Sunday, December 6, 2015

Surprise!

First, my best friend Ashley is visiting us this weekend! Yesterday we drove up the coast and picnicked on the ocean and it was beautiful.
Also, she brought me an awesome mug:

Today, unrelated to her visit but in a happy coincidence, was Ben's surprise birthday party! His actual birthday is January 1, but since that's a popular travel time I had to plan it for another day. I arranged for all of our Bay Area friends to be at the dim sum restaurant by our house, then Ashley and I strategically got Ben to the restaurant about 15 minutes later.
Walking to the restaurant. Ben looks grumpy because we were being weird about getting dim sum at a very specific time, and bossing him around.
Ben upon walking into the restaurant and finding all his friends there - including work friends I hadn't met but creepily stalked so I could invite them too.
I'd been planning the party for over a month, and was nervous the whole time that Ben would find out somehow, so I am relieved that I pulled it off successfully. Perfect weekend all around!

Sunday, November 1, 2015

Exploring our new neighborhood

And it turns out we live walking distance from this trail:
I still miss real fall, with the crisp air and changing leaves, but I guess this is an okay runner up for November weather.

Sunday, October 25, 2015

Hiking and Trains

I have a colleague who has been after me for months to wake up early on Saturday and go hiking in Muir Woods with him and some other friends, and I've always declined because he means early. Last weekend, though, I finally gave in, and got Ben to come too. And by early, I mean we were literally the only people on the BART and it was dark outside:
The hike itself was gorgeous, so I'm glad we did it once, but I'm also not getting up that early on a Saturday to run around outside again.

Yesterday we went to the Millbrae Train Museum, which is right across the street from where we live, but only open a few hours on Saturday so this was the first time we've been around while they're open. It's a very small museum, but they have some neat stuff, like a 75-year-old toy train ride that rocks back and forth (and still works!):
They also have lots of old train controls you can mess around with:
The coolest part of the museum is a 1941 Pullman sleeper car that the volunteers who run the museum are in the process of restoring. The long term aspiration is to build a mile of track so folks can ride in the car for a short distance, but for now you can just walk through it. Still, it's pretty neat - all the rooms are very cleverly designed to maximize space, with all sorts of little things hidden away that fold in/out as you need them (including toilets and sinks). My favorite was the "shoe locker" tucked away under a seat in each room - apparently you would put your shoes in there before going to sleep, then the porter would access them from the hallway (which also has small doors that open into the shoe lockers), polish them, and return them so you'd have shiny shoes in the morning.
As clever as that system is, I'm glad we no longer have to worry about daily shoe polishing as a life requirement.

Monday, October 12, 2015

Margaret Atwood!

Ben and I are both obsessed with Margaret Atwood. His favorite is Oryx and Crake, my favorite is The Blind Assassin, but everything she writes is great and we love her. And today she came to the Bay Area to read from and sign her new book!
Yay, we're going to see Margaret Atwood!
She read from the new book a little bit, which was exciting because we haven't read it yet (we've been waiting for tonight to get our copy), and then answered audience questions for a while. She had a much drier sense of humor than I had expected - for example, someone asked her how she keeps her life "full of vibrancy" (which is a pretty weird question, I think), and she deadpanned "you are making an assumption that my life is full of vibrancy in the first place." Someone else asked a complicated question about the relation between her themes and her plots, and her response was just "someone's got a term paper, I take it." And when asked why her speculative fiction, specifically the MaddAddam trilogy, is so pessimistic, she said "well, I don't think it is... I didn't kill the animals."
Can't wait to dig in!

Sunday, September 27, 2015

Summer Hiatus

Between moving into our new apartment (finally!) and all the associated yet boring tasks, and us both starting new jobs, posting has been pretty light for the past few weeks. We're finally pretty much settled in and things are getting back to normal, so here's a recap of what we've been up to the past month or so:
Went to Sutro Baths with friends
Hiking around the Sutro Baths ruins
Participated in a public art project I randomly walked by one day
Went to a party at Ben's work and hung out with one of his cars
Ate a fancy cookie car from that same party
Went to Half Moon Bay with other friends
We're off to Philly for another wedding next weekend, then I'm in DC for a week for a conference, and after that we should be stationary in CA until the holidays!

Saturday, August 15, 2015

Philly Wedding Weekend

I haven't posted since we got to CA, since we've mostly been trying to figure out housing (we're in temporary corporate housing for now) and settle into our new jobs (I'm still at TFA but in a new role). We just signed a lease for an apartment starting September 9, so hopefully once we get all moved in and unpacked things will start to pick up a little. In the meantime, we are in Philadelphia for a wedding this weekend! The couple loves Dominion, so their sampler is a Dominion card:
The card is called "Grand Marriage" as a play on the "Grand Market" card. The Philly skyline is behind them and they are surrounded by ice cream because we would all go to the Super Scooper All-You-Can-Eat Ice Cream Festival together every summer. There's a baseball instead of a coin in the bottom left because they are both huge baseball fans, and in the bottom right, where there is usually the logo of the set the card came from, is a garnet "S" for Swarthmore since that's where they met (garnet is one of the school's color).

It feels really great to be back in Philly - we got dinner with a bunch of our Philly friends last night, and saw our Littles this morning. Since we're basically living in a hotel in SF, it feels like a temporary place we are staying while Philly is still our real home. We'll be back in October for another wedding, hopefully we'll feel more settled in SF by then.

Friday, July 10, 2015

Road trip: Up the California Coast

Yesterday was the last leg of our trip: LA to San Francisco. We drove about halfway, then took a detour to check out Hearst Castle. It was pretty nuts - here's one of the guest "cottages":
The estate is so huge you can really only see part of it in a day - we did a tour of the "grand rooms" of the main house, which is 68,500 square feet and has 115 rooms in all (we only saw the big entertaining rooms on the ground floor). I didn't realize that Hearst imported so much of the place from ancient European castles, monasteries, etc... For example, all the rooms we saw had ceilings that were taken from 15th-16th century European buildings, cleaned up by Hearst, and then installed in his home. Here are a few:


There was also a ton of ancient art, like the remains of this 2,000+ year old Greek statue:
The limbs and head may be gone, but the most important organ remains.
It was kind of funny though, because in the midst of all the antiquities would be some "contemporary" items that looked out of place, like these very 1950s chairs:

After the official tour you are free to wander the grounds, which are beautiful and overlook the ocean.
Usually the Neptune Pool is a main attraction, but due to the drought it was empty and looked considerably less cool. The indoor Roman pool was still filled though, and it was the most gorgeous part of the whole estate. It's covered entirely in blue glass and gold tiles - I've never seen anything like it before.
Gold tiles on the floor
Sooooooo prettyyyyyyyy
Gold tiles under the water
Also, I didn't realize that Hearst built the castle in the middle of what had been his family's ranch, so you go through all this ranch land to get there and pass an odd assortment of herds of cattle and random other animals descended from the occupants of the zoo Hearst used to keep there. Apparently there are several herds of zebra roaming around - we didn't see them, but we did see a lot of these guys:
After the castle, we drove the rest of the way up Route 1 instead of the main highway, since it takes you along the coastline and is beautiful. The whole drive is gorgeous - you have the ocean on one side and mountains on the other, and it seems like every time you round a corner you come across a sweeping vista more beautiful than the last. We stopped a few times to take photos, but if we had stopped as often as we thought about it, we probably would still be inching our way up the coast.
We finally made it to San Francisco last night, thus bringing a great road trip to an end. Ben actually left for a conference in Rome today, and he'll come back and start his new job next week. I'll spend the weekend getting settled in, and go back to work on Monday. All told we drove 3,700+ miles (not including driving within each city or our little 450 mile day trip to the Grand Canyon) in 18 days, ate an unknowable number of calories, carbs, and everything else  that's bad for you, and had a fantastic time.

Wednesday, July 8, 2015

Road Trip: LA

When we got into LA last night the first thing we did was have dinner with a bunch of our friends here, who proceeded to spend the meal collectively planning our agenda for today. The result was a haphazard yet awesome assortment of LA things that took us all over the city. We started in Manhattan Beach, where we got breakfast at a great pancake house and then spent a long time walking it off along the beach.
Ben on the pier.
We had fun walking on the sand and ogling the ridiculously large beach houses that people have. A lot of them are set up so you can see in to their first floor and admire their beautiful interiors as well as their size and fancy exteriors. The only people we saw actually in any of them were cleaning staff.
Those are individual homes, not apartment buildings or hotels.
Next we drove to Bell for lunch, and had our first experience with cochinita pibil - oh my god I don't know where this dish has been all my life, it is SO GOOD!
I don't yet know what is about to happen
THIS IS WHAT IS ABOUT TO HAPPEN
Lunch was followed by a CHURRO ICE CREAM SANDWICH - as in, they fry two fresh churros, coil them into discs, put a scoop of ice cream in the middle, and hand it to you like it's no big deal when in reality it is the physical incarnation of the meaning of life.
MY FINGERS ARE BURNING AND I DON'T CARE
We were both ready for a walk after that afternoon feast, so next we went to Griffith Park and walked around. We went to the observatory, which has a small free museum about space and a telescope you can look at, as well as a really cool rotating camera obscura of the LA skyline. Plus, you can stand on top and take your picture with the Hollywood sign in the background.
It's small, but it's there!
From the park we went to the La Brea Tar Pits, which look cool but smell awful. Also, they have statues of animals being trapped in the pits, which seemed kind of morbid.
Ben is happy that elephant is dying in front of its mate and child!
We finished the day off with a lowkey sushi dinner and more time hanging out with friends. I will leave you with this store we passed in our wanderings today:
I don't know which part of this store being called VAG I like better - that it's a meat market, or that it has Jesus on it.

Monday, July 6, 2015

Road Trip: Phoenix

Well, technically we are in Phoenix today, but it is a million degrees here and even our host said that the best thing to do in Phoenix in the summer is go away, so we decided to drive to the Grand Canyon! It's three and a half hours each way, but neither of us had ever been and we didn't know when we'd have the opportunity again, so we figured we might as well go for it. It was totally worth it! It's hard to convey the scope and beauty in snapshots, but we did take a few. See if you can tell the difference between the first two pictures we took there:

If you guessed that while brushing those stray hairs out of my face I knocked my sunglasses off my head and into the canyon, you were right! They were cheap sunglasses so I'm not upset that they're lost, but I feel very guilty for littering in a national park.

We took a bunch of pictures as we walked around because everything was so gorgeous, but they all sort of look the same after a while, once we stopped losing accessories into the canyon.
Ben did take a cool panoramic shot with his phone, though:
Click to embiggen
Also, they really don't want you to feed the wildlife there, which is understandable, but this sign basically says that if you feed the squirrels you will contract the plague, and that seems a bit severe.
We're back in Phoenix and will spend the evening hanging out with our friend, before heading off to LA  tomorrow!

Sunday, July 5, 2015

Road Trip: Driving through NM and AZ

I know I've been posting only about our destinations so far, but today's drive from Gallup to Phoenix was so beautiful we had to take pictures. Instead of going the direct way on the main interstate highway, we took a slightly less direct route that went through the Pueblo of Zuni in New Mexico, the Fort Apache Reservation in Arizona, the Tonto National Forest, and lots of gorgeous scenery in between.
Dowa Yalanne outside the Pueblo
The Zuni Pueblo itself is also very picturesque - lots of adobe houses and hornos - but no photos are allowed without a permit.
Pretty driving

More pretty driving
Different type of pretty driving
A lot of the scenery seemed quite similar to Colorado, where we've spent a decent amount of time, but the redness of the rocks and the presence of cacti made it clear we were in the Southwest.
Little cactus
Big cacti
We mostly took pictures as we drove, but we did pull over once to stretch, and for Ben to climb on things.
 Now we are in Phoenix, and there are cacti everywhere, including this giant one in our friend's yard:
Now we are here and about to have dinner, and we have all day tomorrow to explore!