I’m having a lot of trouble with my left hip these days. A run of bad luck. I’ll spare you the details. One of these days I’ll be okay again.

I always like going to Santa Cruz for a break. Totterling around. Here’s the lighthouse jetty by the harbor. Those giant “jacks” are cool. Maybe they brought them in on a barge.

A few weeks ago we got a free Google Cardboard virtual reality viewer. It was attached to the Sunday New York Times lying in our driveway. The Times has a few good VR videos in the NYTVR app for the iPhone. The images show up in pairs and you put the iPhone into these cheap goggles and you see real 360 degree image VR, look up, look down, look all around. It boggled my mind. With a free viewer I found in my driveway and with the iPhone I already had. It’s another huge media tsunami starting up…

After my October hip operation, I was still having problems, but I finally got the nerve to take a walk up onto the hill behind our house. Free. In nature alone. I love this clump of bushes. God within all things.

Then Thanksgiving rolled around and we had a merry group celebration with Rudy Jr. and about a hundred of his friends and acquaintances.

In an ethnic “hall” in San Francisco, I forget, maybe it was the Lithuanian Hall? Last year it was the Polish Hall.

The vintage sight of a US Flag.

And the cryptic street worker marking on the pavement. An unkown tongue.

Took the family and the grandkids for a walk the day after Thanksgiving. Red Riding Hood was along. Or Robin Hood.

Another hip operation, and then I got busy working on publishing Transreal Cyberpunk, an anthology of nine stories that Bruce Sterling and I wrote together. Good to have something else to think about. The book is officially coming out on Monday, the day after tomorrow. But you can in fact already buy it in paperback and ebook on Amazon.

Backing up a few weeks, after Christmas we went up to the city for a day and were walking around Chinatown with daughter Isabel. Are these smoked cuttlefish the gnarliest thing ever, or what? And their color! The ducks…somehow we think of the ducks as tasty. Conditioning. And the cuttlefish…wow. I was just writing about cuttlefish today. I try and put them into every one of my novels.