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!

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.

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.

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!

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!

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.

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.