Tuesday, May 31, 2016

Muir Woods and Mount Tamalpais

We celebrated the day off yesterday by hiking with friends. We spent most of the day in Muir Woods, which has lots of huge redwoods.
It also has surprisingly steep and sweat-inducing trails that eventually bring you up through the fog:
If you go up high enough, you get an amazing view from Mount Tamalpais:
And at the end, we saw a turkey in the parking lot:
Then we returned to civilization and rewarded ourselves for our steep, seven mile (!) hike by gorging on an enormous dinner, followed by ice cream sundaes. We didn't take any pictures of that part, though, since we were too busy ravenously stuffing our faces.

Saturday, May 28, 2016

X-Men

My nerd friend came to visit us just to see the new X-Men movie together - as per the plan we made as soon as the movie was announced. We attended in costume, although her Storm blew my Rogue out of the water. It was fun walking around with her; it was like being with a celebrity given how many people stopped us and asked for a picture.
I'm sure it won't be too long before we start attending Cons together...

Sunday, May 8, 2016

Double DC Wedding

We had two friend couples get married right in a row, both of whom have strong ties to DC, which resulted in fraternal twin samplers.

Couple 1 met and fell in love in DC but live near us in the Bay now, and are united by a shared love of reading and wine:

Couple 2 met at Salisbury University (whose logo is the outline of a seagull) and now live in DC. She's a nurse, he's a chemist who works on batteries, and they both love to bike:

Hooray for being able to reuse skyline patterns!

Sunday, May 1, 2016

Columbarium

Yesterday we spent the day hanging out with our friends in Oakland, starting with lunch at an awesome all-you-can-eat Korean barbecue place.
Barbecuing up some deliciousness!
Then we went for a long walk around a cemetery, which sounds weird but our friend assured us that it has beautiful views and lots of people go there just to check out the scenery. Which actually still sounds weird, until you go there and wander around until you are on top of a hill overlooking all of Oakland and the Bay:
Facing in a slightly different direction, you can even see San Francisco and the Bay Bridge:
SF is on the right end of the horizon
Also on the cemetery grounds is a huge building that was labeled "columbarium" - we had no idea what that meant, so we went inside to check it out. It turns out it's a building for displaying urns, and it seemed like it belonged in Hogwarts.
The columbarium was huge, and made up of many small rooms all connected through little doors and passageways and at slightly different levels from each other. The walls were all stone, but other than that all the rooms were different - some were greenhouses, some were open to the outdoors, some had little gardens and fountains.

Many of the rooms had pretty little murals or stained glass pieces tucked away in them:

Even the urns themselves were all different, and most were not actually shaped like traditional urns. A popular style was for one niche to have multiple urns from a family, each shaped like a book, as if they were volumes sitting on a shelf:
I ended up enjoying the columbarium even more than the cemetery - even though we spent quite a while wandering around inside, I'm sure we didn't see all of it. I'd love to go back with a book and spend a full afternoon exploring the rooms and reading in one of the serene gardens.