Hiking Flop

Today, Tim and I tried to go on a hike and we were not very successful. I found a hike that looked like fun in one of our hiking books, and the photograph looked like it was a hike through a little forest. It was close to where we went biking in Martinez, CA last weekend, so we figured it would be fun. I'd been wanting to take the dog on a hike all week, so we packed up, grabbed a nalgene of water, and headed out the door with Navi. The drive was almost exactly the same as our drive to our bike loop last Sunday, so we knew how to get there. We pulled into the park, parked our car, grabbed our things, and found the trailhead. Navi was exploring around excitedly, and we start hiking up...and up...and up...and soon there was no more forest. It was just the tops of big, grassy, rolling hills with the hot summer sun blazing down on us.

The sky was very blue. While the scenery wasn't exactly ugly, it was very uniform and lacked variety. I realized that I'd left the nalgene of water in the car, and puppy was starting to get hot. She would find one little patch of shade ahead, sit in it and watch us until we got close, and then stare at us as we walked by. Then, when we got too far ahead, she would dash ahead to find the next spot of shade, and do the same thing in her new spot. We started to get worried, and we had only really hiked 1.5 miles or so. After a while, we decided that the hike wasn't that much fun since there wasn't anything to see, and it was too hot for the dog. We turned around...and the cloth of Tim's flip flop snaps. He couldn't walk in his flip flop easily, but he also couldn't walk barefoot because the sand was very hot. After he slowly shuffles the next 50 feet, I decide that something needs to change. I suggest either tying his flip flop to his foot with Navi's leash, or tying it to his foot with a plastic bag. He doesn't like either idea, so I rummaged through my backpack and found a spare pair of socks. So, the flip flops came off, the socks went on, and he started hiking in socks! It worked, except for when he stepped on small spiky things, which he did once or twice. We started heading back to the car, and we came to a bunch of trails that we thought were going in the right direction, but weren't sure. They weren't marked on our map, but there were lots of trees along the path, which meant shade. We decided to take the risk, and we hiked down this steep path. Navi loved the shade, and started walking through all these plants with burrs. She ended up having at least a thousand burrs stuck on her. She would try to chew them out periodically while waiting for us to catch up. As a result, a lot of her fur was wet from her chewing on it. We finally got back to the car, and the last 50 feet was just covered in spiky things. Poor Tim. He slowly limped his way across while I went to get the nalgene of water from the car. I drank a little, Tim didn't want any, and then Navi drank the entire remaining amount of water. What a thirsty, hot dog! Tim and I spent a few minutes pulling spiky remnants out of his feet, and then we set off home in the car. The dog was so hot that we turned the air conditioning on, and blasted her with it. If the car was stopped at a red light or a stop sign, Navi's panting would shake the car. She was like a steam train! She eventually cooled off, but...lesson to me not to forget the water again! I spent the rest of the day combing burrs out of Navi's fur.

Kite Festival!

We went to a kite festival in Berkeley today! It was at the Cesar E. Chavez park, which is at the Berkeley Marina. We got the doggy trailer out from my closet and managed to drag it down to the ground floor along with two bikes, both of us, and the doggy. We are getting better at bringing the whole load downstairs without too much of a problem, but today I failed miserably. I discovered that I am incapable of rolling both my bike and the doggy trailer at the same time, which is something Tim can do effortlessly. You have to be able to steer your bike while only holding onto the seat, and roll the doggyride with your other hand behind and to the left of the bike. If I try holding onto the seat of my bike, I can't steer my bike. If I hold onto the handlebars of my bike, I can't roll the doggy trailer because it smashes into the bike and gets tangled. I thought I could do it today, though, so Tim walks off with his bike and the dog and I spend the next 4 or 5 minutes trying to figure out how to roll both my bike and the doggy trailer without them getting tangled together. After laughing at me for a few minutes, Tim ended up relinquishing the dog to me, and rolling the doggy trailer behind his bike. The hitch for the doggy ride was on my bike, so we decided I would bike puppy to the festival, and then we'd switch and he would bike puppy home. We set off and bike to the festival along the bay trail, which follows the shoreline. It is fun to cart the dog around in her trailer for two reasons; she is very happy to go for a ride, and it reminds me of how hard biking across the country was at times, since you had all the extra weight on your bike. Navi is now 68 pounds, and the trailer must be 15-20 pounds, so all the little hills I bike her over remind me of mountains! We could see all the kites in the air from miles away! We stopped and took some photos, and then we finished the bike ride to the park. We biked around the park looking for a good spot to sit down, and we found a spot where the sun was on our backs and we could see the entire field of kites. There were some enormous kites. They had an "octopile" which was a group of lots of octopi kites. BIG octopi kites. It was pretty cool to see. They also had some little kite battles, which is where a bunch of 6 sided kites are all flying in a little field, and the people try to use their kite to knock other kites to the ground. It wasn't as impressive as I thought. I think I was expecting something exhilarating like the kite battles in the book "The Kite Runner" or something. Silly me. It was still fun to see, though. The festival wasn't following their program at all; we didn't get to see the biggest kite fly or a few other things I'd wanted to see, but it ended up being a nice ride and a fun thing to see. I'll add photographs of the kites later!

After the kite festival, we biked puppy home (on Tim's bike this time!) and then headed over to Matt Bier's to hang out for a while. Matt's girlfriend Britt just moved to Berkeley from San Diego. Since Gabe's girlfriend, Britt, also just moved out, everyone is getting confused since they have the same names. It's silly. I guess the gang is going to go out to the bars sometime, get the two Britt's really drunk, and figure out nicknames for the two of them. We'll see what happens! A bunch of our friends were just hanging out, and they were making homemade pizza. Yum. After a while, Tim and I got tired and just headed home for the night. Puppy was glad to see us! I love how happy she is every time we come home. When I'm home and I know Tim is coming home soon, I keep asking her, "where's Timmy?!" She will start searching the apartment frantically, and I will keep asking her, "where's Timmy?!" to get her all worked up. Then, when Tim does get home, she goes berserk with delight! It's really cute.

Red Velvet Cake

A while ago, my mom sent me her recipe for red velvet cake. She also sent me this poster with cake photographs all over it, and I put it on my refrigerator. Every time I went to get something out of the fridge, I'd see the top left corner of this poster, which had a little photograph of a red velvet cake. So, yesterday I figured I'd make some red velvet cake at last! I sifted together all of the ingredients, I misread the instructions and added three drops of food coloring rather than three tablespoons, and made not-so-red velvet cake. The cakes went in the oven, and then came out of the oven slightly later than they should have. After they had cooled for 15 minutes, I went to turn them out onto trays...and they both broke in half! I ended up smushing the second half of the cakes back to their top halves, and hoping the weight of the icing would keep them stuck together. Ugh. Then I went to make the frosting. Now, this frosting is weird. It's not a typical frosting where you throw sugar and milk together and cream until it tastes wonderful. It's a flour base frosting where you boil milk and flour together until "thick" and then cream it with butter and powdered sugar. I got fooled. I thought "thick" meant ... thicker than milk consistency. So I didn't boil it enough and get really, really thick milk. So when I went to beat this milk into the butter and powdered sugar, I ended up with a liquid. I didn't know what to do so I just threw in more powdered sugar until it reached a more frosting-like consistency. So then I frosted up the cake, put it in the fridge, and after dinner we tried it. It wasn't bad...but I hated the frosting, and I thought the cake wasn't as flavorful and moist as it should be. I was disappointed.

Work was a little slow today, so I could not stop thinking about the red velvet cake. I wondered what the 4 egg yolks were for, and if you could just use 2 eggs instead. I also like to add sour cream to my cake batters; I think it makes a much moister cake. I wondered if adding a little more butter and a little more flour might make the cake moister, too. I figured it might work better to have some baking soda, and some baking powder, rather than one alone. I also wanted a real red velvet cake...not a muddy brown cake with three drops of food coloring. I also looked up the frosting online, and discovered that the milk can become much, much thicker than I thought. So when I got home....I couldn't help but make another red velvet cake. I couldn't decide which of my substitutions I should use...so I did them all. I used 1 teaspoon each of baking powder and baking soda. I used 2 eggs instead of 4 egg yolks. I put in tons of red food coloring. I put in half a stick extra of butter, and instead of 2 1/4 cups of flour, I added 2 1/2 cups of flour. I also sifted everything THREE times. This time, I buttered and floured the cake tins, then added parchment paper at the bottom, and rebuttered and floured the cake tin. I will not have sticking cakes again. Everything went into the oven, and 28 minutes later, came out of the oven at the PERFECT time. Then I tried the icing again. I made Tim whisk the flour milk mixture, and it got really thick. I thought it was thick enough...but maybe not. I let it cool, then I beat it in with the butter and sugar. It was the right consistency, but I can't get all of the butter to seperate...it has a few chunks of butter. Maybe I didn't let it warm up enough. I ended up just frosting the cake, putting it in the fridge, and leaving it for later. Vince and Ashley came for dinner so I made penne with vodka sauce, and tried to make some focaccia with red pepper and onions on top. I ran out of all purpose flour, so I had to use some wheat flour. It came out alright, but slightly undercooked. I still have a hard time deciding when a bread is done. I didn't like it as much as the rosemary focaccia I made with Tim a while ago. I think the rosemary was simpler and just was nicer to eat with marina sauce alongside calzones. After dinner I said that we could try the cake, but warned them that I might have messed it up since I changed so many things. It looked ugly, because my frosting still wasn't thick enough, but the cake tasted so much better, and was a great consistency! I was very pleased. I will try again in the future and try to get the icing perfect, too, and then I will have a perfect red velvet cake!

Fishies!

After work today, Tim and I went on a run with the puppy wuppy. Navi doesn't like going for runs, but I want to get in better shape, so she can learn to live with it. On the way home, we stopped at the pet store to get some female platies for our fish tank with the 8 dollars we found yesterday. We looked around at the tanks in the store and went back and forth on what kind we would get for a few minutes. Then I saw these two white baby platies with a micky mouse on their tail, and I decided right there that we had to have them. Mickey mouse platies come in all colors, but they are all alike in that they have the little mickey mouse head shape on their tail. Tim liked them, too, so we asked the store personel to scoop them out for us. When he caught them, he wrote "adoption" on the bag instead of a quantity and fishy number for the cashier. He explained to us that since they were very young babies, there was no guarantee that they would live, so they were free. So...failure at spending our fishy money, but yay, free fishies! We decided to spend 2 dollars on a cute little grass like plant, but now we still have 6 bucks of free fish fund! Yay! The new fishies are really cute. I've seen micky mouse platies before, but never white ones. They are so pristine and neat. I love them!

Free Fish!

We found 8 dollars blown all over the road today on the evening puppy walk! It is our new free fish fund. :)

Bike Day Yay!

We went on a very nice road bike ride this morning in Martinez, CA. We recently bought a book full of fun mountain biking and road biking trips all over this area of CA. We had initially thought we'd go on a bike trip yesterday, but when we finally got outside it was far too hot. We decided to postpone the trip to today, and leave early in the morning in order to escape the majority of the heat. Martinez is over the hills so it doesn't have the sea to cool it and as a result, it is always 10-30 degrees hotter than Albany and the other cities by the shore. The particular loop that we chose to ride was an 18 mile loop that was easy for us to drive to, so after walking the dog, we packed our two road bikes into the car and set off. It was a nice drive with no traffic, and soon we were on our bikes and on our way. The first two miles went kind of slow because someone kept having to stop to change various things on his bike, but after that the going was smooth. After biking 3 or 4 miles, we noticed these two cows on the side of the road. It was very strange because there was a fence behind them with more cows on the other side...so why were these two cows on our side of the fence? We hadn't passed any cattle guards which meant these were cows on the loose. There's not much we can do about that and the two cows were ignoring us so we kept biking on and a mile later, a cop car coming the other direction stops us and asks if we've seen any loose cows. We sure have! We told them to look on their right about a mile down the road to find the two loose cows and then we giggled for the next mile of biking because that is an odd and rare situation to be in. The bike ride was one of the nicer bike rides I've been on lately. There were nice shoulders or bike lanes, and the roads were smooth. There were lots of cows to see, and we often overlooked parts of reservoirs, bays, and straits. There was a train chugging along the shore, and lots of boats crossing the water. Two miles of the bike ride were on a road that is closed to cars because it was washed out a few years ago by a landslide. There were plants growing through the asphalt, and lots of people walking their dogs. At one part, parts of the road were painted bright colors. It was a really cracked up section of the road, so someone must have come and decided to paint each part of the asphalt a different color. I liked it a lot because bright colors make me very happy. The terrain was full of rolling hills and it really was a wonderful ride. We found our way back to the car easily despite my copying the directions wrong, and just before the day's heat really set in. We stopped at an In N Out on the way home and had a delicious burger for lunch. We also saw a dog that looked like a lion. When we got home, I decided that we would go for a dip in the pool, which turned out to be a nice way to cool off and get the salt off our skin. The pool was nicer than I expected it to be, so I really should swim more often in it. The only downside is it tastes kind of odd. There's normal pool taste, and then there's this. Oh well.

I just tried making a second batch of mint chocolate chip ice cream today. I made the custard yesterday, and it needed to chill in the fridge overnight before I put it in the ice cream maker. I put it in the ice cream maker when we got home, and it is much better than my last batch. I made the last batch with spearmint herbs, and it was not a yummy result. I cannot find peppermint anywhere in the stores, so I went to the garden center at Target to see what they had. I found a chocolate mint plant, so I made this batch of mint chocolate chip ice cream with leaves I harvested from this plant. The chocolate mint plant grows very fast! The ice cream still has to freeze a little more, but Tim and I tried a bite. It's still not perfect, so this is going to become some sort of an obsession. I MUST find peppermint, grow it, and try this again with a combination of leaves from my chocolate mint plant and a peppermint plant. That's my next plan. If it doesn't work, I think I will end up buying every type of mint plant on the planet and trying different combinations until my taste buds are satisfied at last!

YAY STAND MIXER!!!!

Growing up using my mom's amazing stand mixer to make brownies and cookies destroyed my ability to cope with an underpowered hand mixer. My hand mixer has been on the verge of dying a miserable death for the past few months, and it has been driving me insane. One time, while I was making whipped cream, it overheated. It was WHIPPED CREAM! I had to wait 15 minutes for it to cool before it could finish its job. It has been sending me up the wall so for the last few months I've been dreaming of owning my own Kitchenaid stand mixer. I spent hours browsing the Williams Sonoma website for stand mixer options and read about them everywhere. Yesterday, I finally got the guts to tell Tim I wanted to spend 300 dollars on a stand mixer. I don't know why I had a hard time bringing it up, but it turned out not to be a big deal at all. I thought he would think I was especially silly, but in reality he realizes that I spend a lot of time in the kitchen, and that having a stand mixer means more cookies and goodies for him. It also means one less chore for him - I often make him mix cookie dough with the hand mixer when I don't want to! I also really wanted a stand mixer because they come with dough hooks for kneading bread. I've been making a lot more calzones and pizza lately for Tim, so it would be nice to not have to knead the dough all the time. It also makes a huge mess when you have to flour your countertop and knead dough all over it. I hated cleaning up the dried dough remants. It's one thing to clean up a mess of flour, but it is quite another situation when half the flour is stuck to your counter and refuses to come off. We purchased this model in the nickel pearl color, and I went on a cooking spree!

The mixer's first job was to mix up a batch of waffle batter so we could have waffles for breakfast. That was enjoyable, and it was funny to see how fascinated Tim was with the stand mixer. Then, I put the mixer to work again with the whisk attachment when I needed to make a whipped cream topping for my black bottom banana cream pie! The pie came out well. It tastes really good, but you don't get as much as the banana and cream flavor as I hoped. I would put in twice as much pasty cream and bananas next time. It is very hard to get out of the pie dish, so if you make it, butter and flour it generously. I like the peanut butter banana cream pie recipe that I made last time better, but if you're in the mood for chocolate, this one is great. If you are trying to pick between the two, definitely make the peanut butter banana cream pie - it is absolutely fabulous! We wandered around with the dog outside for a while, but when we came home, I put the mixer to work with the dough spiral to knead the pizza dough for dinner! We are going to make pizza with fresh mozzarella and basil on top. Yum. After putting the mixer to kneading the dough, we went to the albany bulb with Jon to go mountain biking around with the dog. When we got home, I put the mixer to work again! We made chocolate cookies with peanut butter chips. When our pizza came out of the oven, the dough was a much nicer consistency and tasted better than it ever had before! I am very, very pleased with the mixer and am so excited that I bought it. If you look at the reviews on the amazon link of the mixer, you will probably notice that a lot of the people comment that they waited a long time to buy the mixer, and now that they finally bought it they wonder why they didn't purchase it earlier. That is what put me over the edge - if I'm going to have one at some point in my life, why not right now? Yay! If I had chocolate chips, I would be making more cookies right now, but I will save that for tomorrow!

Shrimpies!

I don't know when, but recently Tim ordered 25 cherry shrimp for $25 dollars off the internet. His brother had purchased a few from the same website, so Tim was excited to follow in line. They came in the mail today and when I got the package and opened it up, I was not expecting what I saw. I guess I had been expecting older shrimp that were 2 or 3 cm long, but these were tiny little babies. I was shocked, and I put their bag to float in the fish tank so Tim could come home and deal with it instead of me. I told Tim over AIM that the shrimp were a lot smaller than I had expected. I was afraid that if we released them into our tank, the other fish would snap them up in an instant. We keep buying shrimp and then they either die or get eaten and it's becoming a tiring cycle. The bright side is that each time we fail, we learn something new about shrimp care. We just recently discovered that shrimp can't deal with big changes; whenever we added water from the tap, we changed the pH of the tank and killed them off. I guess we figured we'd give it another stab when we found shrimp that were $1 offline rather than $5 in the store. Tim was still at school when the shrimpies arrived, so we decided he would bike to the fish store and Navi and I would walk and meet him there and figure out what to do. After some time at the fish store, we came to a final solution and ended up walking back home with a new 5 gallon hexagon tank that is our new baby tank. We are going to try to raise baby shrimp and baby fish in this tank until they are big enough to survive the main tank. When we got home, we started to set up this new tank and get it ready for the baby shrimp. Tim became worried that the new tank would have high levels of ammonia and kill the new baby shrimp, so he wanted to go to petsmart and buy a test kit so that he can watch the chemical levels. He also wanted to buy a few hardy fish to put in it so that good bacteria can grow and start the tank's ecosystem in a healthier way. So we went off to petsmart, and ended up buying even more fishy stuff. We bought a small heater for the tank, a chemical testing kit, three sunburst platies to cycle the new tank, and I don't remember what else. On our way out, I noticed some really cute ghost shrimp and of course I fell in love. They were only 33 cents, which made them even more irresistable. They were adult sized, so of course this meant that we had to get ten of them for the main tank.

After we got back home, we finished fixing up the two tanks. We are currently floating the shrimp in a little baby isolation box before we release them into the new tank completely. This way, if something does go wrong, we can just pick them all up in their floating box, and float them in the main tank. The baby cherry shrimp are very cute, turning redder as I type, and scampering around everywhere. Even Navi likes the fish tank! She will sit in front of it and her eyes will trace where fish are swimming. She will follow the path that fishies take across the tank with her eyes. Sometimes Navi will get more excited than usual, and if a fish is swimming across the tank, she will her lick her way across the other side of the glass. It is very cute. It's cute enough that I don't mind always having to clean the fish tank glass because of it. So now we have 35 shrimp of all different sizes. I really like the ghost shrimp. Their eyes stick out from their head, which I've never seen on a shrimp before. It's like those little nubbies on the top of a giraffe's head that serve no obvious purpose, but with eyes at the end! Now that I think of it, they remind me of crabs with their eyes out on little antennas. They also truly live up to their name of ghost shrimp; when you first sit down in front of the tank to search for some, you cannot find any at all! Then over time, they slowly start to appear and then you see more and more! Some of them even have red marks on their antennas and front legs. Others don't. I'm not sure what the difference is, but maybe it is the difference between males and females. Maybe they will breed, and we'll have ghost shrimp babies! That would be a lot of fun.

Productive!

I had a really productive day today. I got home from work at 3:30 and took the dog for a nice, long walk. After the walk, I biked over to the grocery store to pick up some fresh produce since we have NOTHING fresh right now. When I got home, I decided to give the dog a bath. Yesterday, Tim and I met Gabe, Britt, and their dog Nova at the Albany Bulb and wandered around showing them the little cathedral and statues. In the process, both dogs discovered a small beached shark to roll around in, and they smelled awful. I couldn't stand even being near Navi, and she was NOT allowed to sleep on the bed last night. I got her in the tub and scrubbed her as hard as I could. I must have shampooed her 3 or 4 times before I was satisfied. It's not that I couldn't get the smell to shampoo away, it's that I was so disgusted that it wasn't until after 3 or 4 shampoos that I could forgive Navi's treason. Tim came home around the time I was finished with a bath, and I dried Navi until she was nice and fluffy with the hair dryer. I also sprayed perfume all over her, just in case anything managed to survive the bath. Then we did a BIG load of laundry that included the bed sheets, EVERY SINGLE TOWEL including the doggy towels, and all of our clothes. Tim seems to go through a lot less clothes than I do. After all of this I managed to cook us a really yummy dinner and then I just basically read until bed. Very satisfying!

Bye Bye Algae!

I made waffles this morning! If I make a third of my buttermilk waffles recipe, I always get exactly 3 waffles for Tim and 2 waffles for me. It's better than making half the recipe because there are three eggs in the recipe and using 1.5 eggs for half the recipe makes things a little complicated. Making a third of the recipe is perfect! Tim is an impatient waffle eater and he can't eat them independently. He has to wait for two waffles so he can stack them and eat them together.

After eating breakfast, Tim mentioned that he wanted to go mountain biking. We figured we'd head up to Tilden for a ride so we walked the dog up the mountain to tire her out before leaving her behind for a while. Then when Tim brought his mountain bike out from the bedroom, Navi got really excited. We figured she remembered the last ride we took her on, and wanted to come along again. Plans changed, and we decided to bring Navi Wavi along. We waited an extra 30 minutes so she could cool off from her first walk, and then we headed off! We biked a fun loop around Tilden that is all uphill for the first part, all downhill for the second part, and pretty flat for the last section. We hoped it wasn't too long for Navi, but we figured Navi would be fine with enough breaks and water, and she was! She would just find a patch of shade when she was tired and hot and would sit down. We'd stop and wait for her to rest up whiule chewing on granola bars. Navi managed to score herself a few bites of granola bars, too. We had a lot of fun biking and when we got back to the car, Navi was ready for a nap. I love it when we tire her out so completely that she's satisfied with just laying around for a while. I don't feel like she's constantly waiting for the next adventure.

On a another happy note, our fish tank no longer looks like a screenshot from a documentary on the Amazon river. In fact, it is crystal clear! It is so clear that every time we see it out of the corner of our eyes, we do a double take of astonishment. We also stare at it, mesmerized with how clean and clear it looks. The reason for the death of the green is that we were tired of losing the battle against the algae and bought a UV clarifier to put in the tank. The UV clarifier draws the water through it and there is a UV light inside that kills all the algae. It has a strong draw of water through it, so it causes a lot of current in the tank so the water circulates and after going through the filter, the algae slowly disappears. It worked a lot faster than we expected, so Tim is convinced that it is magic. We put the UV clarifier in the tank on Friday night, and removed it this morning! In less than 48 hours, the battle against the algae was finally won! It's ironic, really. At work, I spend my whole day trying to figure out how to provide an ideal condition for algae with the least power necessary, and at home, I spend my day trying to kill algae. I think my coworkers would disapprove. Anyhow, in case you don't understand how disgusting the tank was, here are some photos for clarification, courtesy of Timmy. The first was taken right when we put the UV clarifier in, the second is after 17 hours, and the third is after 41 hours.


Ta-da! Isn't it magic?

Kiddie Pool Party

Today, Vince had kiddie pool party. They bought an inflatable kiddie pool and I think they intended to spend the day sitting in it, but I guess the water was too cold. Instead, they all sat around the kiddie pool, but Tim and I headed over to visit for a while. Gabe's girlfriend, Britt, just moved out here from Alabama, and she brought her dog out with her. The dog is a three year old mutt named Nova that is pretty cute and very friendly. Nova and Navi dashed around playing and play fighting with each other. We let them go because hopefully it tires them out and we don't have to play with them more tonight. Tim and I are going to show Britt the albany bulb sometime this week. She's unemployed so she can go anytime, and I think Navi and Nova will become very good friends. I like when they are both at the animal house because, with Penny, they seem to make the three bears kind of assembly. Navi is the big dog, Nova is a bit smaller, Penny is tiny, and they are all so fuzzy and sweet.

I guess someone gave Vince a Heineken mini keg with a broken tap, so they spent a while trying to open it some other way. After hammering nails through the bottom, they managed to open it up enough to get the beer out. When they were pouring, some of the beer would run down to the bottom of the keg and drip all over the ground. Navi figured it out, and had some fun drinking beer that she probably figured mysteriously appeared from the air. After initially laughing at the spectacle, we started to catch the other drip of beer with a second cup, so no more beer for doggy. After a while, I got bored with the party because I can never follow everything that goes on, so I headed a few blocks away to look around anthropologie sale racks, and buy some more plum flavored sake from the warehouse. When I got back to Vince's, Tim was ready to go home, so we headed home to make dinner. I made calzones with lots of mozzarella cheese, green peppers, onions, and sausage for Tim! He must be in heaven since he's had three calzones in the last two weeks. I also made some italian flat bread with rosemary on top. The calzones were my favorite of the three kinds I've made so far, but Tim still likes the fancy schmancy kind that takes forever to make the most. Oh well. I guess I can content him with these, and make the fancy kind once in a while. The bread was good, but slightly bland. If you ate it with pasta sauce, it was delicious. There is another recipe for the flat bread with red bell peppers and onions on top. I am itching to try that recipe because when they make it in italian restaurants, I can't stop eating it even if it means I can't eat my meal when it comes. That's why I don't like italian restaurants. I like the bread so much that I eat it all, and then when my meal comes I simply cannot eat another bite.

Beach!

Work wasn't very fun today. It wasn't awful by any means, but I think I had a case of the Fridays or something. I was tired of taking the same test, over and over and over. It's a part of research so I usually don't mind it but today it just drove me up the wall. I got a headache, and I could not wait for 3 o'clock to swing around. After an eternity of tests, 3 o'clock finally saved the day. I zoomed out to my car, drove home, let Navi out of her crate and ran around the apartment with her for a while. I had myself a little snack and Navi was cute enough to win herself a little snack, too. Then we ran to the beach where I played with her for a while. I really like the beach; it's called the Albany Bulb. There is a little beach on the main land that nobody seems to swim at so there are a lot of dogs and kite surfers. Sometimes I worry that the kite surfers might hit a dog while trying to come to shore, but they always seem to be mostly in control of the path they take. At one side of the beach, a long peninsula reaches out towards the bay. It's not a natural peninsula; it used to be a landfill where lots and lots of trash was dumped. Eventually they stopped dumping there, and over the years nature took over. So now it's this fun park to go wander around, and it also seems to be a canvas for all the artsy hippies in the area. There are always people spray painting on the broken pieces of concrete laying around or people dragging old metal from the woods to build sculptures with. A lot of kids make fortresses in the woods or other hangouts where they lay around drinking beer all day. A lot of homeless people live there, too, but they never bother anyone. Navi likes to play fetch on the beach with random driftwood, especially on windy days since she can crash into big waves. She's not very good at bringing what you throw back to you, though, so after a while I give up and wander along the peninsula. It always seems to change because the waves bring new things along the shore, people drag things around, and there is always new art to see. The tide was the highest I've ever seen it today. Navi likes to chase splashes, so I throw rocks into the water and she tries her hardest to swim fast enough that she can snap at the splash. If you let her catch too many splashes, she gets sick, so I try to throw them just far enough away that she's close enough to try to swim for it, but far enough that I don't have to clean doggy barf up later. It requires talent. I usually throw them too far by accident, and Navi shoots me a disgusted look while she's swimming that seems to say something along the lines of, "You moron! I'm not stupid enough to even try getting that splash! Throw me a splash I can actually catch!!" People always give me weird looks when I'm throwing rocks into the water, but...it makes my dog happy. At the end of the peninsula, there is this huge pond where the water is mostly still. It is connected to the bay at this one location, but only at high tide. Normally during high tide, you can skip over rocks for a 30 or 40 foot section while walking around the pond, but since this was the highest tide, it required a more elaborate dance than usual. All the rocks were covered by water except when a wave had just gone over and the water was pulling away. I had to be in mid-air while the waves came, and on a rock just after the wave went over, and in the air again for the next wave. A very elaborate dance indeed. Navi gave me strange faces as I hopped and skipped from one rock to the next. She was just wading through the water splashing me while wondering what I was doing, and she would always stand on the rock I needed to hop to before the next wave came through. I would have to shout "hurry up! go away! move!" while we were scampering around and she made me get wet a few times. I finally got to the other side with slightly damp shoes but I didn't fall! I had a few close calls. Then I continued to make Navi chase splashes and then I had walked around the entire pond. We headed over to the part of the park with lots of statues, and wandered around there. It is really cool that someone came along and decided to build pretty astonishing statues out of scrap wood and metal. I will add photos later. After wandering around a bit more, we headed back home where we both vegged out and watched TV waiting for Tim to come home.

Bucky Balls!

Work was interesting today. I was having one of those days where I just could not do a single thing right. I would start a test, and after continuing with the test for 30 minutes or so, I would jolt up from my chair in the sudden realization that I'd forgotten to adjust something before I started the test. I'd fix whatever it was, start testing again, and without fail I'd realize I'd forgotten yet another thing. After 5 or 6 (or 7?) such mistakes, I told one of my friends that the silver lining of all these mistakes was that I was pretty sure I'd made all the mistakes I could. I hoped I'd finally get some good data so I started testing again. After a little while, my boss wanders in and I quickly happened upon the discovery that while I had used up all my possible mistakes, he had made a big mistake that made all the data useless anyway. We managed to sync up our bad days!

Then Timmy showed up! He went to work with the company he contracts for, which is about 6 miles southeast from where I work. He biked to my company, played with the pond for a while, and then we biked home together. It was fun! We were hungry when we got home so we played with Navi while making an early dinner of penne with vodka sauce. Tim played tug of war with her and the boiled wool toy my mom and dad got from Carmel when they came to visit. My mom was convinced the toy would be very short lived but it's still alive and gets played with every day!

That blue fishy toy is a free toy my mom got and sent to Navi a while back! I think she was at a book fair in NYC and a stand was giving these dog toys out for free. My mom grabbed this little blue fishy, and another one that looks like a lamb. They are little plushy toys with a hard chewy part in the middle made by kong; I guess kong is trying to branch out from all their tough chewy things. I thought the toys were cute because they were plushies with some weight to throw, and Navi loves them! After dinner, Tim and I played a game where we threw toys at her and tried to get one to stay on her back. I'm not sure what she thought of the game, but after a few minutes she decided she was fascinated with a toy rope ball that she has never, ever shown interest in before. She was a frenzied demon chasing after this ball wherever we threw it. Eventually, that grew old, and she migrated to her toy that reminds me of a bucky ball with extra pizzazz thrown inside.


Then she rolled upside down with her bucky ball and played like that for a while.


Then she gave me a little shock and threw the ball at me.


I'm pretty sure she knows exactly what she's doing.

Airplane Fireworks!

The last time I traveled to Florida for work, I happened to look out the airplane window when there was a fireworks show happening down below. It was really cool to watch, and I thought to myself that it would be fun to be flying around the bay area on the 4th of July. I didn't think much of it at the time but as the weeks passed by the gears started turning in my head. One of our friends, George, is a pilot and loves to take his friends out for rides. A few months ago, he took Tim and I up in the air to see the bay area. If you want to see photos, Tim took a lot and put them up on his picasa website. That day, we flew from the Oakland airport to a small airport in Sonoma, where we landed for lunch. We saw all sorts of old vintage aircraft including a very rare P-40 (think Pearl Harbor) and we went to a deli to eat lunch. We took off from the Sonoma airport later, flew over Marin, the Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco, and then landed at Oakland again. It had been a lot of fun. When Tim and I were biking with George last Thursday, I asked him about the possibility of going up in the air for the fireworks shows. He seemed interested in the idea, and over the next week he and Tim put the idea into motion. A plane was reserved, and last night Tim and I set Navi up with some Chopin on repeat coming out of speakers surrounding her crate. We covered part of her crate with a thick blanket to help block the noise of fireworks, and gave her lots of bones. We weren't really concerned, but we figured that Chopin is pretty all over the place and maybe the fireworks would sound like an odd note from the music rather than something to be terrified of. After all that hubbub, Tim and I headed over to Vince and Cassie's for a party, and then around 7:30 Tim, George, Shannon and I and headed to the airport. We took off around 8:30 PM and flew around the bay before it got dark. There were a LOT of fireworks going off from random people setting them off in their neighborhoods. It looked like the world was this giant circuit board that was slowly breaking into a million pieces with little, colorful bursts of light everywhere. People always told me that they could hear fireworks going off all night long, and I never really understood the magnitude of it until I went up in the air and saw it all. Everywhere you looked there were little firework shows. We circled around and around for a while, evading other planes that were also out looking for fireworks, and around 9:30 all the shows began! Some shows were hidden by fog, but you could see the fog flickering with all sorts of light. We found one really cool show over Richmond, and we circled around that show until it was over. It was an awesome experience and George is going to make this a 4th of July tradition. It was nice to do something new for the 4th of July, because even though fireworks never lose their ability to hold your eyes to the sky for 30 minutes, you start looking for something you haven't seen before. Watching the fireworks shows from above was the new perspective I needed. It was a lot of fun, and Tim took a few videos with his camera, and he has put some up on youtube. He also took some night photos of the city, and they are posted on his picasa here. There were also new fireworks this year that exploded in heart shapes. Those made me smile. After we landed and made Tim clean bugs off the plane, we headed back to the party for the rest of the night.

This morning I woke up and went to watch the fish swim around their green fish tank. You can see a little more of the tank now, so hopefully that keeps improving. I noticed that one of the fish looked like it had a fungus, so I decided that Navi's morning walk would be to the fish store to buy medicine. So Tim staggered out of bed a little while later, and we wandered over to the store. So now we are armed with fish medicine, and hopefully after this and the death of the green water, we have a happy fish tank again.

I did a lot of cooking today, and Tim makes a good sous chef. He likes to chop things up and follow orders as long as you don't tell him anything complicated. He does well with "please chop this up" but very bad with "please chop this up, then put it in that pot after the sauce has simmered for 3 minutes." It makes it easier, actually, since I don't have to explain all of what is going on. I made some cookie cutter chocolate chip cookies with some new dinosaur cookie cutters I found a while ago. Tim and I like dinosaurs, so I really like the cookie cutters. I can never get myself to buy Christmas style, or Easter style, or anything too specialized because what happens when I want some cookie cutter cookies and all I have are Christmas trees and stockings in the middle of July? We also made a fantastic dinner from the cookbook my parents got me for my birthday from the amazing Indian restaurant we ate at. It's a great restaurant about 2 miles away from our apartment on Solano Ave, and it is called Ajanta. I love that place. They just started having takeout, and when Stephen came out to visit, we got some takeout. It turns out we were their first takeout order, ever! It's nice because it's an online takeout menu, and you submit your order online. So no phone for Tim and I. Yay!

Anyhow, from that cookbook, we made three things from the Hyderabad location of India. I guess Hyderabad is the capital of the state of Andhra Pradesh, South India. We made a Hyderabadi Murg Korma, some rice with coconut and spices, and some Raughani Roti (whole wheat flat bread). It was sooooo good. It was pretty spicy though, so I had to pant and blow my nose all the way through dinner, which makes me think that my parents would really like it. The curry was delicious, and while I had some difficulty with the rice, practice will only make perfect. Tim liked the dinner a lot, and we are very pleased with our venture into Indian cooking. I can't wait to try the next series of recipes, especially the samosas recipe! Yum. :)

Fish Tank!

Tim woke me up by making me breakfast this morning. It was 8:30 and I was rolling around but I couldn't get myself out of bed. He made me an egg burrito and put it in front of my nose to wake me up! That got me out of bed and I went and watched some cartoons with him. Yay!

On a less fun note, our fish tank has been really green. In fact, it's so green that if you put your hand into the back of the tank, you can't see your hand. It's not that there is algae on the wall or anything since I clean the glass regularly, it's that the water is so full of algae that it's green. It reminds me of all the documentaries I've watched about the Amazon river. Whenever they try to film underwater there, it is so murky that you can't see anything. That's what our fish tank looks like. I don't think it's harmful to the fish because they still seem really happy, but it's gross. Actually, it is absolutely disgusting. I cannot stand it! We have no idea what is going on, so we decided to go to the fish store today and start working towards a solution. When we got to the fish store, we wandered around looking at fish and plants and other cute aquarium critters until the lady was available. Navi sniffed every nook and cranny while we were wandering around. When the lady was free, she asked us if we needed any assistance, and we told her we had green water. She told us the reason for that was low nitrates and high phosphate, but it seemed kind of unclear how we could get rid of it. We also discovered that our tank pH was really, really low (around 6.2!) and that we need it to be around 7. We later figured out that the vacation feeder we put in our tank when we went backpacking was what lowered the pH. She told us to try putting a few more plants in the tank, to do a 1/3rd water change to raise the pH (by adding tap water in), and to use a water treatment to get rid of chlorine and a few other chemicals. We also have been having trouble getting the plants to stay rooted since we have such large gravel, so we bought some smaller, black sediment type gravel. I've always had natural colors in the past, but I think the black will really make the green plants and the colors of the fish POP! If we get more cherry shrimp, they will probably glow a lot more, too, with the black gravel. So we wandered back home with these goodies, and set to the first stage of fixing our tank. We pulled out all of our plants and the log so we could try to replace the gravel, and then we removed 1/3rd of the water. It was so gross because we couldn't even see what we were doing. If the fish were hiding in the back, we couldn't see them. I couldn't even tell if I was somehow in the process of accidentally murdering a poor critter. I was kind of nervous so I did everything reaaaally carefully. We washed out the black sediment gravel in the bathtub and slowly added it in so that it wasn't possible that we buried anything. The black gravel looks really nice...what we can see of it, at least. We then filled the tank with more water, put the driftwood back in, replanted all the old plants, and added in the new ones. After terrifying the fish for probably a continuous hour or so, we left them alone. They seemed happy...but I don't think I've ever seen them unhappy. We can see a little more in the tank, but that is probably just because of all the clear water we added. We'll have to see what happens over the next few days. Here's to hoping!

Dog for Sale

Lets remind ourselves how very cute and adorable Navi Wavi is:

Isn't she as cute as a button? I love her oodles and oodles. All day long, I was excited to go home, run Navi to the beach, and play. The traffic is worse than usual this week; I can only guess it's because people are trying to make an early getaway for the fourth of July. I was very antsy, dancing at the edge of my seat. I finally get home and open the door so Navi can run out to say "Hi!" but she slowly walks out with an extremely guilty looking walk. It's the kind of walk she does when she wants to say something along the lines of "Ok, so, I know I really messed up, but do you still love me?" So I started to look around for whatever she managed to destroy. I was expecting a milk carton to be strewn across the floor, or perhaps another set of tooth gashes in the bed. Maybe a pillow or three ripped to smithereens. The first things I checked were Tim's piano and accordion because if anything happened to those, I'm pretty sure he would cry. Everything looked fine and the bedroom looked nice. I turn around to play with Navi, relieved, and this is what I see:


Oh my. She's managed to pull the carpet up, chew the mat underneath to shreds, and rip up some wood pieces. The floor under the carpet is concrete, so there's nothing she could do to damage that. When she wants to do damage, she really does damage. What other dog eats the wall? She's done that before. I stared at the mess in shock, and then went to IM Tim to tell him the news. I told the dog she was a very, very, very bad, bad, bad dog and I put her in her crate and left her there for an hour. She must have felt awful because she would roll over onto her back every time I walked back into the room. I guess on the bright side of things, I'll get to learn to fix flooring. Another silver lining is that she didn't mess the carpet up at all rather than pull it up; once I replace the mat under that section of the carpet, we can staple it down again and it will be as good as new. If she had messed up the carpet itself, we would be in for an expensive repair, since it is wall to wall carpet in all rooms except the bathroom and kitchen. So at least there's that. I'm not really mad about it because what is being mad going to achieve...but I am honestly really sad right now because I can't take Navi to the beach. If I did, it would almost be a reward for her being very, very naughty. So I guess I'll bike to work tomorrow to avoid traffic and take the dog to the beach when I get home. Doggy gets to stay in her crate tomorrow though, that's for sure.