Jack Steffen
Posted Wednesday, January 20, 2010 03:15 AM

Had wonderful Christmas Holiday Season in San Francisco, one of our favorite cities. Wife's other daughter also came and stayed at daughter's, so no place for my wife and me since they have only a two-bedroom, single-floor house in SF. We were lucky, though, and got to house-sit for a friend of wife's daughter who went on vacation to Australia. No hotel expense incurred. Makes a vacation in San Francisco even better! We were there for both holidays and the birth of wife's daughter's second child. Susan did not want to know sex of second child (they knew for first one, a boy). Alec knew and made innuendos for months that it would be a boy without actually saying it was a boy. Baby was born on December 24th, just in time for Christmas the next day. When the baby was presented to the mother, they told her it was a girl. Alec accomplished a great feat of deception. We took charge of the grandson when ever we could since daughter was busy attending to the new arrival. Grandson, Kristian, loves to ride the street cars, electric busses, light-rail, etc. While he has been to 5 foreign countries already and many cities in the U.S., he has never seen the ocean in San Francisco(?). He is two and a half now and was quite excited at watching surfers riding in on the waves and also watching other people throw tennis balls into the surf so their dogs could go fetch. We then took him to the SF zoo (hasn't gone there yet, either). He was more fascinted with the play things, tree stumps (for jumping), cement tunnels (for crawling through), etc. then he was with the animals. The zoo also has a real live open car steam train. So naturally he wanted to ride on that as well. All this was fun, and we obtained some really nice photos for Susan to post on their blog site. SF is a great place to vacation, especially for those of us who don't live there in the Bay Area.