Honda sent us a family invite to the launch of their 2000 range of cars, including a hybrid electric/petrol vehicle that looks pretty interesting. We drive in to the city and spend some time looking at the cars and eating the free food, and then use our complimentary discount coupons to visit the “Zeum”, an interactive audio-visual museum and activity center, catering to 10-18 year-olds, but we had a lot of fun anyway <s>.

This evening I remember to set the VCRs for all the new shows that are premiering this week. There’s a lot of them, and they all sound good! Typically, our favorite shows (ER, Chicago Hope, The Practice) are all starting their new seasons also. And we will be out of town, in irregular contact with TV.

Today we have a lazy morning warming up in the sun in our backyard. We decide to climb Mt Tamalpais and show T & V the view. The summit of Mt Tam is above the fog, and despite the fog covering the view of San Francisco, we still get a fabulous view.

Rather than go out for dinner again at one of our favorite places, we decide to fire up the grill. Derek shows up in time for his steak to come off the grill, hooray!

Frustrated with being unable to do music work on Maestro, I designed a cover for Volume 7 of my ongoing project “Prodigal Sounds Archives”. We built new versions of our Acme software and new InstallShield setup files, and set FTP uploads going, loading our new files up to the Acme servers. We invited ourselves around to Alan & Kerry’s place in Novato and take their kids off their hands for a couple of hours by taking them to dinner at the local IHOP (International House of Pancakes).

It’s a beautiful day! We celebrate by working (poor, sick people that we are). Seriously, I work on loading music from cassettes onto Maestro’s hard disk and clean up the tracks using Audio editing software. In the middle of this, Maestro’s C: drive vanishes. Blue screen of death. No operating system. Weird sounds. Argh!

As a distraction we drive out to Smith Ranch Road (where our temporary accommodation was when we moved here) and had dinner at the nice Pizzeria, followed by a movie _Outside Providence_. The dinner was great, the movie was not as good as I expected, but still entertaining.

We go to the Civic Center to see about getting new pages put in Lisa’s passport, and while we are there, we visit the County Library (under the dome) and get library cards. After a run of beautiful days, clouds start coming up from the South and it starts to rain this evening. The ground doesn’t really get *wet*, exactly, but if you walk outside you can feel the raindrops. A bit of thunder and lightning raise the excitement level somewhat. Lisa notices that the mockumentary _Forgotten Silver_ is being shown on the Sundance cable channel (a really good independent and arthouse film channel) and we settle down to watch. We missed it when it screened in New Zealand, and were very happy to watch it at last. It was very funny, but I remember back to the letters and kerfuffle over “whether or not it was real” at the time and I wonder how badly some people wanted to believe it. It was pretty obviously pulling our collective legs. I got a strange feeling at the end, because after the credits, they had the TV ONE logo and “made with the help of your broadcasting fee, so that you can see more of NZ on Air” logo thing. Something I wasn’t expecting to see here!