Stately Yoink Manor

Birthday Gratitude

2010-06-27T21:50:00.001-07:00

It's been a while, so hopefully no one's checking the blog anymore and I can noodle about with my writing without much notice. Plus, it's bedtime so I'll make it quick.

This year is our 81st birthday, and mine has already passed with K's coming on Tuesday. This means we held our annual backyard birthday BBQ on Saturday (yesterday), with perfect weather and a traditionally randomized cast of attendees.

I like our BBQ for a number of reasons. It lasts all days so parent and kids can come early, or anyone can stay late. Lots of folks bring food to share, which invariably results in a delightful smorgasbord of tasty food. We've got enough kids that they're mostly self-entertaining. And we get to hang out with a fabulous cross-section of our friends. I was really happy that an old high school friend (reconnected to on Facebook) came by, even as some other regulars couldn't make it for mostly legitimate reasons.

Plus this year I feel particularly grateful - I've described my June as one full of gratitude. May was a tough month: K was bumpily starting up his job search and structuring his downtime while we were all living in anticipation of R's heart surgery. (R, my niece, was born in late January with Tetrology of Fallot - a fancy way of saying "four things wrong with your heart".) The surgery went well, K has settled into a routine of vigorous networking and job interviewing, and I'm approaching my ten years (TEN YEARS) at Robert Half.

The way I figure it, my family is healthy, I have a job, we have a roof over our heads, and our cats are darling (if psychotic). The only things I can winge about are the pounds that refuse to come off, and signs of age (eyesight, vocabulary recall, aches). And that just doesn't seem like much. On the flip side, I am grateful for heart surgery technology, my fabulous family and friends, quiet moments at home, and so many other things.

So I put my love and gratitude out there, take a deep breath, and enjoy the days.

The Great Cat Escape

2009-08-01T18:55:00.000-07:00

Three weeks ago we were working on our garage as part of a long-term effort to clean out our basement. We were sealing the concrete so as to be able to use the space without quite so much dust being constantly created. While we had the garage door open to facilitate drying, the back door of our kitchen blew open (a not-unusual occurrence that has resulted in false-positive house alarm alerts in the past), and our cat Ka went downstairs to investigate. When I realized what had happened, I managed to follow her down the stairs and into the garage at exactly the right time to scare her onto the street. Kyle was just a few seconds too late to stop her from running away entirely, and followed her a few houses down, and then lost her in the bushes.

Disaster! Cats are normally hard to catch, but our Ka is a class-A fraidly cat and has never been comfortable being petted. We're not even entirely sure she likes us, for that matter. Well, she seems appreciative enough when food is in the offing.

So what to do? Not a day later, the woman from whom we adopted our cats emailed us with a cheery, "How are you doing and how are the cats?" check-in email. We had to tell her that Ka had gone missing, at which point she started showering us with information on how to find lost cats. Key points included: 1) have patience (cats take a while to get bcak) and 2) the cat is probably very near by (within 5 houses). She continued to pepper us with other advice, including how to leave tuna trails, walking the neighborhood to leave our scent around, and how to design an effective lost pet flyer (ask me if you ever want to know). She even brought us one of her humane traps (she catches lots of feral cats and takes them to get their shots and spayed/neutered) and a blanket to conceal it with.

Over the course of the next two weeks we did just about all the things I listed above. We left out food and water daily, and hoped that she was getting it (someone was definitely eating it - was it Ka?). We left tuna trails. We walked the neighborhood, making noise with her favorite toys and calling her name. We even posted signs on the block and talked with neighbors. We did manage to trap two possums (ick) and feed the local skunk trio (thanks for the smell guys), but no cats and definitely no Ka.

Finally, the day K came back from Comic Con in San Diego, he was putting out the cat food and came back into the house looking for a flaslight. "There's a cat eating the food right now and I think it's Ka!" It was, and we put the cage out with great anticipation. A few hours later, we had trapped something - another possum! (2 of 2) Catching possums, aside from being disappointing and somewhat guilt inducing (sorry, dude), requires that the cage and blanket be washed (to get rid of the scared possum smell). So on Monday I came home early and hosed everything down so we would be ready to set the trap again.

That night we set the trap, making much noise with the food bag and hoping fervently that Ka would still be in the area. Just as I was headed for bed, we heard the trap spring. Kyle went to check it, thinking, "Please no possums, please no possums!" and was delighted to find it was Ka. She was initially terrified and mewling to break your heart, but once we got her inside she very quickly realized she was home once again and seemed visibly relieved. She was hungry, thirsty, tired, and quickly went to sleep.

The only lingering bumpiness was that Pi'i did not recognize Ka at all and hissed at her viciously. We looked it up online, and after 2 weeks on the outisde, Ka smelled all kinds of foreign. Her familiar face was not enough to convince Pi'i to welcome her back. (Plus, Pi'i had seemed quite happy to be a single cat during those two weeks - perhaps she had pushed Ka out the back door??) Friends with cats reported that visits to the vet and even short separations could result in this kind of hissing behavior, and that it would pass. Even so, we decided to invest in a cat pheremone diffuser (Feliway) which would hopefully calm both cats and help Ka get rid of her old smells faster.

It's been almost a week since Ka came home, and I'm happy to report that the two cats are snuggled on the sofa now. Thank goodness. Ka seems much calmer than when she left, as though she recognizes a good thing now that's she's been without it. She's much less jumpy, and almost tolerates being touched. I'm just glad she's back, and glad Pi'i has company again. Let the romples resume!

Freeway Sightings

2009-03-19T21:34:00.000-07:00

Noticed a few things on the commute recently:

-Overturned car. Yikes. I just don't see those often, thankfully.

-Wild turkey. Hopped up onto the outside rail as I drove by, proud as you please. Hope it didn't try to cross the road.

-Blue Miata with license plates "UH WTF". I laughed out loud.

In home news, the cats are adjusting nicely. Pi'i is the affectionate one, Ka'ohi more shy. They excel at CatOlympics including Hide 'n' Seek, Wrestling, and the CatChase.

Denver Weekend. Geh.

2009-02-23T20:33:00.001-08:00

Spent the weekend in Denver with my old buddy J and his fiancee L. He's been there for almost four(?) years now, and pathetically, this is the first time I've gotten out to visit him. He has a lovely house in an area that features Craftsman bungalows (just like home!), and seems to be doing well at work for Lockheed...not that he can tell me what he's working on of course. He and L have adopted a dog, B, who has the magical quality of shedding hairs that are visible no matter what color clothing you're wearing. (In fact B's main breed - Swiss Mountain dog - is known for being "tri-colored". It's a feature.)

We had just about a perfect Denver weekend. On Friday morning we picked up L's engagement and wedding rings, and got them insured on the way home so L could wear them with a clear conscience that day. They are, of course, gorgeous! J and I went cross-country skiing at Eldora near Boulder...and I'm happy to report I survived with most of my muscles in decent working order. J bought himself a new pair of gloves because the ones he had were waaaay too thin for the near-katabatic winds that were howling through the base area. Thankfully, once we were on the XC trails we had protection from the trees. I only wiped out twice: once when I wanted to turn - and failed - and once when I wanted to stop - and failed. I can carve an S or do a mean hockey stop on downhill skiis, but not on teles. No way. No idea how. Ouchie!

When we got home, J was unable to find one of this gloves. A thorough search was conducted, but no glove. Perhaps it had fallen out in the ski rental hut? Or on the way back to the car? Bummer.

That night we had dinner downtown (bison burger, baby!) as it started to snow. Neat! Happy, fluffy snow. Yay! Late that night when J when to pick up L from downtown (she was at a birthday party with friends), he said the roads were full of accidents - the temperature had dropped and created icy conditions. Thankfully they got back safe.

Saturday dawned with an even coating of snow. Fabulous! It being Denver, though, the morning sun slowly melted the snow, and B was able to roll about in the grass and mud, tracking only some of it back into the house. Silly dog. As we were watching him in the backyard, I happened to notice a glove partially visible in the snow. Was it the missing glove? Turns out that B had stolen J's new glove and taken it into the backyard for overnight safe-keeping! Well, at least we had both gloves back.

That morning we strolled along the Dinosaur Ridge, a simple but effective showcase of the local geology and its propensity for hiding dinosaur tracks and plant and animal fossils. While not particularly eye-popping, it did make for a nice walk and some insight into plate techtonics. The weather was warm and clear, which meant we had a great view of the surrounding landscape. After that we went over to the Red Rocks Ampitheater, a performance venue built into the dramatic rock shapes. It was impressive and beautiful, but by then my head was hurting due to altitude incompatibility so we called it a day. On the way back we stopped by their wedding venue; unfortunately there was a wedding going on and J didn't feel like crashing, so we looked at it from the outside and imagined how nice it will be in summer with the hogback mountains and flowers.

On Sunday we checked out the Denver Art Museum (nice acronym, guys). Designed by Daniel Liebeskind, the new buiding looks like a large, crazy, titanium ship. We took the architectural and the collections highlights tours which turned out to be a much better approach than just wandering the (confusing) halls. I really enjoyed the space, and how it encourages exploration. The curators have a challenge in figuring out how to display the art, but I don't feel the building detracts from the artwork on display. Rather, it put me in a more open and thoughtful mood, which accentuated the experience of seeing new art. Though truthfully, the angles also made me feel queasy.

I was personally fond of the floor map.

It was a very fun and chatty and interesting weekend. We had good food, talked a lot, and do a bunch of things. I'm glad I went, and even gladder we'll be back in July to celebrate!

J's new favorite lamp

Kittehs!

2009-02-23T20:31:00.000-08:00

We've adopted some cats. Long story short, we think they are Russian Blues and we got them from a woman who was fostering 10 other strays in her garage plus owning 12 cats of her own in her house. Yeaaah. I just uploaded pics on Facebook so check there for more updates.

Birthday Bash

2008-12-09T21:22:00.001-08:00

Dad's 70th birthday party was this past weekend in SF. The weekend started with a Chinese banquet dinner at Great Eastern restarant in Chinatown on the actual day of his birthday (Dec 5), followed by the birthday (observed) dinner, and rounded up with dim sum brunch on Sunday at Canton Restaurant south of Market. Am I full yet?

We started planning for this months ago, of course. IWOM put the venue negotiations and menu in motion; Dad slowly filtered names for this invite list to me. I sent a "Save the Date" email consisting mainly of one of his baby photos. Later, Dad and I selected and ordered the invitations online (note to self: October is rush season for card-printing due to the holidays) and then he went out of town, leaving his near-career-long admin and me to address the invites and send them out. Thankfully, they turned out great - another victory for the internet!

Once he returned from his trip, we went to design the cake, and I was struggling to think of something appropriate. Something from Dad's professional career, like a microbe or infectious agent? Or maybe something travel-related, like the glass pyramid at the Louvre? I finally hit on it as he told me about his most recent blue-and-white purchase, a Ming plate in the shape of a lotus. We showed the cake folks what we wanted, and they said they'd give it their best shot. Dad went into their storefront wanting passion fruit flavor, and thankfully it was one of their options. Done!

Meanwhile, I had a dress and matching necklace made in Shanghai. The dress was based on a design by Valentino from the Neiman-Marcus website and the necklace was made of weird pearls that looked like teeth. I felt like an extra from "Conan the Barbarian" wearing them.

The actual party was a tremendous success, which I judge mainly by the sheer bliss exuded by Dad. He's not someone to get emotional, but he was clearly happy to be surrounded by friends, and they were happy to get a chance to celebrate their experiences with him. Toasts were funny, heartfelt, and exemplified the diversity of his experiences. One of his oldest friends, S, had a typed copy of a letter that Dad wrote to him in 1960 after a trip to Europe with comments that had the audience howling. His sisters were generous and sweet, and I learned that I'm not the first relative he's subjected to his opinions on opera (apparently he lectured Auntie P. on a number of musical topics before he left for college). The reception started at 6:30, and the last guests wandered out around 10:30, whereupon the aunties and cousins and our family migrated to the lobby for drinks. Dad disappointed by not falling asleep at that point (an historical tendency of his), and we finally went to bed around 1am.

And the cake was totally awesome. Beautiful AND tasty!

J managed to tough it out for most of the night, and came down for a final bow in jammies before going to sleep. She was a high point of the evening.

Bah, Humbug

2008-12-03T19:51:00.000-08:00

I hate Christmas. Well, I hate shopping at Christmastime to be more precise. I wrote more about it in another blog I've started experimentally, where I can put my thoughts around how to make the world a better place. I did say experimentally.

We had a great B'giving at Stately Rawson Manor in Oregon, with giant piles of food, multiple sets of electronics simultaneously in play (computers, Wii, drum sets), and even a plate-painting session where K created the "Caffeine Threat Levels" mug a la Homeland Security: zombie (low), human (guarded), awake (elevated), alert (high), ADHD (severe). Totally. Awesome.

Dad and I got to see the SF Opera's production of "La Boheme" last night, which was pleasingly decent. The last time we saw "Boheme" at SFO it was awful and we left early, so we were both happy that the leads could carry their arias (unlike the last time). I love the moment in this production when Rodolfo and Mimi are singing their love duet, and the sides and back wall of the garret disappear, leaving them bathed in moonlight and singing about love. It's a class-A romantic moment.

It's been a tough week at work from an attitudinal standpoint. I'm hoping I'm just suffering from post-vacation seasonal affective disorder and will be put right by consumption of massive quantities of calories. That starts tomorrow with my company holiday banquet, followed on Friday by Dad's Chinese banquet and (same night) K's company party, and then Dad's 70th birthday party on Saturday. Oh, and dim sum brunch on Sunday. Am I full yet?

Can't wait to see C & J & J - they're staying with us on Friday and have had quite an adventurous trip, starting in Hawaii to see Popo and currently in Oregon with J's family.

Rainy Shanghai

2008-11-22T16:23:00.000-08:00

Shanghai is more familiar every time I come here; things just don't seem to catch my eye the way they used to. I wonder if this is because I am more comfortable here, or because the city continues to Westernize itself?

This time, the vendors aren't constantly shouting at us and grabbing our arms to come into their stores; they wait until we express an interest. This is VERY different from before. More shopkeepers speak English. More foreigners are everywhere, and they know how to bargain - throwing up their hands and walking out of the stores in mock disgust. There was even a Chinese man dressed in full Stanford regalia waiting for Shanghai dumplings at Xin Tian Di - on the day of The Big Game.

The air quality seems slightly better, though the rains have brought a disgusting sheen to the streets...at least until the scum is temporarily washed away. The city is also preparing for the International Expo in 2010, so there are posters showing what not to do on the streets and sidewalks: spitting, leaving construction materials, dumping dirty water and garbage out the windows, smoking in non-smoking areas...Mom wants to steal one of the signs because she thinks it's hysterical.

We're supposed to go for a walking tour near the Bund today with mom's architecture friend, but I've been having stomach problems since last night and am not convinced it's the best idea. Staying in doesn't hold much appeal either, unfortunately.

Musings

2008-11-16T12:57:00.000-08:00

It's hot in the Bay Area. The weather conditions that are literally burning up Southern California are making for a balmy November weekend in NoCal. Some of my Red Cross friends have headed south to help with the fires - many thanks to them. My NoCal friends, meanwhile, are breaking out their summer clothes. Good thing K and I weren't fooled into switching to our flannel winter sheets or...damn.

Went to see "Boris Gudonov" at the SF Opera last night, starring Sam Ramey (no, not the horror film director) in the title role. I must be genetically conditioned to like bass voices because he had me when he started to sing. Amazingly, Sam is 66 years old. He's had an incredible career. The article in the program discussed the affects of aging on his voice, and how this might be the last time he sings the role of "Boris". I'm grateful I got to see him, and that I've seen him in a few roles over the years at SFOp. Some of his YouTube performances (including one as a toreador who loves the letter "L" on Sesame Street) are thrilling, if not priceless. I'm officially a fan.

So, is it shallow of me to enjoy opera so much in the middle of a meteoric economic crash, in a period when our presidency is undergoing seismic change (thank goodness), and when my work just laid off some longtime colleagues on Friday? Fiscally, these opera tickets are something Dad and I invested in at the start of the year. From a human standpoint, it's nice to have something to enjoy - especially my Dad's company as we approach celebrating his 70th birthday this December. I prefer to think that human experience is a collection of large and small events, positive and negative, and it's best to take it all in with equanimity, an open mind, and gratitude. I am grateful for my friends, my family, and opportunities to support and value them, whether that's by spending an evening together at the opera, or writing them a recommendation on LinkedIn.

Another Sunday night

2008-10-26T20:37:00.001-07:00

...another weekend chock full of stuff!

Let's start with last weekend:

Friday
-Dinner with R & R at Zachary's. Yum.

Saturday
-Bay-Friendly Gardening seminar on low-water plants. Lotsa good learning.
-Voluntered at the Alameda Country Community Food Bank
-Dinner with S and C at Soi4. Dessert care of TJ's - molten choco cake. More yum.

Sunday
-Raider tailgate (as described in the previous post)
-Party planning and dinner with Dad at Camino. Super yum.
-Experimental clearing of slow drains using vinegar. Sadly, did not work.

Now, on to this weekend:
Friday
-Dinner with Mom to belatedly celebrate her birthday, at Cortez. Amazing small plates. Really delicious.

Saturday
-Composting with Worms class. Dirt! Worms! Fungus!
-Chinese Lesson
-Dinner at Paul K in SF (nice Mediterranean food...delicious beets)
-San Francisco Symphony featuring Joshua Bell on violin. That boy can play.

Sunday
-All day sewing in preparation for Halloween. (check later for photo)
-KB rocks the chores with grocery shopping, garden shopping, laundry en masse, cooking, and mopping. That's my sweetie!

Oh, KB also attend an industry charity dinner, black tie optional. He borrowed a plaid cummerbund & tie set from Dads, and then proceeded to terrorize folks who knew him before he shaved and cut his hair. Totally awesome. I picked up my tipsy sweetie from the St. Francis around 11:30pm, whereupon he presented me with the lovely flower centerpiece (red roses...odd for a charity event but great for a spouse consolation prize) and told me how much he appreciates me. The latter is something he tends to do when tipsy. My friend J rightly pointed out that this is a rather cute trait.

Fall Sunday

2008-10-19T21:11:00.000-07:00

It's freezy out. (For me, that means 55 degrees.) Yesterday it was sunny and warmish, but after the sun set, all bets were off. Today in the sunshine it was freezy! Phooey! Now I have to go find my turtlenecks and scarves and warm things...

We joined our Raider mostly faithful friends today at the tailgate (but not the game, we don't have tix anymore) and enjoyed a carb fest. Or as K dubbed it, a CARB WRECK followed by a CARB CRASH. (Yes, he was killing himself laughing at this joke.) There was a token slab of meat, but until that was ready we had pumpkin bread rolls, pumpkin bread loaf, bagel chips, bolani, garlic bread, and grapes. Uuuuurrrrgh! It was nice to catch up with the peeps - this is only our second home game of the year, and the weather was good.

Even better was walking through the parking lot to take BART home; we passed a mind-bending variety of people and displays. Parents and kids selling candy for their schools next to the party boys shotgunning beers. Variously "decorated" Al Davis posters. Men in silver masks with wigs smiling in posed pictures with kids. (In some odd inversional rule, the most insanely dressed Raider fans are invariably the nicest). Skeleton Halloween bodies dressed in Raider gear, and sitting in chairs at tailgates. Raider grills. Raider steam cookers 8 feet tall. I didn't see any portable living rooms (sofa, rug, TV set, satellite receiver, power generator) but we have in the past. It was a sunny day in Raider Nation...made even sunnier by the eventual astonishing win against Brett Favre and The Jets, thanks to Janokowski's record-setting field goal.

Fall is really here. Now, how come we haven't played the World Series yet?

Red-Letter Day!

2008-09-10T21:06:00.000-07:00

Went to see the Giants game. Got the sweeeeeeet company seats. w00t!

Yes, that's my view 3 rows back from the field. Close enough to say things the players and umpires could hear! I sat up in the front row for a few innings too.

And then we came home and made cheese from scratch! Like, for real! We bought some cream-top 2% organic milk from TJ's and followed the directions in our Cheesemaking Kit, and less than an hour later, fresh mozarella cheese! How cool is that?

Om nom nom.

It's that time of year

2008-09-08T20:47:00.001-07:00

Driving home tonight from work, the freeway traffic warning sign on the Dublin grade read:

Oakland Coliseum
E V E N T
Expect Delays

First game of the season, Oakland vs the hated Broncos. Monday Night Football. Yes, we love our HD TV.

Goooooooo Raiders!

La Frida Bonita y otras cosas

2008-09-06T21:49:00.000-07:00

Went to see the Frida Kahlo exhibit at the SF MOMA this weekend. I was surprised by how many paintings were included in the exhibit, and frustrated by how many people were also moving through the rooms. It was hard to read the information displays, and hard to get in close - even sometimes see from a distance - the paintings. But what paintings! I know Kahlo mostly for her self-focused imagery, her struggles with pain, her representations of inner anguish. The exhibit showed her earlier portraits (straight-up, 30s modern), her later still lifes (vibrant, beautiful, static) and many candid photographs from her years in SF and Mexico...in addition to the amazing images you already know. There was good biographical information about her marital to-and-fro-ing with Diego Rivera, as well as her sojourns in America. Altogether she painted some very beautiful, symbolic, thoughful pieces. I was surprised by my enthusiasm. And while she herself was beautiful and charismatic, and she was tragically in love with Diego Rivera, a doughy dumpling of a man - what was she thinking???

Afterwards we got the super-bonus of an exhibit of modern Chinese artists - including Yueh MinJun whose works shows hordes of painfully grinning Chinese men (on ostriches, as fields of near-identical statues, sitting around, etc.). They are somehow perfect - identical, falsely friendly/happy, artificial, vaguely off-putting. Ai WeiWei had taken Neolithic clay pots (5000-3000 BCE) and painted over them with garishly-colored paints. Sacrilege! What a waste! Or...an interesting point about history, conservation, consumerism. Sui Jianguo created "The Sleep of Reason" - my new favorite, a statue of sleeping Mao (very unusual, as the link explains), and filled the room around him with waves of colored toy plastic dinosaurs, radiating outwards in dreamlike technicolor trip-out patterns. Way cool.

Afterwards we had dinner on Fillmore street at SPQR, a mixed-up Italian joint. It was good, but I can't tell you why. The desserts were confused (the "panna cotta" was a delicious chocolate mousse with chocolate cake on the bottom), and I think we paid too much. I was fascinated by the clientele; Mom had commented recently that people eating out in the East Bay are somehow different than the people eating out in San Francisco - more casual. Sitting there in SPQR, all I could see were white people, all the women were blond (almost none naturally), all from a very high socio-economic stratum, healthy, wearing very nice clothing, and not necessarily enjoying themselves. I felt pretty ghetto in my shorts and stringy yoga top. The couple to the right of us complained the whole time about the food, and the woman to the left of us spent almost the entire meal nattering away to her absently listening partner. Dad and I barely needed to talk for all the entertainment we had. Yes Mom, diners in San Francisco are different. I'll stick to the East Bay.

Change is good, mostly

2008-09-02T19:58:00.002-07:00

I've just concluded a rather interesting month. The short(ish) version: I realized that my workplace had changed strategic direction in a way that really didn't need my skill set very much. So I went to S, the guy who runs the place, and said, "I'm not asking you to fire me, but honestly, you don't need me. Is it okay if I make a few calls?"

My thinking is pretty straightforward. I'd rather work where I'm needed, not just where I'm liked.

So he gave me permission, and I put the word out that I was available. Something must be in the proverbial water, because it seems like I got calls from damn near every major player in my industry within a few days.

Also within a few days, S called me into a meeting to tell me, with a hangdog expression on his face, that he had done all he could, but my position had to be eliminated. My last day was to be in two weeks, at which time I would be handed a very generous severance check.

Weirdly, he was the one who needed to be comforted. "S, man, why the long face? You just got done telling me I get a fat check for leaving, which you know damn well I was doing anyway. Corporate HQ got a camera in here or something?"

I continued interviewing. Either they were all desperate, or I still got mad interview skillz, because each interview resulted in either a followup interview or an offer. Perhaps I shouldn't have done so many interviews...pretty soon I had a lot of deciding to do.

I've chosen one now, and for those who have heard me talk about the options, I chose the one that I can take the train to rather than the one I need a Chinese visa for, or the one I could bicycle to, or the one that might involve exotic foods.

I've learned a lot through this process. Turns out I can make hard decisions after all. Apparently I also have senior-management-level strategic thinking. I definitely have the Best. Wife. Evar.

I haven't ruled out going overseas for work one of these days. Probably will, in fact, before the next summer Olympics. Learning Chinese and French in the meantime might be a good investment of my time....

Twenty Year Time Machine

2008-08-26T20:16:00.000-07:00

Had a really good weekend (which is good, because this week so far has been uphill both ways).

Friday night: Gaming. D&D 4th edition with some of K's tribe members. I manage to convince KF to join us at the last minute, thereby preventing him from mouldering in his office until the wee hours. J brought Fred's Burgers and old-fashioned fat-tacular ice cream. (First two ingredients: butterfat and buttermilk.) I conked out at midnight.

Saturday: Haircut, violin lesson, volunteering at the Alameda County Community Food Bank, and dinner with the Dads. I was exhausted after shelving food for 3 hours, but cheerful. My co-volunteer spoke mainly Spanish, so I was kept mentally entertained by struggling to remember vocabulary.

Sunday: loafing about, including some minor house chores, reading in the sun, and a vegetable-tacular trip to the local farmer's market. K made a giant egg bake full of broccoli and cauliflower.

The highlight of the weekend was really the violin lesson. I played violin semi-seriously when I was a kid: started when I was 9, stopped when I was 13. I like to think I was a decent violinist, and the main reason I stopped was because we had moved to San Francisco and it seemed clear to me that it was time to decide if I was going to be really serious about violin or let it go. I decided I didn't want to be yet another Asian Girl Who Plays Violin.

I've always harbored a desire to play again, Sherlock Holmes-style, and so have kept the violin with me, as well as my sheet music and stand. I even had the poor thing repaired at a local violin store a few years back. But mostly it hid in its dark case.

Earlier this year I looked for violin teachers on Craigslist and found one who just happened to grow up in the same region of LA as I did, and even played with my Junior High orchestra conductor. He's a Berkeley grad, lives not far away, and was very kind and encouraging. He seemed pleased that I still remembered a few things (including a general sense for when notes are out of tune), and had lots of good advice about my bad thumb posture (BOTH hands, drat the luck). I was really encouraged and heartened.

So, now I'm back to practicing. K says it isn't too bad, and I find it very enjoyable. Some of the stuff even seems to be coming back, which is great. Many thanks to Mom and Dad and C for tolerating the whining and screeching of my practicing all those years ago, and paying for the lessons!

Mistaken Identity

2008-08-26T20:13:00.000-07:00

K just told me that he had to undelete some items from my gmail. Apparently I had left it logged in. He went to send an email and saw all these messages from people and companies he didn't know! delete, delete, dele-- oh crap! This is C's email!!!

Note to self: remember to log out from K's machine.

Point Reyes - On Hard Difficulty

2008-08-17T18:03:00.000-07:00

Meaning (for those of you non-gamers), not on "Easy" or "Medium".

Been looking forward to this hiking weekend for some time. Though none of our usual camping buddies was able to join us, K and I decided to go it alone (and miss E's birthday shindig, sorry E!). I needed the mental rest.

It started off badly, as I ended up needing to do about 3 hours of work on Friday. (Boo! Vacation delayed!) That took me until 10:30, whereupon I started gathering my stuff for packing. K had already given us a good head start (with my verbal commentary) during my work phase. We headed out around 12:30, stopped by TJ's for jerky and fruit, and got to Point Reyes around 2:30. After some initial administrivia at the Visitor Center to get our camping pass, we went to the Five Brooks staging area, parked, and hit the trail. First leg: 4.4 miles up, up, up! It was a nicely graded drivable road (Stewart trail) that went up to Firtop Mountain at 1,324 feet. Oof. Oh, and it was 82 degrees out. Double Oof. And there were yellowjacket warnings. Yikes! A few groups of horses passed us, and at one point K spotted a mountain lion. Double Yikes! We considered turning around, but another group of horses gave us courage (and cover) to proceed.

At Firtop, we met a group of cyclists celebrating their ascent of the mountain. As we proceeded down the steep trail, I marvelled, "They _cycled_ up this?" We took a hiking path down the aptly named Greenpicker trail, and made it into camp in plenty of time to pitch our tent and feel exhausted before having dinner. We couldn't find our tent pegs and it was so warm out, we happily slept under a fir tree with no rain fly. We also started a steady diet of ibuprofen. Total Hike Day 1: 6.4 miles.

Some uncomfortable tossing and turning during the night. We agreed we need new sleeping pads.

Since we were both prety wiped (we both had had migraines late in the week for one thing), Saturday we decided not to go for a longer trek down the coast but to look for ocean views from the Coast Trail. We don't normally stay at this end of the park, so were looking forward to different terrain. We hiked out via Glen Trail to the Coast Trail, and saw...lots of fog. Fog, fog, fog. We were very glad not to be hiking in heat like the day before, but the vista points were sadly obscured. Finally we turned a corner on the trail and saw...a mound of white rock jutting out of the ocean. K promptly gave his best voice-over: "And now on our left, Bird Poop Rock..." as that was what clearly gave it its color. Moments after that, the fog cleared and we were able to see the coastline down to Wildcat Camp and the faint coloring of Alamere Falls in the distance. Beautiful! We had lunch at Arch Rock and ambled tiredly back to camp. K found a nice stout walking stick and cleaned it up. Napping, dinner, and some bedtime reading. The sun never really broke through, and it was spitting fog when we went to bed. Total Hiked Day 2: 5.7 miles.

During the night: incredibly loud chatty neighbors, more painful tossing and turning, the slow increase of drips in our uncovered tent.

Morning dawned gray and drippy. The fog continued to condense into spitting near-rain, so once it was light enough (and we could no longer stand the water splups in the eye) we got up, took stock of our soaked items, and decided to head out as soon as we could. K made stand-up breakfast, while I slowly assembled our things and kept them as dry as I could. Mostly, our approach was to "put everything into a white plastic bag and walk." We'd already agreed the night before that we were going to take the shortest route back to the car. Not long after leaving camp, Kyle saw another mountain lion - much smaller this time, but unmistakably a mountain cat. This plus the very damp Greenpicker brook - er, trail - convinced us to change our route out from the shorter hiking paths back to the main Stewart Trail. We would have a clear view of the road and the horse traffic, leaving much less chance of cat encounters or slipping on the wet terrain. Slog, slog, slog, 6.4 miles and we were back at the car.

This was a tough trip for some reason. Our other stays have been at campsites that are far more accessible (Sky and Coast are 1.3 and 1.8 miles from parking, respectively, with not much elevation change); this trip we started by climbing 4.4 miles in 82 degree heat. We'd both had migraines recently. We were both uncomfortable sleeping on our pads. We got soaked. (Oh, it turns out the tent pegs had landed under the tent and we just hadn't noticed. "No wonder the ground was so uncomfortable!" K said half-jokingly, half-painfully.) And we didn't see much wildlife, except for K's mountain lion sightings - not exactly encouraging. I did get to greet a few big black offrushing beetles and a banana slug, but there were none of the usual deer.

Maybe we'll try again in October, or let it rest until next spring.

Rabbits on the Runways?

2008-08-09T22:42:00.000-07:00

At a birthday dinner in honor of my cousin K last weekend, we were discussing my Aunt P's pet rabbit. It's quite taciturn and fuzzy. I mentioned that there was one time when (my) K and I were driving through SFO's Long Term Parking Lot, and I was scanning the aisles: no space - no space - no spaces - brown hare - no spac--what?! There was a big brown hare sitting there, chilling out. In Long Term Parking. Cousin A chimed in that she had seen them at Chicago (O'Hare?!), and someone else mentioned they'd seen them at yet another airport. What is it with bunnies and planes?

K hypothesized that rabbit/hare populations are usually kept in check by predators like raptors...who probably wouldn't do so great in the airport environs. Could there be a raptor shadow around airports that allows for bunny proliferation?

CalTrain!

2008-08-02T13:18:00.000-07:00

Took my first ride on Caltrain yesterday. Yep, first. It was civilized, clean, quiet on the inside, and efficient. I felt quite smug about the entire experience. I was on the express train, so I felt smug when I passed the local stops and slow local trains. I felt smug when I could see all the slow traffic on the freeways. And I felt smug walking from the train station past street traffic to my friend's house.

Go public transit! Now if only Muni weren't quite such a harrowing experience...

Nuthin' Much

2008-07-31T20:51:00.000-07:00

Just sneaking in another post before the month ends (wait for it...) so I can feel like slightly less of a slacker about this so-called blog. I look forward to the day when I have an always-on, conveniently-placed, fast-connected computer-or-other-device that lets me update my blog more regularly. And I'm sure that, even with all those facilitative items, I will still find ways to procrastinate on posting!

Not much new around here, though we seem to be busy. We got to catch up with a bunch o' friends last weekend - it was the parade of babies, actually. R and J and delightful daughter A. We had a surfeit of melon and potato puffs, and good laughs. I especially love J's "She'll be fiiine" approach to mothering - seems very sensible to me. K and A and little A (a different A!) rolled into town in their spiffy new Minivan (how did we ever get by with rolling doors on only one side, that we had to roll by hand?) and spent some time watching A toddle around our backyard. It was really nice to get to see all of them.

This weekend we've got two, count 'em, TWO days of gaming planned, and two, yes TWO birthday parties to attend. Okay, I'll be sitting in our friends' pool while K is gaming on Saturday, but still. And at some point we get to clean the house. yaaaay.

I seem to be connecting with a lot of old friends on Facebook these days. It makes me happy. It especially makes me happy to find them doing well.

Our veg garden continues to entertain us, and while I'm sure I'm not doing a thousand things that could make our plants bigger, stronger, and more prolific, I am quite pleased that we've seen produce at all. We've had two delicious zucchinis, a pile of lemon cucumbers, and an early tomato that leapt off the bush and into K's hand (or so he claims). More tomatoes are clearly on the way, ditto zukes and cukes, and hopefully someday my organic blue lake beans will turn into...beans. The basils continue to bask on our back stairway, with oregano and mint sprouts coming up. And the supposedly "dwarf" sunflowers have grown large in our front porch. I'll post some before/after photos soon. It delights me that I've managed to drop a few seedlings into the ground and they've turned into food sources. Major props to K who honestly does most of the watering. We've decided that one of his mutant powers is the ability to slog through necessary tasks. Go Slog!

Nip Family Reunion Redux

2008-07-27T08:43:00.000-07:00

Location: Honolulu, HI

Attendees: legion

Weather: hot and humid

Thursday:
Flight delayed. We arrive at our hotel at 3am PST in an enormous white SUV, the Buick Enclave. Yes, it's a housing unit on wheels.

Friday:
Breakfast on the terrace at the New Otani hotel. It's warm and there are brief rain showers on us, but no one seems to mind. Ah, Hawaii! Dad heads off to
meetings about Popo. I wrestle with a nasty migraine, K and I stroll on the
promenade towards Wakiki. We meet up with Aunt P., Aunt S., Uncle R., Dad, and Popo for lunch.

Evening: Tsukiji Fish Market buffet. The games begin! Cousin S (or rather, her husband M) has made blueberry butter mochi for Dad and Uncle W (the hosts of dinner and both turning 70 this year)...evil evil stuff.

Saturday:
Breakfast: malasadas. YUM.

9:30am ceremony at the graves of Ah-Po and Ah-Gung, my great-grandparents (the parents of Popo). There are mosquitoes, cockroaches, broken pavement...and lots of food and fire to appease our ancestors. We burn paper money (fake), kowtow in generational order, and stand around in the humid Manoa Valley air eating the food - pork, chicken, red bean buns, jai, and some weird gelatinous rice stuff I've never had before and didn't like. Dad shows us the graves of Gung Gung's parents (the Young side), which have "superior" feng shui, i.e. a better view of the ocean. He tells us of the time when he was a boy running through the graveyard and fell about four feet into one of the grave plots. Spooky! Before leaving Manoa we drive up to Gung Gung's memorial garden and spend some time there. It looks well-tended and the lilies are in bloom. We leave a lei on the plaque and take lots of pictures.

We visit Popo again and tell her about the morning's ceremonies, then head off to the Diamond Head Memorial Park where we put some flowers on Gung Gung and Doreen's spot. We drive by the house on Hakaka as well. It looks pretty good, though the driveway and roof are aging, and the garbage cans no longer fit into the nice concrete cubby where they used to live, back in the day. I guess we just have more garbage now!

We drive out to Kaneohe and, after missing the two main turns, make it out to Uncle G and Auntie H's place there to celebrate Uncle G's 80th birthday. (He's not techically my uncle but my Dad's uncle; he is Popo's brother.) Dad heads to the harbor to join the glass-botom boat tour, and K and I alternate helping to set up the tables and napping. I join a flat-bottom boat ride out to Coconut Island, the same one featured in the opening scenes of Gilligan's Island. After I get back to the house, K and I take a brief kayak paddle around the nearby bay. I learn how to husk a coconut (WORK!!!) while others fish without results. The party is great fun. Tons of friends and relatives, a great catered poi supper (rice, tuna poke, lomi salmon, Korean short ribs, kim chee, chicken long rice, lau lau, pineapple, baked taro, and of course poi!), and even some ukelele and hula entertainment from the relatives. There's a cake, more butter mochi (cherry this time) and fruits - long an, lychee, and incredibly delicious mango. We are all seriously stuffed.

Sunday
Breafast: More malasadas. More yum.
The Tinman Triathlon threatens to block our ability to get anywhere on Sunday morning, but thankfully it's mostly over by the time we head out for family photos at the Hawaii State Library. More mosquitoes, and more photos. We take a walking detour to "the Westminster Abbey of the Pacific", Kawaiahao Church and browse around the graveyard. Lots of old Hawaii families and missionaries.

Lunch is at the Mandalay Restaurant, where we have some great dim sum and are treated to a lion dance. This brunch is in honor of my cousin R and his new wife, N. N has been a trooper throughout the weekend with all the relatives and everyone offering their congratulations. After brunch we get chocolate-covered fortune cookies, more cake, and a slideshow from their wedding.

We visit Popo one last time, and while we are there more cousins show up to chat as well. Popo is very bright and active, and even jokes and smiles a bit. It probably helps that she's benefitting from all the good food leftovers!

We make it back to the hotel for some brief beach time (in fact, my only time on the beach - K stays near the air condtioner inside). Dad and I enjoy the sun and splash about, before getting ready for that night's banquet dinner in honor of Auntie T's 80th birthday. More food! More feasting! We all keep our eyes open for the noodle course - usually the last one before dessert. Kyle and I sneak out unobtrusively to catch a cab to the airport, and secretly aren't all that heartbroken to miss dessert - we really don't need the calories!

Yoink Birthday Dinner at Chez Panisse

2008-06-30T21:45:00.000-07:00

A half-bottle of Pierre Peters blanc de blanc champagne

Cherry tomato salad with handmade mozzarella, anchovies, and curly endive

A half-bottle of 2005 "village" burgundy

Tagliata di manzo Grilled Cannard Farm Dexter beef with creamed wild greens and vegetable fritto misto

Boysenberry, peach leaf, and apricot bombe glacee

Mint and lemon verbena tisane

Thanks Dad!

Tokyo Food Lineup, cont.

2008-05-26T10:44:00.000-07:00

Memory is fading a bit already, but I'll do my best.

Day 4, dinner: Restarant Engaku in Daikanyama, a kaiseki joint run by The Plum Lady. The proprietess knows everything plum, and there's even a book about her plum knowledge. Dinner starts with homemade plum wine, and continues through many beautifully arranged and tasty courses. Sad to say I can barely remember what most of them were, though there was definitely an assortment of seafood and meats, a delicious rice porridge, and traditional frothy tea at the end. The hostess even treated us to some incense listening - apparently serious incense people don't smell it, they listen to it - where tiny slivers of wood were set on a glass plate over a heat source packed in sand. Precious and very delightful-smelling. She even shared records of incense-listening sessions much like wine tastings, where guests took guesses at the sources and similarities of the incense sources. Whew.

Day 5, lunch: we stroll through the Asakusa district, admiring the Golden Turd atop Philippe Stark's Asahi building, and the temple, and the kitch stalls stretching to the horizon. We duck into a tempura restaurant and have truly mediocre tempura. A bust!

Day 5, dinner: Dinner definitely makes up for lunch. After watching a performance at the Tokyo Symphony, our gracious hosts take us up to the Ark Hills Club where we enjoy a parade of beautiful, delicious, and extraordinary sushi. Just awesome. The chef even shares a particular eggplant with us, which can be eaten raw - and tastes delicious. We're all completely stuffed, and wander about the club in a sushi high, admiring the views of Tokyo and the art by Le Corbusier.

Day 6, lunch: After discovering that the neighborhood tempura joint (recommended to us by the hotel staff) is closed, we settle for noodles in Ebisu, 99-something. It's crowded and noisy and Mom doesn't like it much, but I'm happy to have tasty noodles on a rainy day. Plus, the table is fully of funky additives.

Day 6, dinner: We return to the site of previous exploits, the yakitori joint. After a week of glorious feasting, we decide to tone it down and stick (mostly) to vegetables. Wrapped in bacon. Asparagus, tomatoes, and enoki mushrooms. Once again, delicious.

Mom heads back to Shanghai, but I stay on a for a few days of work in the Tokyo office. Sunday night I meet up with a colleague and we enjoy noodles at Ippudo. They're so big they've started a restaurant in NYC. One feature is they provide cloves of garlic and a presser at the table so you can have fresh squashed garlic in your noodles. Serious yum.

Monday night, another colleague and I go to Ninja in Akasaka. This turns out to be a theme park and a very good restaurant - we are led by a ninja through the "dangerous" path to our table, and served by various server ninjas, and entertained by a ninja magician. The food is really good in spite of the kitch factor - foams and flavors put together in an updated fusion mix. The only real miss was the dessert - one of them had a delicious flan on top of what can only be described as "snot noodles". Ew.

Tuesday before getting on the plane, I follow my colleagues to a tempura joint not far away. It's fabulous. While I wouldn't ordinarily consider paying $30 for a set tempura lunch, this is totally worth it. We have 4 different plates of piping hot tempura, plus rice and crunchy vegetables and tea. Finally! Light, melt-in-your mouth tempura that doesn't obscure the taste of the food inside!

Other notes from the trip:
On the way back from dinner one night, we sample the local hole-in-the-wall-yet-very-famous tako yaki - octopus balls. They are puffy, creamy, scorching hot dough balls with a morsel of octopus inside. I can't say I was an instant fan, but they weren't repulsive either.

The money-washing shrine in Kamakura, where you put your yen in a basket and use the shrine's stream to "wash" it. Copious incense fires nearby help you (carefully) dry your damp yen. Money so washed is supposed to return in multiple, so we're advised to spend it wisely.

Mom and D and I hit the town, and check out the Art Deco Teian Art Museum. The exhibit there features export ceramics (not so interesting), but the building itself is a beautiful Art Deco confection, with really lovely details in things like the stairway railings and radiator covers. We also tromp about the garden a bit, deserted due to the rain showers, and smelling slightly of ginko.

We tackle another neighborhood museum, the Meguro Art Museum. It's a small space and no translations are available, and we're the only ones in the Museum. We eventually figure out that the works are by Japanese artists in the style of impressionist painters and have a reasonably good time.

I bought a few pairs of Japanese split-toe socks, with the idea that I like wearing my flip-flops in the house but sometimes it's chilly. They're working out grandly, and I'm wearing them now. Yay, warm feet!

Sumimasen...Om Nom Nom

2008-05-08T00:30:00.000-07:00

This trip to Tokyo has been in the planning for something like a year now (or rather, in the discussing...planning only got serious about a month ago) with Mom and her friends. A stated goal of the trip has always been consumption of great quantities of high-quality Japanese food. So far, so good.

Day 1, dinner: We head into the neighborhood (Meguro-ku) for sashimi. As M says, "In Japan, even the worst sushi is better than almost anything you can get outside of Japan." We are each presented with an amuse bouche of a giant snail of some kind. I pass. I opt for the uni instead, which is as delicious as everyone always says it is. Essence of umami in a squishy orange blob.

Day 2, lunch: Noodles in Kamakura, suburb of temples. After a morning of slightly taxing hiking amongst the hills and temples, we duck into a noodle joint on the main drag and everyone has cold soba. Except for me. I need the protein, so opt for an oyaku-don (chicken & egg over rice) instead. Yum. On the way towards the train station after visiting the Big Buddha, we get green tea soft serve ice cream.

Day 2, dinner: An amazing feast at a place called Kamakurayama - ostensibly a "steak restaurant" in the hills above Kamakura, but somehow we manage to have the best sashimi I've ever had (this one's for you, Dad) as an appetizer - consisting mainly of shellfish I would ordinarily never eat but was fantastically, eye-openingly, fresh and delicious. The steak was a beautifully marbled slice of something divine. I'm drooling just thinking about it, and I don't eat much steak anymore.

Day 3, lunch: Roppongi Hills shopping center. We navigate our way through the slightly disorienting complex to a tempura restaurant...only to find that it's closed on Wednesdays. Doh! We navigate our way back into the main area, visually appraise the various restaurants on the food floor, and opt for sashimi. Super-bonus: weird black sweet mochi for dessert, covered in what we guess is peanut powder. Later that afternoon, between visiting the Sky View and the Mori Museum Turner Prize exhibit, we down fruit juice floats.

Day 3, dinner: We head once again into Meguro-ku for yakitori, squeeze into a local 25-seat restaurant, and pig out. We proceed to eat chicken wings, gizzards, livers, and cartilage(!); asparagus wrapped in bacon, tomato wrapped in bacon, potato, eggplant, shitake; pork rolled with shiso, ginko nuts. Yum, yum, and yum. We roll home afterwards.

Day 4, lunch: Shibuya district, Tokyu Honten (department store). We head up to their restaurant floor and once again visually appraise the options. We're planning to get tempura in Asakusa tomorrow, so we pass on the Everything Unagi place and the noodle joint and opt for more sushi. We sit at the bar and point; the chef is very friendly, and even faintly amused by our limited sushi vocabulary. "Is that ikura? Aaaaaaaa."

Tonight we're headed into Daikanyama for another local recommendation by a friend. Gonna have to work up an appetite, or at least work off some guilt at how many calories we're eating!

Sprouts!

2008-05-08T00:24:00.000-07:00

K has been minding the garden since I took off for Asia. As part of my gardening experiment, I started a few pots of seeds - some basil, some dwarf sunflowers and, um, something else. Two weeks later, success! Sprouts! More on the veg plants soon...the pics are trapped in my camera that doesn't work on Japan's network.

Shanghai Update

2008-05-03T17:39:00.000-07:00

Back in Shanghai for a few days before jaunting off to Tokyo. Not much new here - same old ever-present gray dust and grease, same frantic construction. Main differences: fewer knockoff vendors, more people speak English, and it was actually quite hot when I got off the plane - in the shiny NEW Terminal 2. Mmm...love that shiny new terminal smell.

K immediately went a bought himself a copy of GTA IV . His analysis: "I suck at Grand theft Auto IV. I think my problem is that I don't really want to speed, kill people, or break stuff."

Well, that's a relief.

Food and Wine

2008-04-27T11:20:00.000-07:00

Last Saturday we went to the Kermit Lynch annual Oysters and Chablis outdoor food-fest in Berkeley. Dad was, of course, the instigator, so it only seems fair to show his happy sponsorship. From left to right: Champagne (not so great), Chablis (bought a bottle), and Aligote (very tasty). Turns out simple crisp whites go very nicely with salty things like oysters. At least, that's what I think Dad said. K stuck with sausages, and we split an strawberry-rhubarb galette and a salted chocolate cookie. Salted chocolate seems to be the New Hot Taste these days; that's the second restaurant we've been to in the last month with a salt+chocolate pairing.

Some more vacation tidbits:

Fresh housemade ricotta and buffalo mozzzarella in Campania. We had just finished visiting the temples at Paestum in the middle of buffalo mozzarela country. Serious five-star yum. On a slightly worrisome note, in addition to the garbage scandals in Campania (Napoli's "state"), there are concerns that illegal dumping is causing toxic chemicals like dioxin to get into groundwater and soil. Apparently some buffalo mozzarela has tested positive for dioxin, and the DOCG buffalo mozzarella consortium has of course been working to disprove/discredit these rumors. Their sales would plummet! Sadly, corruption is alive and thriving in southern Italy...or do they just hear about it more than we do in the US?

The fish market at Siracusa - much cheaper than Taormina, where we stayed. But we didn't have any way to bring pounds and pounds of shrimp home and cook them, which I'm sure Mom would have done given the chance. One vendor had a bucket of still-alive octopi, somewhat squeam-inducing.

Whoops, there went March. And most of April.

2008-04-19T10:13:00.001-07:00

We're back! All the news that we make time to print. Or something.

K's had some excitement at work, where his studio was/wasn't closed, he did/didn't have a job or a project. He is, at this moment, still employed in Foster City and he even has a new project...but we can't talk about that. Officially. My work remains oddly the same yet ever-changing. I'm looking forward to a short break in early May, when I head to Asia for a week+ to hang out with Mom. I'll sneak in a few days in our Tokyo office while I'm there. The weather in the Bay Area is starting to change, showing signs of warmth (but not too much), and the trees on our street are sprouting happy green leaves. Except for the one in front of our house, which is literally retarded - it blooms later and sheds its leaves later than all the other trees on the street.

Here's a vignette from our January vacation: we were stopped in Amalfi on the way to Ravello for lunch and a stroll. The next bus wasn't due for an hour, so mom asked the local entrepreneurial taxi drivers what it would cost to get up to Ravello. We met: Elvis.

On the windy road up to Ravello, his stories of bad drivers on the narrow streets were accompanied by the sounds of "Heartbreak Hotel". He eventually had to turn it off because the road quality was so bad it caused the CD player to skip.

Groovy.

Dear lord, it's almost March!!!

2008-02-17T20:14:00.000-08:00

Where has 2008 gone? Yikes!

Last weekend was awesome. Dad hosted his annual Burgundy tasting dinner, and actually invited us to attend! W00t! First time ev4r. There were 18 bottles of wine for 18 people, some 9 different wines (2 champagnes, 2 whites, 5 reds), and a delicious dinner. And great company! Many of the attendees hadn't seen us since our wedding, so it was great to catch up with them and witness their surprise and delight at K's "new" hair- and beardstyles. We arrived at 6:30 and didn't leave until 12:30. Decadence!

Then Sunday was another foodstravaganza: my Aunt E.'s Chinese New Year Party. Gong Shi Fah Zay! (Note that's the Shanghainese version of Gung Hay Fat Choy) She cooked up a storm, and Aunt J. and Mom brought even more to eat. The cousins and mini-cousins were there, and it was a great family gathering. Chinese New Year is the time to eat symbolic foods pertaining to luck, properity, and fertility. So there were lots of eggs, round things, things whose Chinese characters look or sound like money...between the fat and the family, I felt very rich! Super-bonus: my cousin Bob (who, like me, was born in the Year of the Rat - this year!) brought a bag of plush rats to hand out the the mini-cousins. Five fat, furry, buck-toothed, thick-tailed rats from IKEA. It was awesome.

This weekend we had dinner with one of K's colleagues: J and his family. We spent most of the dinner taking about games. Classic video games, new video games, board games. It was a complete geek-out. Lots of fun. K also saved the universe (playing Mass Effect), and I pulled a bazillion weeds out of our front yard. My back and legs muscles are really paying for it, but it makes me happy to have a neat(er) front yard. It was great weather, so there was also a lot of cat-like basking in the sun. With the not so cat-like New Yorker.

A quick Brussels restaurant redux:

Brasserie de la Gare - not too far from work and yummy Belgian food. Great interior decor.

Belga Queen - very chic and with very Belgian food. The bathrooms were unisex with transparent doors...until you turned the lock. I ate foie gras and woodpecker. Yum!

Kokob - the Ethiopian place. Tasty, but not as tasty as Cafe Colucci here in Berkeley. They did have a nice hibiscus, ginger, and something-else aperitif though.

The flight home was delayed at JFK (shock! dismay!) and the nice Delta folks comped us the movies and games. I spent most of the flight riveted by a Popcap game, something to do with flipping links to eliminate them. Damn those electronic crack dealers!

Next trip? Probably back to Brussels in April. Mom's muttering about going to Japan in May but the planning might be complicated.

Brussels Weekend 2: Teh Googles are watching me

2008-01-28T12:00:00.000-08:00

They detected I'm in Belgium and gave me google.be results. They even changed my Blogger options so I had to choose between "Blog maken" and "Aanmelden" to make this post! Auuugh! I feel so geotargeted.

Anyway, I wanted to write about my weekend, mostly undistinguished except for significant stomach troubles and a glorious trip to the opera to see Handel's "Giulio Cesare in Egitto". My 10 euro ticket got me entrance to a lovely small European-style opera house, and my legs got me up the stairs to my seat. Along the way I bought an 8 euro program that consisted of two beautifully bound books, one filled with the synopsis in four languages (the Brussels standards of French and Dutch, plus English and German, super-bonus!) and about 4 different articles about Handel and the opera in French and Dutch, and bilingual cast biographies; and the other with the libretto in the original Italian, French, and Dutch. What a bargain!

From my seats I couldn't even see the supertitles, but they wouldn't have helped anyway. They were in French and Dutch, of course! Thankfully I'd done some research online and knew the gist of things. The music was truly beautiful, and the production what my Dad would call "eurotrash" - very modern, and stark, and black-and-white. Super-bonus: there were three counter-tenors onstage that night, instead of the predicted two, each with a distinct style and carriage. Neat stuff. It's very incongruous for modern audiences to hear such high-pitched voices and think of them of heroic; we're just conditioned otherwise. Audiences invariably titter when they first open their mouths. And then stop, if the singing is good enough.

Since my stomach had been a bit touchy all day, I contented myself with a quick waffle snack before the performance. Waffles and opera, a good day!

Brussels Weekend 1

2008-01-20T10:23:00.000-08:00

Well, K and I owe some serious holiday updates, but for now here's mine. I'm camped in Brussels for the nonce, and had a very nice weekend.

Friday: stayed up stupidly late watching "The Punisher", featuring John Travolta as the bad guy and some easy-on-the-eyes guy as the Punisher himself. Plus, it was dubbed into Italian. How could I resist?

Saturday: woke up groggy and headachy and hungry at noon. I stumbled across the rainy plaza to Le Pain Quotidien and had a sublime salad of smoked salmon and lentils. Even the group of chatty Flemish folks didn't kill my buzz; the asked what I was eating and I managed to find the right item on the Flemish-language menu. In the afternoon I wandered the streets, eyeing sale displays & antiques, and eventually found a market that sells yogurt. I also gathered up a fair sampling of gourmet chocolate goodies. Saturday evening I failed to find a restaurant with availability and settled for the local bar/cafe. Turns out they've updated their menu since I last had it, and it includes some decent salads and desserts. Huzzah!

Sunday: woke up at a decent hour, chatted with K (he was up late, gaming with buddies), worked out, went back to LPQ, did some work, met a friend at the Museum around the corner to see the Reubens exhibit. Trudy Kohler, these "pink, squishy bodies" are for you! It proved beautiful and educational - apparently Reubens was so successful that later in his career he would sketch out models of large works and hand the execution over to other studios. Outsourcing it, old school! The room with his huge religious works was just gorgeous - he really packs his compositions with action, motion, and detail. Then we went to a local cafe and enjoyed some sinfully rich rasberry meringue tart. Sugar buzz!

I'll probably go back to the cafe tonight for simplicity's sake. Sometime this week I'm determined to check out the Ethiopian restaurant near the Grand Place, as well as a few more Thai restaurants and some classic Belgian joints. Though those are often hard on the arteries...can't take too much of that. I did find a Japanese restaurant, so that's on my list for when I need some comfort food. And the opera house is showing Handel's "Julius Ceasar in Egypt". Dad says if I can catch a performance, I'll have been to an opera house that he hasn't. Ha!

A few takeaways so far:
1. Nearly everyone in Brussels speaks English. I'm giving up on my shitty French for now.
2. A cold, overcast day in Brussels is a good day. At least it's not raining.
3. I need to find healthier things to eat in Brussels. Waffles, fries, beer, shrimp, mussels, and chocolate don't make for balanced nutrition.

I love the holidays

2007-12-18T19:14:00.000-08:00

K and I were on BART, headed to his company's holiday party along with scores of other well-dressed East Bayers. At MacArthur station, a well-dressed couple got on the train, sat down, and pulled out boxes of holiday cards. They proceeded to spend the next few stops scribbling furiously, checking their (separate) mailing lists, and conferring on whether or not Lisa still lives with Keith and if they still live in California.

I admired their industriousness. Their BART ride could not have been longer than 20 minutes, tops.

The kicker? They were sending Hannukah cards at least a week after Hannukah.

What was that noise?

2007-12-14T02:22:00.000-08:00

Driving to work yesterday I heard a weird buzzing noise from the the dashboard of the car. (Not the Corolla, but that's another story.) The only other time I've heard this noise has been when I've left the key in the ignition and opened the driver's side door. It's clearly the "You're a bozon!" alarm. What had I done now?

As I approached the office, I noticed a lot of frost on the ground, and out of curiosity asked my dashboard controls what temperature it was outside: 34 degrees F. Yikes!!

The Prius has a neat little freezy indicator light, a snowflake on the road (no pic, Teh Googles have failed me). K didn't believe me when I told him about it the first time.

Brrrr.

Shanghai Chronicle, Day 2

2007-12-02T11:43:00.000-08:00

…because there weren’t enough hours in Day 1.

What do I do in Shanghai? I keep moving. Mom sets a challenging pace of shopping, eating, and shopping. Day 0 (usual arrival time: 6pm local, after a 13 hour plane ride) starts with a 1+ hour cab ride into Shanghai. Once I arrive, Mom immediately starts asking me what I want to eat. This time we went to the new tapas bar located in her apartment complex, Zoco. She’s been talking about it this trip. The proprietor (her neighbor, a friendly guy from Barcelona named Miguel) gave us a number of good tips on the dishes. Notable: balsamic vinegar ice cream.

Then bed.

Day 1, I have a conference call at 8:30am. Construction starts noisily upstairs at 9am, and the Jawbone wins. We run some errands and swing by a few clothing stores on our way back to the apartment. We achieve purchase. We then meet up with some friends locally for lunch: delicious won ton soup and vegetables; they have something called “pineapple bread” (which has nothing to do with a pineapple except a vague visual resemblance due to a topping of sugar on the round bun), beef chow fun, and a fish head hot pot. Our other friend has a pork sandwich.

We then hop in a car and head over to the fabric market, a rambling, claustrophobic, 3-story building packed with fabric vendors and tailors in approximately 20 x 20 foot squares. Miles of shops. Miles of fabric. The vendors aren’t as actively confrontational as they are in some of the other, similarly-configured malls; these are also used to foreigners and many speak English to the wide variety of tall tourists roaming the halls. We spend hours looking at brocades, Chinese silks, Thai silks, buttons, coats, dresses, pashminas, scarves, and sartorial sins against nature. A few hours later I’m dreadfully jet-lagged and we stumble out of the building with bags full of loot. We repair to the apartment complex for gelato and an introductory session with the tailor.

Dinner: a local new Chinese restaurant (extension of a well-known restaurant in Hong Kong, apparently) where our friend B orders excellently. We roll home and I have another conference call at 10pm. The jet lag is brutally bad by then.

Day 2, I sleep in and halfheartedly attempt some morning yoga. We have an excursion planned, to the north side of Shanghai.
We first stop at Shanghai’s latest architectural transformation – “1933” – a building that was formerly a slaughterhouse and has now been rebuilt into an expo center and party space, in advance of conversion into retail shops and restaurants. The outside is a beautiful Arts and Crafts concrete façade. The inside is a confusing warren of passages, ramps (including one labeled “cattle road”), and stairs, overhung with the creepy aura of someplace where things used to be killed. We check out a few of the design exhibits, and beat feet when we get too spooked.

Next we head to WuJiaoChang where Chiang Kai-Shek planned an ideal Chinese community in the 30s, with the intention of rivaling the concessions’ hold over Shanghai. A few large buildings survived the intervening years. We start with the stadium, where this year’s Special Olympics were just held. They’re pulling up the field and it’s gloriously large and deserted. CKS built it in order to prepare the Chinese for their first Olympics in 1936 in Berlin. We drive by another building that has since been repurposed as a school. Its façade is dark gray, almost brown, and clearly shows the passage of time. In contrast, what was to be the “facing” building across an imposing central boulevard/square is now a hospital, and it has been cleaned and preserved. We sneak into the building and admire the ceiling decorations and design details. Another building, the civic center, is now a sports university,
fronted by soccer fields and throngs of students practicing golf swings and playing tug-of-war. The building is in the traditional style, but built out of concrete. It’s impressive.

Finally, we stop by the former aviation club. Soong Mei-Ling (one of the famous Soong sisters and CKS’s wife) was head of the Air Force and wanted to promote China’s air power. The building is in the shape of an airplane, with plane details throughout. The interior has been whitewashed and now houses the pharmacy services.

Throughout all this, we drive blithely into the compounds with our private car, pile out, take pictures, drive away again, and no one gives us a second look. We get a few curious stares here and there, but probably because the blond woman, Mom’s friend A, is giving us great historical detail as we walk around, in Australian-accented English. It’s a good time all around.

Somewhere in there we stop for lunch at a local restaurant, whereupon A (whose interests tends to both the historical and the architectural) finds out that Mom’s cousin B is an architect whose family’s roots lie firmly planted in Shanghai. They have a lively conversation, including B’s story of how his childhood asthma attacks in Shanghai were the key to his family’s escape to Hong Kong during the Communist years.

In the afternoon, we get massages. Really cheap massages. Right across the street. Gotta love the local economics. The tailor swings by to show us some fabric, and we decide to eat locally for dinner. Yum.

Ow.

2007-11-27T14:53:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I started the P90X fitness program. You may have seen the infomercials -- it's a many-DVD training program that is designed to lean me down and muscle me up (some, nothing grotesque).

Well, ow.

The first DVD was an hour of pushups and pullups, followed by 330+ reps of various ab exercises. No, I did not finish. I sucked floor mat for a good portion of the workout period, and spent the rest of the time staring up at my disobedient noodly appendages draped helplessly over the pull-up bar.

Mister Cheery Pants on the video kept telling me it was all right to be a weak-ass jello-bellied drag-ass, and that soon -- soon! -- I would be as mighty as he and his fat-free iron-slinging dance troupe.

Mmmyeah.

Ow.

Last minute Halloween!

2007-11-04T12:26:00.000-08:00

What with being sick last weekend, there wasn't much time to throw together a costume. (We were planning to attend a friend's costume-required party on Halloween night.) I briely fantasized about making a Lt. Uhura (original Star Trek) dress, but since I didn't leave the house all weekend, no luck there. Instead, my colleagues at work decided to get dressed up as witches, went to the Halloween superstore for some strategic accessories, and much fun was had by all.

M helped me style my hair in a gravity-defying pseudo-mohawk, spray it orange, and bought me some enormous orange eyelashes that convinced me I need to wear fake eyelashes more often. And I find the black nail polish to be appealing somehow. Perhaps it's time for a brief goth period for me? Ha ha, okay just kidding.

(click on the images for larger versions)

Mom's response: "It's not as cute as the one we took of you when you were a toddler."

Well, duh! ;) I have the same dopey grin at least. Thanks Mom.

When life gives you lemons, play Halo

2007-11-04T12:00:00.000-08:00

Or, no trip to Pt. Reyes in October.

We were supposed to go to Point Reyes again last weekend with our friends E&S, but instead both of us got very sick. My version included an inability to eat anything fatty, a generally nauseated feeling, and exhaustion. K's version was mostly about feeling like crud. Since I wanted to be distracted from feeling hungry and K wanted to be distracted from feeling like crud, we played Halo. We finished Halo 3 on Heroic, and started again with Halo (original flavor) and eventually got to Halo 2. Along the way we compared rendering complexity, interface design, and game design. it's very cool to see what has changed (quality of graphics, complexity/diversity of user interface) and what hasn't (basic weapons design and usage, HUD, cooperative play mechanics). NB: the fall-off-the-platform sequences at the end of 2 still suck.

Machinima enthusiasts are great Halo users as well, and apparently certain game elements were included in Halo 3 to facilite video creation - like providing an "at ease" stance when the Master Chief is carrying a weapon (he's not aiming his gun so you can see his face, making it better for dialog scenes). The guys from Red vs. Blue appear to have contributed some humorous moments during actual gameplay as well.

E & S did manage to get to Pt. Reyes on Saturday, whereupon their double-bagged trail mix was eating by an enterprising mouse. (Apparently the rangers knew about this and warned them, but no one quite counted on just how enterprising the mouse was.) They had a really good time, as expected. While we didn't exactly have a really good time, we were at least distracted for a time from feeling like crud. I was still tired into this last week, and kept resting.

"Normal" Life

2007-10-21T21:20:00.000-07:00

At the risk of invoking the Doom Gods, I'll say that life and work have been somewhat calm recently. The week of vacation did me a lot of good. Family time was fun and relaxing (mostly). Camping was very relaxing. Work has been going through a brief lull where I'm neither traveling a ridiculous amount nor working on a LOT of projects at the same time. I'm learning to make time for quilting and house cleaning again. (Who knew that ironing could be so relaxing?) I even managed to go shopping with my girlfriend R this past weekend and bought about 50 wrap dresses.

Trust me, I am enjoying it while I can!

The India tour I was planning to take with Mom in January was unfortunately cancelled due to lack of interest, so we are in a flurry of considering new options. K and I may check out Shanghai for Thanksgiving. We may head to Italy in January. The planning period with endless options is enjoyable and (because I am who I am) somewhat brief. I'm looking forward to the next adventure!

And with the A's out of the running, I'm really hoping the Red Sox win the World Series. Go Sox!

Pt. Reyes in September

2007-10-21T21:12:00.000-07:00

This is becoming a good habit!

K and I went on another three-day trip to Point Reyes National Seashore. This time we were at Coast Camp right next to the water, and were joined by our friends D and M. We had originally planned to hike over Mount Wittenberg to the camp (we've done this before and it's a nice way to burn some calories plus the scenery is a great Pt. Reyes sampler) on Friday, but K's company ended up having a team-building day so we went there first instead.

Team building for a game company means: paintball! K's sordid past includes some hard-core paintballer years, so he had the gear and the attitude to have some fun playing. I watched some of it, but wandered off for a part of the time. His colleagues were very nice about inviting me to join, but I was happy to pass on the bruises and bonus sweat. We were headed camping, after all.

We managed to get into camp before dark, but there was no sign of D and M. Unfortunately, between the heat, paintball, and hiking, K had triggered himself a migraine. Our stove was nearly out of gas, so it took forever to cook dinner, plus we waited a good while for D and M to show up (enjoying some primo star-gazing in the process, at least until the unbelievably bright moon showed up). In the end, K went to bed with barely any food (but a lot of Excedrin) in him, and D & M made the hike in glorious full moonlight and found the camp just fine. M cheerily said, "I think I've pitched more tents in the dark than in daylight!" as she did exactly that.

A note about the moonlight: a recent New Yorker article talked about how cities are _over_lit. Planners (and people) tend to favor more light, with the assumption that that means more visibility and more safety. However, it turns out that humans are really well adapted for low-light seeing, and studies have shown that _less_ light often results in lower crime and vandalism. Plus, there's the environmental effect whereby some animals navigate via the brightness of the stars (newborn sea turtles, for example), and since cities are now brighter than the ocean reflecting the sky, they're getting misdirected and dying in great numbers. My personal test of wandering around camp without my headlamp on and, later, under just the moonlight confirmed that I could see just fine. Not particularly detailed, but fine enough to find my way, not get hurt, and notice other moving objects on the trail. The article prompted me to downsize our porch light, and I'm glad I did. Now, how can we get more cities to work on decreasing their light pollution? (Yeah yeah, I've seen the Simpsons episode.)

When we woke up in the morning, there was a deer in our camp.

Saturday we opted for the Coast Trail, which somehow ended up being a round-trip hike of about 9 miles, including side trips to Sculptured Beach and Arch Rock. The tides weren't with us, so we couldn't do any really cool exploring, but the hike was beautiful and we saw lots of birds (mostly pelicans) and a few seals. M is a very entertaining energizer bunny. She gets these weird urges to run, and apparently D has a collection of photos of M running away from him. (So far, she always comes back.) She definitely helped the miles go faster. I think.

We were pretty pooped by the time we got back to camp. D was darn near zombified ("Braaaains...") and we managed to summon enough energy to make dinner (yummy pasta) and plop into bed. We'd planned a moonlit trip to the beach, but we were all fast asleep by then.

The next morning we packed up the camp, walked down to the beach, and proceeded to sit there for a few hours. It was great. Peaceful, relaxing, sunny...D was man enough to go swimming (nutbar), and after the initial I-can't-breathe-it's-so-cold shock, seemed to have a good time splashing around. Thankfully the undertow wasn't acting up that day. We saw seals, horses, dogs, and even some more albino sheep. (Yes, SHEEP.) We were there long enough to watch the tide come in, and eventually peeled ourselves away and headed back to our cars.

That night we managed to tidy ourselves up enough to head into the city for dinner with my Dad (mmm...chicken), and slept well in our own beds. The next day: chores and Teh Haloz. Ah, vacation!

On the Road Again

2007-09-16T09:14:00.000-07:00

Been a while since we posted...it's been busy.

We got out to see S&P&S&N for their housewarming and anniversary party in Merced, and it was another blissful day at the pool. They even put my name on one of the floaties! Slight drawback was that the "permanent marker" was no match for Coppertone Bug & Sun (SPF 15 and DEET), so I briefly had some very fetching black marker tattoos.

I'm in Birmingham (UK) this week, and would entertain you with a photo of my hotel room & environs, except I forgot to bring my camera hookup cable. It's a nice hotel room that looks out over trees and...another hotel. I'm rather more interested in checking out the pool at some point. And, while it is a very nice hotel room, it turns out we are some distance from the city-center, so I'm planning to be healthfully familiar with the hotel accoutrements before Friday.

Careful what you wish for

2007-08-15T08:45:00.000-07:00

Remember my comment about taking all the 4.x earthquakes in the world rather than a Big One? Well, there was a 3.2 last night around midnight that jolted me awake, and a 2.7 on Saturday night that jostled my sudoku session.

The list of earthquakes in our region seems sobering at first, but the actual numbers are quite low. Could be a truck going by...could be an earthquake. Given that the wind patterns are pushing the constant sound of trains our way at night, I've got enough nightmares without actual ground motion!

Baseball, Olive Trees, Model Ships, Tents

2007-08-05T20:03:00.000-07:00

Been a bit remiss on posting, but real life gets busy sometimes.

Went to a baseball game in the rain today. What? Okay, it was really your classic spitting Bay Area fog, but I was decidedly wet. And unimpressed with the weather. It did humid up a few times, but I ended up wearing my fleece for most of the game. Thank goodness my colleague G brought her fleece blanket and was willing to share. I also managed to convince my workmates that the cheese that comes with nachos is really made of plastic. We were all very disappointed that the malt guys didn't come around after the 3rd inning. It's a vast anti-malt conspiracy, attempting to replace our ballpark favorite with crappy Dibs, Toll House cookie sandwiches, and sno-cones. Feh!

I also finally planted the olive tree that mom gave me for my birthday. It's been sitting, happily potted, in the backyard since the BBQ. R gave me some llama dung (yes, llama dung) to help give it a good start. He has a garden at his house in Napa and it produces the most amazing vegetables - he says, because of the llama dung. Interestingly, the area around where I've been watering the olive tree has sprouted new evil weeds. The ground in our neighborhood is so fertile, it's just waiting for more water to make it go crazy. (In digging a hole for my tree I came across all kinds of root networks, ready to send up new shoots.) All the more reason to replace our lawn with something more environmentally conscious, I say.

And isn't it funny how "weeds" are "the plants we don't want"? I was thinking that the other weekend when pulling up the bastards. I wish there were a better way for me to like what my garden volunteers.

My guest feature photo this post are models from my brother's childhood collection. I remember these being displayed with great respect on the high-up shelves in his bedroom when we were growing up. (High enough so I couldn't mess with them, I assume. My brother is no dummy.) They've been a bit dinged around in storage at Dad's, and somehow I am now in possession of them. (Along with C's storage "bank", containing mainly Boy Scout merit badges so far as I can tell.) Hey bro, do you want these back?

We also bought a tent on sale at REI. K decided he doesn't have enough sprawl room for sleeping in our current 2-person tent. When we got it home, I insisted on setting it up in living room and testing it. It's definitely bigger than it looks in this photo. Hee hee!

K's Chicken Abomination Recipe

2007-07-21T07:53:00.000-07:00

In response to a friend's request for the recipe, K wrote:

Weeelll...see...um...part of it is from the Best Recipe "grill-roasted chicken" recipe. And part of it is from stuff I read. And I made the rest up.

I'll do my best to remember everything. Here we go:

Ingredients:
1 chicken
1 can of beer (quality not important; I use Pabst Blue Ribbon)
1 cup (or so) herbal chicken rub
1 cup (or so) kosher salt

The herbal rub:
I use the paprika-based chicken rub in The Best Recipe. You can use any chicken rub, really, as long as it does NOT contain salt. You are brining this bird, and that would be way too salty to eat if you use a salt rub. Go for things like rosemary, paprika, oregano, sage, basil, cumin, and just a little hot stuff like cayenne. Google "chicken spice rub" and you'll get lots of ideas.

The night before:
- Get a non-reactive (glass or plastic) tub or pot just big enough to contain the chicken. Fill with enough water to cover the chicken (best guess is fine).
- Dissolve the salt in the water, stirring until it's clear.
- Put the chicken in the brine and put the tub in the fridge.

The morning before:
- Dump the brine out.
- Rinse the chicken in cool water and pat dry.
- Massage the chicken, inside and out, with the herb rub.
- Put the chicken back into the fridge.

1-2 hours before mealtime:
- Take the chicken out of the fridge.
- Open the beer and pour off (or drink) just less than half of it.
- With an old-style triangular can opener, punch two extra holes in the top of the can so it looks sorta like a radiation symbol.

Okay, now at this point, you do different things depending on whether you're grilling or oven-roasting.

Oven-roasting (less prep, weather-immune, milder flavor)
- Remove the top rack from the oven and set the bottom rack as low as necessary to fit a vertical chicken.
- Preheat the oven to 375 or so. Anything from 350-400 is fine.
- Get a pan with raised sides and put a cake cooling rack or roasting rack in the bottom of it.
- Shove the beer up the chicken's butt.
- Stand the chicken on its drunsticks and the beer can in a sort of tripod setup, with the beer can on the rack and the drumsticks poking through to rest on the roaster pan bottom.
- Put the pan with the chicken in it into the oven.
- Monitor the temperature. It's ready when the deepest part of the breast meat is 170. Depending on your oven and the size of the bird, it'll take an hour or two.

Smoking (tastier, much more macho)
NOTE: You need a grill that has enough headroom to fit a vertical chicken under its lid.

- Fire up your charcoal grill. Get 4 or 5 big (3") hardwood chunks, soak them in water for an hour, and add them to hot barbecue coals.
- Or get a handful of hardwood chips, make a double-thick tinfoil tray, soak the chips in water for an hour, then put them in the tray and set the tray on the grill.
- If you have a gas grill, fire up your gas grill to low/medium, then use the chip try method above.
- Stand the bird on the grill, using the drumsticks and beer can as a tripod. I find that it's more stable if the drumsticks are jammed between the grill bars.
- Cover the bird. Check on it every 15 minutes or so and adjust the temperature of the gas grill, or add briquets to a charcoal grill, to keep the heat up while not scorching the outside of the meat. Replenish wood chips if they burn off.
- Monitor the temperature. It's ready when the deepest part of the breast meat is 170. Depending on your grill and the size of the bird, it'll take an hour or two.

Okay, now the tricky part: removing the beer can. This recipe makes fall-apart chicken that is very moist and tender. So you will have some trouble getting the beer can out without making a huge mess.

First, get the beer out of the can, otherwise you risk spilling it all over your chicken during extraction. Not great. Take a meat fork (you know, those ones with two big ol' prongs) and punch a hole in the bottom of the can and let the beer drain out. For effect, I sometimes do this while it's still on the grill. (Stab! Pfffsssshhhh!!! Oooo! Aaah!)

Now you can set the brid down horizontally and gently twist and pull until it's free. Remember, it's hot! Sometimes a knife needs to be inserted and run around the perimeter of the can to free it.

Ta da! Ready to carve and serve.

Weekend Update

2007-07-21T07:36:00.000-07:00

Sorry no posts last week. Couldn't talk. Too busy.

Last week was actually rather stressful, so I did the Girl Thing and rounded it off by getting a nice pink pedicure. Yes, pink. Rather a bit more pink than I'd planned, but the color was leftover from an impulse buy in San Diego (we were there for cousin M's excellent wedding). It's kind of a happy pink, so it'll do.

Saturday I headed out with some girlfriends to visit another girlfriend who has moved to Merced. We had a fantastic day at their pool in the 90-100 degree weather. There was one moment when I was lying in the pool on a green floatie and thinking that I felt just about perfect. There's nothing like idleness, a little Vitamin D, and kahlua brownies to cheer up the soul. If I can get a chauffeur to drive me to/from Merced next time (~2.5 hours), it'll be perfect. Now where could I find one of those? Sweetie?

This past week was more relaxed, partly because my boss it out of town, and partly because my brain was fried. The main excitement Friday morning was the 4.2 earthquake, some 5 miles from our house. We're used to the occasional rumbler, but this one jolted us out of bed and really zapped us awake. Small earthquakes aren't usually that scary...unless you're right on top of them! We did learn a few good lessons, like the fact that my glasses were sent tumbling to the floor and I couldn't find them, not great if it were the Real Thing. But there's really no knowing what'll happen in the big one. I'll take all the 4.x earthquakes in the world, every day of the week, rather than anything bigger, thankyewverymuch.

We don't have too much lined up for this weekend (lunch with friends, dinner with Dads), and we're continuing to test out the "one weekend day free" hypothesis so I get a chance to recharge my batteries. So far, so good.

Vacation Week

2007-07-08T20:37:00.001-07:00

K and I took this past week off for some R&R, which in this particular case stood for Roadtrip and Point Reyes.

The roadtrip took us up to Oregon City, Oregon (just south of Portland) to visit with K's siblings and their families, with children ranging in ages from 8 months to 13 years, all brilliant and well-spoken and a ton of fun and totally exhausting. K's sister S had rented a beach house out in Pacific City. To me, Pacific City seems like just about any beach town I've stayed in, whether that's Hawaii or California -- salt-bleached houses, boating detritus, quiet suntanned locals, and a distinct local pace of life. In sum, very enjoyable and relaxing.

We spent one day down at Netarts Bay, where the RV park folks will rent you an aluminum boat with a motor and some crab traps, bait, and measuring doo-hickeys and you can try your luck at crabbing. We found no dungeness that qualified, but did pull up two small red rock crabs. (nasty little fellers)

We also made the trip over to the Tillamook Cheese Factory. This was something of a pilgrimage for K, the inveterate cheese-lover. We got to see the assembly lines where cheese is sliced, weighed, and packaged, as well as the slightly less interesting cheese fermenting vats. And then we got samples and ice cream! Fantastic. And I have verified that cheese curds do indeed squeak when you chew them.

Finally, this past weekend we went hiking in Point Reyes with two friends, E and S. They are getting ready for a trip to Alaska in August, so they were testing out various vegetarian backpacking recipes (tasty) and equipment (Jetboil - cool) and general communication/compatibility while hiking (seemed good to me). Some of the things they'll have to deal with in Alaska I don't envy - bears? Hungry bears? Hungry smart bears? Okay, maybe I'm just scared about the bears. They were saying that you have to put the clothes you cook in into the same bear-proof storage as your food, otherwise they might think you're tasty. *shudder*

No bears for us! We saw white deer, turkey vultures, berries, poison oak, other deer, red tail hawk, quail, rabbits, lizards, burned-out trees, the ocean, lots of fog, and a decent amount of sun. Pt. Reyes National Seashore is truly a wonderful place, and surprisingly close to the husle and bustle of San Francisco (we picked up E from downtown SF at 5pm and were picking up our camping permit in the park by 7pm, and that includes a packing break at S's in Marin). I'd like to go there more often. As for Alaska, assuming I go there someday? I'll take the tourist route.

Cross-Dressing Weekend!

2007-06-26T20:52:00.000-07:00

Aw come on folks, it was Pride weekend in SF. No, we did not cross-dress for our birthday party (although now that I think about it, that could have been fun...). We had a pile o' people and a jolly good time and a very cute cake on Saturday.

Sunday I went into the city to have brunch with the Dads and watch a matinee of San Francisco Opera's production of Der Rosenkavalier. It was fantastic. Three sopranos singing some beautifully lyric music by Strauss. Just lovely. One of the leads is a classic "trouser role" where a woman dresses and plays the part of a man - in this case, Octavian, the young lover. Even more amusing, Octavian cross-dresses as a serving-maid to dupe the annoying clod Baron von Ochs.

All of this as punctuation to Pride weekend. It was amusing to visit the opera mezzanine (where many folks go during intermissions for a smoke or breath of fresh air) and see all the attendees using their opera glasses to gawk at the heaving throngs of Pride dancers - still going strong into the afternoon, the heavy OON-cha OON-cha OON-cha bass beats only barely masked by the opera house's stone walls.

I was a bit depressed by the opera, as it's all about how the "older" woman realizes she must make way for young love. Not a great weekend for me to be hearing about how the 30-something-year-old woman was feeling "old". Not even if it WAS beautifully sung.

This Thursday: Don Giovanni, Dad's favorite. I've never seen it before.

Reaping the slow of mind

2007-06-26T00:12:00.000-07:00

I can't make this stuff up:

Just got an envelope from the bank that has the mortgage on our home (and who recently sent us a notice announcing a rate increase to 8.75%) containing an offer to invest $10,000 or more into a CD paying a whopping 5.05%.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, my dear fellow?

If I wanted to make 8.75%, and I had $10,000 available, I would INVEST IT AGAINST PRINCIPAL, you vampiric maggots.

Full marks for cojones, though. Next time, include the CD promo in the SAME ENVELOPE as the mortgage rate increase. Half the postage, double the irony.

Although, for comedy purposes, I would love to know the quantity (and home phone numbers! I need more gullible friends!) of all the mortgage customers who took them up on this lose-lose deal.

I mean, come on, what kind of intelligence test IS this? I can understand keeping some cash in an interest-bearing checking account or something for emergencies while you pay your mortgage, but a FREAKING CD?? You can't even touch that dough for a YEAR or more. So why in nether Hell would you invest in a 5.05% CD when everyone in the country is looking down the business end of a 6+% mortgage?

Sheesh.

/rant off
/for now...

Boss Week!

2007-06-22T15:42:00.000-07:00

This has been a tough week. If I may indulge in some whining:

Exhausted. Too much travel.
Infected. Got a tetanus booster Tuesday.
Stressed. A few major projects, meetings, and high visibility. This week.
Depressed. Personal stuff. K and I are fine, it's other stuff.
Still exhausted. Went straight home and into bed the past 2 days.
In pain. Damn that tetanus shot hurts!
Annoyed. Woke up this morning and found our phone doesn't work.

On the flip side, I hear that my bro and fam have moved into their sweet new digs in NYC. Hooray! And we're celebrating our joint birthday party tomorrow. Double Hooray! Did I mention it's my birthday tomorrow? I'd almost forgotten. Here's a shout out to Mom - thanks Mom!

Here's to nowhere to go but up! And now for a quick nap...

Winds of Change

2007-06-19T21:08:00.000-07:00

K and I saw a few friends this weekend who are moving out of the area. *sniff*

Two are a couple who are moving to Baltimore for his job. D had a horrendously long slog getting his various impressive (at least to me) degrees, and this is a huge reward for him. (Yes, even Baltimore!) I am very very happy to see how happy he is, and very very sad to see the two of them move away. S was a theater co-conspirator in Ye Olde College Dayz, so it's been a treat (understatement) to have her nearby. If anyone has managed to teach me a smidgen of manners, it's her. (Sorry Mom, you never stressed the value of thank you notes.)

The other person leaving town is my stalwart baseball buddy, the Q. He's finished his giant-brain degree at that other school, and is headed to some town in the Midwest that I've never been to. I hear it's a cool place though. He'll need mukluks. Again, I'm very excited for his career, and very personally, selfishly sad he's leaving.

Even some local-area friends (with a totally adorable newborn) are moving house across the bay.

Change is hard!

We'll just have to steal some left-behind friends, those people we've met for years at mutual gatherings and thought, "Hey, they're cool, we should hang out sometime." It's worked for us before, and it's a nice way to build a circle of friends. Makes explaining how you met a little hard though. "Well, we know the same couple who don't live here anymore..."

Safe travels to all. Send email and links to photos!

Sprouts-ville

2007-06-13T16:58:00.000-07:00

One of the tourist attractions in Brussels is the Manneken Pis, or the fountain with a little boy peeing. Notice I didn't say "big attraction" (you'll have to click on the pic to actually see him). Anyway, the Bruxelleois are inclined to dress the poor guy up for any of a number of events, so I was amused to notice the very practical ladder chained up in plain view to the right of the tourist-swarmed fountain. You can see the feet sticking out below and to the right of the urn. I noticed it while I was looking for the "CAMERA SECURITY!" indicated by two signs on the wall. Couldn't find a camera. They must be pretty secure.

I came back to my hotel early today to rest and, later, work. Turned into a nice day so I opened the window and set up shop. Not such a bad location, really.

There's always a first time

2007-06-10T12:05:00.000-07:00

Can you guess where I was yesterday?

Stupid tourists were blocking the front, so the backwards picture was much more accessible. (This is a reverse of that one. Thanks, Photoshop!) Unfortunately, sometime before or after I took this photo, my wallet disappeared. I say "disappeared" because I can't honestly say I know it was stolen, and given I very jet-lagged at the time, there's a non-zero chance I unintentionally made someone's day (there was about $100 USD in my wallet, not to mention 3 credit cards and my California driver's license). Welcome to Teh Suck.

The folks at my hotel were fantastic, and encouraged me to check my bags again before sounding the alarm. Once I confirmed it was gone, they called Amex for me, helped me figure out how to pay for the room, and showed me how to get to the police station to file a report. Very nice folks.

After an initial panic, it broke down like this: my bank would re-issue me a one-time, temporary card within 4 business days. Amex would re-issue me my card from an Amex office, same-day. I had enough USD to convert to Euro to get a train ticket to Brussels so I could work on Monday. The only hitch was that there wasn't an Amex office in Amsterdam, or I might've gotten that sooner. All in all, not bad -- K could've wired me cash if it got really desperate, and my very lovely colleagues were all willing to loan me cash until I got things straightened out. Room service, here I come.

The good news: I had a nice hotel room with internet access, and took a very nice bath. My friend D cheered me up (in chat) with stories of his misadventure in Denmark, when he and his girlfriend lost their rental car keys on the beach and the super high-tech Volvo locked itself down so they got to retrieve their belongings through the window and crash with a local beach entrepreneur for the night. I was doing pretty well by comparison.

Unfortunately the most I saw of Amsterdam was on the tram on the way to the train station. I think between the beer, museums, and nice walks, K and I could have a really nice week there. We'll definitely bring safely belts though. No purse for me!

Can you see why Amsterdam really reminded me (visually) of Cambridge, Mass? I knew you could.

Oh - in all my years of traveling, this is the first time I've lost my wallet. Feh!

How not to get hired

2007-06-08T19:53:00.000-07:00

I participated in a job interview and review today where we opted to pass on a candidate for the sole reason that he was too negative.

He had worked at a company that was, by all standards, dysfunctional (and is now shut down). He worked on a project that has been poorly received in the marketplace. He took on a wide variety of tasks on that project and completed them effectively.

Here is how he presented that history: he worked with idiots, his project sucked, and he kept adding taks to his plate because his coworkers were unwilling to do unattractive (though necessary) jobs.

When asked directly what he would have changed about the company or the project, he had no ready answer. He really had to think, and even then his answers were composed entirely of "not do this" and "fix that" and "correct this person's mistake." None of his answers were positive or actionable, such as "do this" or "add that" or "redo my work in this superior way."

We tested him thoroughly, as we do all candidates. He complained several times, to several different people, about the amount of work required to complete our tests (even mentioning more than once that he should be paid to do that much work).

Here are some examples of how he could have experienced exactly the same set of circumstances, and been exactly as honest, and also been positive (and likely have been hired):

"My last project could have been successful if we had..."

"I did my best to help the team get everything done, whatever it took."

"Your tests are very thorough. You must have highly qualified staff!"

When faced with tough times, the successful and inspiring and desirable approach is: Take on what you can handle. Encourage your teammates and seek ways to meet goals while keeping everyone sane. After the tough times are over, use hindsight to look at the situation anew and figure out ways it could have been made easier or been handled more effectively. Focus on what people did right and how to do more of that.

Being negative doesn't just make the hard times harder. It can directly prevent you from getting into a better situation (as it did in this case), because people want to work with positive, supportive, solution-oriented, learning coworkers.

The Venice of the North

2007-06-07T07:41:00.001-07:00

I'm hanging out in Bruges, Belgium for a few days, World Historical Site and cute little town. Medieval architecture, horse-drawn carriages, and cobblestones abound.

Did you know that the standard side-dish for most main courses in Belgium is fries? Life is good.

I've mentioned before that my ideal America is one where gas is as expensive as it is in Europe, and the additional cost pays for public transportation. (Spare the Air days are another fantasy come true -- free transportation!) Imagine the advertising possibilities!

No Car Saturday!

2007-05-27T09:43:00.000-07:00

In light of reports that more Americans are driving this weekend than ever (in spite of the crazy-high gas prices) K and I decided to do everything via public transportation instead. (For those of you not in the US, it's Memorial Day Weekend. Most folks get Monday off.)

We considered taking the ferry to Angel Island for the day, but the 8am start didn't happen. Instead, we:

Packed our backpacks with crosswords, laptop, and coffee mugs

Took the 51 bus to Berkley

Had breakfast at La Note

Bought geek supplies at Games of Berkeley

Bought a Jawbone

Bought $3 DVDs at Reel; rented some movies

Bought veggies at Berkeley Bowl

Walked back to College Ave. and had handmade ice cream at Ici

Window-shopped in Elmwood

Took the 51 bus back home

Watched Pirates of the Carribean 2: Dead Man's Chest

Watched Underworld

Watched Underworld: Evolution

Went to bed

It was a cool day, originally overcast and burning off around noon. The pace of strolling, window-shopping, stopping for a rest, interacting with other walkers was quite civilized. And while the bus schedule was somewhat less that reliable, it was a nice conveyance for a holiday weekend.