Decadent it may be...expensive it is...but Grand Opera, done right, can be glorious! We heard Luciano Pavarotti in his first San Francisco performance, Rodolfo in “La Bohème.” “My, that's not a bad tenor at all,” we said. We saw him do “La Bohème” here some years later (about 25, in fact), and we still thought he wasn't a bad tenor....

We rather like animals. An investigation of some of our other pages, starting with Beagles Are Best and continuing through All Dogs Are Good Dogs, Announcing Jenny!, Introducing Zoey, Zoey's Autobidography, and Phoebe, Come Home, will prove that to you. Our house is a cross between the San Francisco Public Library and the San Francisco Zoo.

We really like holidays. Halloween is our favorite, of course, especially as celebrated during Mimi's childhood, when “Trick or Treat” didn't mean collecting pennies for UNICEF, but—um, kinda vandalizing the neighborhood....

And we both write. We've both sold stuff here and there, now and then, but we've also done a variety of other things—Mimi has edited a couple of newspapers, Dick has run a gym, and together we spent 10 years designing people-to-people expeditions to remote corners of the Pacific Basin, taking people to stay in traditional villages in the South Pacific and in homes and losmen in Bali (and check out Bali Is.... for a look at that magical island).

We like to photograph—strange things, sometimes. Markets are a favorite. Mimi is fond of doorways. Mimi and Dick both shoot animals and plants. And people best of all.

We read. Constantly. Dick has a passion for Joseph Conrad and plans one day to put up a Conrad Web site. Mimi recommends John Barth's “The Sot-Weed Factor” to anyone with a taste for the bawdy and picaresque and John Fowles' “The Magus” to anyone who wants to get really angry at a book.

Dick gardens. For the nth summer in a row, he's produced a bounty of vegetables. Holler if you want us to e-mail some zucchini. He's also into orchids that can be seen on our Orchids page, begonias, bromeliads, and other interesting stuff, and he even grows pansies because Mimi likes them. He keeps an ever-changing array of fragrant, blooming pots on the deck across the room from Mimi's computer table.

We like to argue, especially with each other. A friend of ours recently invited us to a gathering at her Russian Hill apartment called “A Festival of the Opinionated.” We drove another participant home to Berkeley, and all the way home she insisted that we were lost, until we pulled into her driveway.

We like to go to good junky movies.

We kinda hang around with computers a lot. Our latest assignment—to really learn Photoshop.

We like to stay home with a good bottle of wine from the family vineyard (plug: Navarro Vineyards in Mendocino County, California), take our shoes off, settle down with the beagles, and enjoy each other's company.