There was no where to park. We drove around and around but all the lots were full. My mood started to sour. I can only be in traffic for so long before I start getting upset. I took to desperate measures to entertain myself.

“Help Me! (Trapped in car, can’t see lasers)”

“All these people are coming here? Really?”

Line to get in

At last, we gave up and parked in downtown San Mateo and ate at a taqueria in the back of a Mexican grocery store. Marcia had excellent tamales. The Jesus statue on top of the meat case lifted my spirits.

I would have been happy to go home at that point, but it had taken four-and-a-half hours to get there and Kyle and Marcia still wanted to go, so we walked over to the Maker Faire. Luckily, because Marcia is all connected and important, we had free tickets, so we didn’t have to stand in the line to get in.

Once in, it was… crowded. And yet the faire was pretty much the same. I mean, yeah, they had a few new things, like bands and giant metal statues–

–but overall it was the same. Same giant robot giraffe, same cupcake scooters, same pinball trailer, same $3 water and soda (and $9 beer, I hear). What was different was that somehow–and I admit this is a subjective viewpoint–the joy had been sucked out of the event. Last year, there were people riding around on every weird bicycle contraption you could think of. This year, there were only a few people on such things. Last year, people were so cool and strange that I wanted to take a picture of everyone I saw. This year, while there were plenty of geeky tee-shirts and pony tails, only one or two people struck me as interesting. And also, people were kind of rude.

One of the biggest disappointments was the craft fair. Last year, the Bizarre Bazaar was full of awesome crafts. I walked around and got idea after idea. This year, the overall quality of the crafts seemed lower. While there were some repeat crafters, the new stuff slipped into more predictable craft territory: baby booties, cards, cutesy pillows, etc. And anyway, I couldn’t even look at the booths because they moved the Craft portion of an event into a small building and it was so crowded, you could hardly walk.

(Sample of the crowd in the Craft building)

That said, I’m glad I went because I got to hang out with friends. There were a few other cool things:

1. Giant metal statues, as mentioned before.

2. A DIY mushroom farm where you can grow your own mushrooms at home. Kyle and I bought one. We are growing shitake mushrooms on our kitchen counter now.

3. Goats

4. Various lasers, Tesla coils, robots, et. all.

5. Pops! by Krystina Castella, a book about making popsicles. I was so impressed, I went right home and made popsicles with fresh lemon and grapefruit juice.

Kyle kept saying that I thought Maker Faire wasn’t cool anymore because, like an indie band geek, I didn’t like that my little “discovery” had gotten so popular. Maybe so. It amazes me that that many people wanted to go to it, and I suspect the reason is hype more than anything else. Or, it could simply be that I resent sitting in a car for five hours.

Still, I don’t care if it is a little snotty: like a good restaurant or an indie band, some things start to suck once they become popular.

It was the weekend of festivals. On Saturday, I went to the San Francisco Oyster and Beer Fest to see the band Flogging Molly. On Sunday, I went to Maker Faire in San Mateo, which is put on by O’Reilly to promote Craft and Make Magazines. I took lots of pictures, too many for one entry, so I will split it up into two.

I will start with the second part of the weekend, the Maker Faire.

As an O’Reilly author, Kyle was asked to host the “Hacker’s Lemonade Stand,” where he answered questions about Knoppix, Ubuntu, or Linux Multimedia. Here he is at the booth helping some girls:

I, on the other hand, wandered around and looked at the crafts at the Bazaar Bizarre and all the exhibits. I saw robots, strange-looking bicycles, and explosions. But one of the neatest things for me was walking into the Make Store where O’Reilly was selling its books and seeing not one, but two, giant posters of the covers of Kyle’s books hanging on the wall. Here is the picture of the Knoppix Hacks poster (he’s almost done with the update of that book, by the way).

Wandering around, I got tons of article ideas and ended up buying some coasters and an art print. Here are some pictures:

The main room of the fair

This kid was playing a video game using that plane as a controller

Pirate guy

By wearing that suit, that guy was playing music on the computer just by moving his body.

Knitting and drumming at the same time, for some reason.

They were shooting fire with those gun things. It made children cry.

The children were happier with the giant robotic giraffe.

He will write you a poem about anything.

Tomorrow, part two of my weekend: The Beer Fest and Flogging Molly.