Steven Rubio's Online Life

sports in the age of terrorism

Photo taken at the baseball All-Star game in 2007:

google maps as madeleine

Go to Google Maps and search for the place where you spent your childhood. It won’t look like your memories of the place, but you’ll find yourself thinking about when you lived there, and the changes between then and now will lead to reflections on the difference between you-then and you-now.

Here is what my childhood home looks like today:

The house is as old as I am, a tract home built when my mother was pregnant with me. All of the houses on the block looked the same, with the exception of the mirror effect, where some homes had the driveway on the right, like ours, and others had it on the left, which meant the floor plan was flipped. On walking through the front door, you’d be confronted with a living room, with dining room attached and kitchen off of the dining room. In the opposite direction from the kitchen, off of the living room, was a short hallway, off of which were three bedrooms and one bathroom. Eventually, families would remodel; in our case, we extended out the back, with a family room connected to the kitchen, and an extra bedroom and bathroom.

I can’t tell from the above picture what has been done to that back area, of course, and the size of the tree (and the shade) makes it difficult to see, anyway. You can see the front door, and I know where the windows are, but that’s memory speaking. The lawn seemed v.long when I was a kid (I can’t remember for sure, but a part of it might have been paved over later to make the driveway bigger). There was a rose bush in front of the door; when my grandmother was watching us and we did something wrong, we’d have to get a “switch” off the bush for a spanking.

I look at this picture, and I can see street football, and I can remember the neighbors who lived on either side, and I can see the floor plan, and which bedrooms I slept in at which times in my life, and where the TV was … if I were Proust, I could turn that photo into seven volumes of memories.

Here’s a picture of the above house from sometime in the mid-50s. I’m just guessing … my brother was six years older than I, and he doesn’t look all that old, so maybe 1956?

picsay

Just got an app for my Android called PicSay, which leads me to one of those awful blog posts where I include cute pix from the cute app. It sells itself as a goofy picture modifier, although there are many PhotoShop type features, as well. Here are three examples of what it can do. First, I take a photo of Robin with a look on her face I’ve seen many times, and add a word balloon:

Next, I try to make Six look sillier than usual. I don’t really succeed, but here’s the picture, anyway:

Finally, here is my answer to everyone who complains about how I look in family photos:

playing with semi-new toys

more wedding memories

They had a photo booth. First is me and Robin, second is me and all of my siblings who attended (David, you’ll be glad to know Geoff shouted “Hi, Dave!” for every one of those pix).

tahoe wedding

My niece got married this weekend, so we traveled up to Tahoe for the ceremony. It was lovely, a perfect combination of the traditional and the quirky that exemplifies the couple quite nicely. Rain and wind threatened, and even made a bit of an appearance, but only so that the heavens could cast their approval:

The reception was as expected:

And I survived a weekend in nature:

It was weird … due probably to the altitude, I had some asthma while we were there. Nothing serious, but enough so that I finally realized I couldn’t wait to get away from all that fresh mountain air and return to my smoggy Bay Area home.

a couple of random pix from the wedding

Emphasis on random … Robin bought herself a new camera and took the important pictures. And a ton of others are coming to Facebook, I’m sure. Here is proof the ceremony was in nature and I was there:

Jacob and Sara walking the aisle:

nature

wouldn’t mind being there

time (late 50s, early 60s, early 70s, early 70s, mid 80s, 21st century)