Grizzly Peak Ride

One of our friends, Britt, just moved out from Alabama, and she used to love road biking. She hadn't biked in two years and wanted to start again. She asked us to go with her, and we were happy to obligue. We decided that for her maiden voyage, we'd summit Grizzly Peak. It's a nice taste of the hills, but you don't go down the other side, becuase that means you have to climb back up again to get back home. I'm not really sure what kind of a climb it is, but it's got to be somewhere between 1000 and 1500 feet. It's a good ride, and a hard ride for someone who is out of shape. Last night, George met a girl named Jamie at bible study who runs marathons and triathlons, so he asked if she wanted to come along. She did, so at 9 am on Sunday morning, Jamie, Britt, George, Tim and I all met up, and started biking up Tunnel Road. We wound our way up the mountain, which has some really beautiful views of East Bay and San Francisco and I guess the whole bay area, really. Britt really was a trooper, and she managed to climb the entire thing in her first ride of two years. I was very impressed, and she was very tired. When we got to the top, Britt was really happy, and we rode back down into town. We biked Britt home, and then Tim and I decided to grab some food on the way home. Tim ate a lot.

I have been meaning to take my bike apart, clean it up, clean all the parts, put them all back together, and re-cable everything. I have been pushing it off for far too long, so today I cut all the cables so that I couldn't ride until I cleaned it all up. I ended up taking everything apart, cleaning it with simple green and a toothbrush in the bathtub, and them reassembling everything. I also discovered that Tim can not, for the life of him, get my cassette off my wheel. That might be a problem someday, but it's not a problem right now. I guess I'll deal with that when I really need to. After everything was cleaned, I dried it all up, and put the bike back together, with Tim's help. Tim cut up the cable housing because our wire cutters are so bad that only someone with superhuman strength like Tim can use them, and then we re-cabled my bike together. I put a new chain on, and Tim also helped me tune everything, which was really nice of him. I hope it rides like a dream now.

Mt. Tam Ride!

I decided that Tim and I were going to pack our road bikes into the car, drive over into Marin, and bike from Stinson Beach to the summit of Mt. Tam. The map of the route is here and it is about 25 miles with something like 2800 or 2900 feet of climbing. We woke up early to beat the heat, took the dog for a nice walk, packed our bikes in our car, and set off! We drove over the Richmond-San Rafael bridge into Marin, and drove down a very windy set of roads to get to Stinson beach. It is so twisty turny that if I drove, we would never arrive, because I would be driving so slow. We found a nice place to park our car and the best part was there wasn't that much traffic. That area gets really crazy sometimes, so it was really good we got there early in the morning. We got on our bikes and rode through the town of Stinson and watched the waves on the beach. We found the road we had to turn onto, which was an umarked road with a metal gate, and we started our endless climb. We climbed up, and up, and were passed by many bikers on very fancy bikes. We passed a cop sitting on the side of the road. Then we were passed by many more bikers on fancy bikes. After a while, we got to the top of the ridge, and it was hot. It was so hot that I couldn't stand standing still for 5 minutes to take a decent photo. I felt like I was radiating heat. It was so bright, too. It was a wonderful ride, but it was just a little too hot. We biked along the ridge, which was pretty barren, and sweated a lot. We sweated our way up and up some more and then we managed to push ourselves to the summit of Mt. Tam. There are actually three peaks in Mt. Tam...so we had to climb over the first...down a little...over the second...down a little, and then up the third. The view was astounding. I will never tire of the view of the bay, but this was in a completely different angle than I've ever seen before. I could see all the way down Mt. Tam in Marin, I could see the Golden Gate Bridge from above, and I could see San Fransico at a completely different angle than from East Bay. It was astounding. It's a shame that it was so hot though, because I couldn't stand taking photos. What photos I did take didn't come out well because it was so bright and I was too hot to stand still and fuss with the camera to get a better photo. Some other time, we will summit Mt. Tam again, on a much cooler day. When we got to the top of the third peak, we were tired, but that wasn't much of a problem. It was just absolutely nauseating how hot it was; it was 103 degrees F at the top of Mt. Tam. We rested for a few minutes in the shade and ate melted trail mix, and then we headed down the mountain. Now, that was amazing. It was a screamin' downhill, and it was totally worth the climb. When we got back to our car, which was not much longer after we summited the mountain, we turned the AC on right away. Tim drove home along the curvy swervy road, we ate some In N Out for lunch, and then we drove the rest of the way home and laid around for the day.

"Bowling" Night

After having fun at the company bowl-off a few weeks ago, I suggested to the gang that we all go bowling every so often! There is a deal at the local bowling alley that games are $1.25 on Monday and Tuesday nights after 8:30 pm. I was really surprised by the amount of interest, and some of my friends suggested that we all get together to have dinner, white russians, and watch the Big Lebowski. I'm not all that into the Big Lebowski, nor am I interested in white russians or any other drinks, but I said I'd make dinner for everyone. I wasn't expecting 10 or 11 people to say they'd come, so it was a little more stress than I thought it would be. I rushed home from work to go to my dentist appointment for a general teeth cleaning and check-up, and of course I started stressing about everything. While I was driving home, I became more and more paranoid that I had looked up the wrong dentist's address, and wasn't going to the correct place. In my mind, I kept playing out this embarrassing scenario where I walked into the office right on time and found out I wasn't in their appointment list. I kept thinking about this and thinking about this and dwelling on it and finally I just drove straight home, RAN up the 8 floors of stairs, RAN into the apartment, frantically searched my dentist on google, found out that I'd been going to the right place all along, hopped onto my bike, pedaled furiously over, and arrived, thinking I was 20 minutes late. I was 5 minutes early. I got some strange looks because I was terribly out of breath, but the appointment went well and I emerged without any cavities! Yay!

I then headed over to the grocery store to pick up the supplies for pizza, morroccan cous-cous salad, and a vegetable salad. I paid much more than I wanted to pay for this sort of a dinner, packed it all onto my bike, and pedaled furiously home. Once I got home, I had another dilemma: I had no idea how much pizza to make. My friends are pretty famous for not RSVP-ing and just showing up, and they are also famous for eating a LOT. I ended up asking Pam and letting her decide, and the verdict was that I would make enough dough for seven 12 inch pizzas. Then the next problem began: when I looked at the pizza dough recipes, they didn't multiply linearly. The recipe for two doughs was NOT the same as the recipe for one doubled. The recipe for three doughs was also not some sort of a linear scale from one or two dough recipes. I didn't know what to do, so I ended up making a batch of 3 pizza doughs according to that recipe, and putting it aside. Then I did that again, and put it in the same bowl. Then I made one more recipe, and put that in the same bowl, and let those all rise together. In the end, I smushed them all together, and spent the whole night fretting that the pizzas would somehow blow up as a result of this. I'm sure I could have made it much easier on myself somehow.

Friends started flocking in much earlier than I expected. Then, I made much, much more cous-cous salad than I had expected the two boxes to make. The morroccan cous-cous salad is pretty good. It's very simple, and it just has cous cous, peppers, olive oil, lemon juice, parsley, chick peas...and I don't remember what else. I had Tim and Pam cut up all the vegetables for the garden salad, and then the three of us started to assemble pizzas and bake them. I was fretting up a storm that everyone would be angry that the food wasn't ready, until Tim made me realize that his friends had all they need: drinks and a movie. By that time, the pizzas were starting to come out of the oven, so I let people go for the food. They all seemed very happy, and I always love homemade pizza.

After dinner, we all wandered over to the bowling alley. When we got there, we were terribly surprised by how crowded it was! It's a bowling alley! They are supposed to be smokey and empty and dark. It turned out that you have to show up at 7:30 to get a ticket to a bowling alley for 8:30. We wouldn't be able to bowl til 10 pm, so we decided to go chill at a local bar instead. It ended up being a lot of fun, but I don't think I am going to be very interested in throwing another big dinner again. I'll stick to small, two person parties for now.

Sunshine Cupcakes & Homemade Oreos!

Today, I wanted to bake. Whenever I want to bake, I end up unable to decide upon one sole recipe to make. I always end up wanting to make this and this and maybe a little of that, too. I was stuck between making homemade oreos or sunshine cupcakes, so I ended up convincing Pam to come over so we could make them both! She said she would bring all her fun shapes of silicone cupcake holders over! She was still busy at work, and Navi was all antsy, so I took Navi on a walk to the library for some seperation anxiety training. I am currently trying to work on showing Navi that it's OK to be tied to a post while I go into a building for a few minutes. I don't think she believes that we'll come out and get her again. Tim tied her to a bench a few weeks ago and went into the library for five seconds. I did it again today, but lurked inside for a few minutes. She's not a big fan of the situation but I'm trying to get her to be more relaxed about it.

We wandered back home, and then Pam wandered over to the apartment. We baked up a storm, and by the end of the night, we had some incredible homemade oreos that I will definitely make again. We also had a batch of wonderful sunshine cupcakes, which are a lemony orange cupcake with a tart icing. I found the recipe in my williams sonoma baking recipe book. I gave the cupcakes 5 stars...and I think I give the homemade oreos 5 stars, too!

Ugh

Last night, Tim went into the city to go see George play the french horn at a cafe or a concert or something along those lines. I was really tired and he wouldn't be back until around midnight so I decided not to go along. I ended up watching a movie called "Tell No One" that really kept me on the edge of my seat, and then around 10 pm I jumped into bed to fall asleep. Navi jumped into the bed right after I did but instead of just going to sleep like normal, she acted like some odd night guardian. At first I figured she was just missing Tim, and tried to sleep through the fact that she was getting up every 5 seconds. Then she let out a low woof, which was really weird because she is such a quiet dog. She kept running to the door so I thought Tim was home, but he wasn't. I got up and checked every nook and cranny there is in the apartment, but I couldn't figure out what was going wrong. Of course, my overactive imagination kicked in, and I started worrying that people were sneaking around outside and that something terrible was going to happen. I couldn't sleep until Tim came home and it was pretty late by then.

So I woke up this morning and I was really tired. I was in a fog, and just wanted to get to work and start working. I showered, brushed my teeth, grabbed some lunch from the fridge, and started driving to work. I get to work and lumber towards the door to the building and realize that my badge, which lets me into the buildings and rooms I work in, is at home. It was 7:15 in the morning, and I was too tired to have to deal with this. Everybody seems to come in late on Mondays, so I wasn't very hopeful of rescue anytime soon. I sat around in my car until the next person arrived, and finally Yuen Yee drives in around 7:40 am. She let me into the building and opened up the rooms I needed opened, and we had a good laugh at the situation. Just wasn't the nicest way to start a work week, and now one of my bosses is being a pain in the ass. To add onto the list of todays annoying things, one of the pairs of pants I spent all of yesterday patching and sewing already has another huge rip. It's 9:20 am. I guess it's not a terrible day, but things just aren't going my way. On the positive side, at least the rest of the day has to go upwards somehow. Two books I've wanted for a while are finally in the library, and Tim has found another odd little band that he is convinced I will love.

Wet Dog

Good Doggy

This weekend has been kind of lazy. It's also been kind of nice. Yesterday I made a chocolate stout cake and a strange asparagus, green been, leet, and crouton salad. The cake came out pretty well, although slightly drier than I'd hoped. It reminds me of a chocolate pound cake, which I really like. The salad was very odd to eat at first, but as I ate more and more, I fell more and more in love. The same thing happened with Tim. At first he thought it was "interesting," then he thought it was "pretty good," and then he got up for seconds and said, "I changed my mind. This is fantastic!" We had left overs, and we didn't know how the bread would preserve, so we invited George over to eat the rest. I also went to Joann Fabrics in order to pick up some scrap fabric to patch up some of my pants and some of Tim's shorts. He has these shorts that he wears while mountain biking that have rips at least 6 inches long in the butt. They don't really matter because he wears them over biking shorts, but I figured I'd patch them up. The main reason I wanted to patch my pants is because all the pants I wear to work are ripping. They are really old and kind of threadbare, but I can't stand the thought of buying new pants for work. I spend so much time crawling around on the ground, snagging my pants on nails, and covering them with glue. I figured I'd try to patch them all once. If it works, great! If not, at least I tried before I shell out more money for more pairs of pants to promptly destroy. I bought a fabric glue and today I turned all of our pants and shorts inside out, cut out pieces of fun fabrics, coated them with a little glue and stuck them on. I'm still in the process of sewing them on for a little more reinforcement. We'll see what happens!

Since the dog didn't get a grand walk yesterday, we took her on a grand walk today. We walked over to PetSmart, where I found a toy I've been looking for on sale! I snapped that up, along with a really cute lobster thing. The cashier didn't love dogs as much as the usual cashier, so Navi didn't get a treat. She was very disappointed. I decided that because Navi had gotten neglected her treat, and I wanted coffee, we'd also wander over to Target. The garden store at Target allows dogs, and I figured we'd walk through to see if they had any Basil, and hopefully some cashier there would fall in love with Navi and give her a treat. We wandered in, and Navi got not one treat, but two! I also found a basil plant, and snapped that up. One java chip frappachino and one strawberries and cream frappachino later, we were wandering over to the beach. We played with Navi there for a while, then wandered on home. Once home, we decided to wash and wax the car. I soaked the car, Tim soaped it up, I rinsed it off, and then we drove around the block with the dog sticking her head as far as she could out the window. Then we parked the car in the garage, and started to wax it. Tim only brought one sock to wax with, though, so I ended up standing there with the dog supervising things. After I told him he missed a spot for the third time, he kicked me out, so I wandered back upstairs.

I've been realizing lately that Timmy and I did a better job at raising a dog than I thought we did. When I was in Rochester with her, I'd take her for runs all the time. She would always manage to get her leash caught on a lamp post by running on the other side. To make things worse, the faster I tried to unwind the leash, the faster she wound it up. After dealing with this every single day for a few weeks, I decided that I was going to stand there and wait until she unraveled herself. It took forever, but now that we're in CA and have worked on it for a long time now, she has made it one step better. Rather than getting wound up and unwinding herself, she just avoids walking on the other side of things. Even if you walk around something kind of strangely, she will slow down and make sure she walks on whatever side of the obstacle that you decide to take. So the occurance where she wraps herself around a post is now very rare. Yay! That's not the only example, but it's the only one I can think of right now.

On Friday, when I was biking home, I saw a woman exasperatedly guesturing frantically at her dog, who was dropping a load in the middle of the street. It made me smile, because now I know I'm not the only one whose dog likes to poop in the road.

I'm going to try to make a tomato and sausage risotto tonight! Yummy.

Poor Shrimpies :(

I really am a silly person sometimes. I got home from work today and saw that our fish tank was in peril. We've been having trouble lately with the pH continuously dropping off the scale , and we could not figure out why. It has been driving us insane because our shrimp, which are our favorite little critters, cannot deal with changes in the pH. The bottom of the tank kept turning into a shrimp graveyard, and we have been starting to freak out. Our baby cherry shrimp are precious to us, so when I saw that the bottom of the tank was littered with dead shrimp, I flipped out! Rather than waiting for Tim to come home and deal with it, I dropped my bag on the floor, grabbed the pH test kit, and tried to find the right instructions. I took the hood off the tank to get some water in the test tube, and didn't realize til 15 seconds or so later that it was pumping water all over the desk. Chaos ensued and the end result is that when Tim came home, I was in the middle of cleaning up a very big mess. He got right back on his bike, headed over to the fish store, and bought another kind of buffer that would raise the pH. We spent some time mixing and playing with water in a pitcher, and then we fixed the pH of our tank. So now, instead of only lowering the pH, we are now creating a valley for the pH to settle by placing both buffers to lower the pH and increase the pH and hardness. We spent a few good hours fixing everything up, and now our fish tanks seem much more stable. We still have a good amount of shrimp though, so hopefully they can survive.

For fun photos of some fishies and shrimpies, check out Tim's picasa! The album is here.

Wisdom Teeth

Today, I arrived at work around 6:30 in the morning so that I could leave early around 2:30 pm. I had an appointment with an oral surgeon at 3 and I was terrified that I would be late. Lately, my lower teeth have been pushed towards each other and they have started to crowd and move around other teeth a little. It's not bad yet, but it's not going to fix itself, so I wanted to get some x-rays to see if I needed to have my wisdom teeth taken out. I was a little nervous because this was my first appointment to a doctor or a dentist or anything really while I've been in CA, and I wasn't sure how gracefully the secretaries and doctors would handle my deafness. When I was in NY, I was in a region heavily populated by deaf people, so I was never the first deaf person anyone met. Here, it's a completely different story, and I wasn't sure what would happen.

I was pleasantly surprised, though. I had called a week or so ago to make the appointment, so they knew I was deaf by the method I used to call. I walked in at 2:55 pm and I had my forms already completed to hand over. They asked me very nicely for my name and when they realized that I was the deaf person they were expecting, the main secretary handed over a piece of paper. I looked at the paper and it had a list that she had typed up just for me with all the things we needed to do. It was all numbered, so first it requested that I give her my ID and medical and dental insurance cards so she could copy them. I handed them over, she smiled, took the copies, and then we moved to step number 2, which was the forms. I handed my already completed forms over, and she was very pleased she didn't have to wait for me to fill out the forms. Then we moved to step 3, and to be honest, I don't remember what all the steps were. The point is, I didn't have to waste a lot of energy trying to communicate, and I wasn't embarrassed by the usual lack of understanding. It went really smoothly, and then I was told to sit down and wait. When the nurse came out asking for me, all the secretaries smiled and pointed to me saying, "That's you!" It was really nice, and it really reduced my stress levels.

The nurse tried to make small talk at first, but I was having a very hard time understanding her. I could not understand a word she said. She held up a finger as if saying "wait," disappeared, and a few minutes later, a new nurse came in. The new nurse tried talking to me, and I could understand a decent amount of what she said. They decided to switch nurses so that I'd have an easier time - I've never had anyone do that before. She also recognized that it was much more trouble for me than it was worth to deal with small talk, so she just handed me a few pamphlets to read, and let me be. I don't know why people think silence is so awkward, because most of the time I think silence is a lot easier to deal with than endless small talk that I can't understand. It was nice because I knew when she did talk to me, it was something important. There are a lot of times where I don't understand something, but I feel the topic is trivial so I just let it slide and pretend I understood. You can't do that in a doctor's office in case they do slip something important in the middle of small talk, so it just makes the situation a lot more stressful. Whenever this nurse said something, I knew I needed to understand completely, and it just went a lot smoother.

The doctor was a little less capable of dealing with deafness, but he was patient enough. Turns out I need my bottom wisdom teeth removed, so I will be having them taken out on Friday, September 11th. I'm sure I won't like the office as much after I've had the surgery, but I like that I had a very easy time and I don't mind the fact that I have to go back.

A Sunset

Thunder Mountain!

This weekend, we decided to go backpacking with Navi again. We found a list of trails in El Dorado National Forest, and picked the Thunder Mountain trail. We packed at the last minute on Saturday morning, lazed around the apartment until noon, packed up the car, and took off! A 3 hour drive and a visit to a ranger station later, we arrived at the trailhead and let an excited Navi out of the car to explore. She wandered around while we got our packs on and chatted with a few other hikers, and then we set off!

The hike was along a ridge with beautiful views and you climbed and climbed and climbed to the top of Thunder Mountain. I think it was something like a 2000 foot climb over 3.5ish miles. There were a lot of solar panels along the ridge when we were first starting out, which was kind of neat. After a while, the views really opened up, and it was really beautiful. I took some panoramas, and here is my favorite one:


Navi was having a lot of fun. She is like a little mountain goat! She jumps up on rocks, stampedes up and down steep ridgelines, and always seems to be wondering why Tim and I aren't going any faster.


Tim decided to copy Navi, and hop onto a rock, too! Then of course, Navi hopped up too!


We kept climbing up and up, and eventually, this was our view of the rest of the hike.


At this point, we had started to look for a nice place to set up the tent and camp. We had heard from other hikers that there were no flat and clear places to camp, so we figured that if worse came to worse, we'd just hike up to the top, have a nice look around, and then wander back down and find someplace to camp on the way down. Tim then wanted to hike off the trail to what looked like a big grassy area a mile away, but I didn't want to leave the trail. After a while more of climbing, we decided that the top wasn't going to have much camping area, so we put our packs down, took Navi's pack off, and decided to walk up to the top and leave our packs behind. We follow the path, and suddenly, Tim decides that the path is about to go into the wilderness region of El Dorado, and that it's not going to go to the top. He decides that we need to climb up a steep hillside of loose rocks and pebbles in order to see the view. I was a little skeptical because what kind of hiking path bypasses the top ridge completely, but since Tim is so smart and wonderful I figured he must know what he was talking about. We start to scamper and slide up the hill and suddenly my path up the hill criss-crosses with a real path. The path actually wound up to the top with switchbacks. Silly Timmy. He made me climb and slide up to the top, and all I had to do was follow the path for a little longer. Well, the top had a pretty view. We wandered around for a while, and Timmy followed the path a little bit longer. Of course, since we had left our packs behind, he finds a really nice camping spot. So we walk back down, following the real path this time, get our packs, turn around, and walk right back up again. I'm never listening to Timmy again when he suggests leaving our packs behind. Anyhow, we returned to the nice camping spot, set up the tent, and wandered off to have dinner far away from the camp. It was starting to get darker, so we ate dinner, tossed the frisbee back and forth for a while, and then we wandered over to see the sunset. This photo isn't of the sunset, but it's at sunset time.


After this, we were pretty tired, so we snuggled into our sleeping bags and slept through the night. We woke up at sunrise, watched the sun rise over the mountains, and then wandered our way back down the mountain. We need to do this more.

Aurora Bowl-off!

Aurora had a bowling competition for happy hour today! Everyone left work around 3:30 to go to a nearby bowling alley, and the games began! The teams were randomly chosen beforehand, and I was on a team with Bert, Daniel, Yuen Yee, and Laurie. Bert is the VP of biotech, but seems a lot more like a college kid.


Daniel is a smart, kooky, eccentric employee that is very skinny and has very long arms and legs. It never seems that Daniel moves the way our joints permit so he always seems like he's dancing with broken limbs. He actually reminds me of Ronald Dahl's the big friendly giant. I don't think other people read as much as I did when I was younger, because nobody ever knows who I'm talking about when I mention the bfg.



This is the bfg:


Don't they look kind of similar?

Yuen Yee is a very happy lady from Hong Kong. I'm not positive she's from Hong Kong because it seems she has been everywhere. She is a lot of fun to be around and never fails to put a smile on your face.


Laurie is one of our temporary employees from Australia, and he uses quite a bit of aussie slang that leaves the rest of us clueless as to what he just said. A lot of the people at work , especially Jon, like his accent, but what do I know of that?


And of course, there was me!


We started bowling, and it was actually a lot of fun. Yuen Yee has a very bad elbow, so after six or seven gutter balls in a row, I suggested that she roll the ball instead. Bert and Daniel liked the idea, so they demonstrated how to roll the ball between your legs. It was pretty funny to watch one of the VPs of Aurora and a leggy man showing Yuen Yee how to roll an imaginary ball between their legs.


That's Bert in the photo, teaching Yuen Yee how to roll the ball. The man bowling next to Bert is Steve, who was on Jon's team. Jon's team ended up winning, and Jon ended up having the highest individual score! Here's Jon:


The first time Yuen Yee rolled the ball, it was a gutter ball. The next round, she knocked a few pins down! The round after that, she knocked a few more down, and then finally she knocked them all down in one try! We were very proud of her!

Daniel was having a lot of fun throwing his body on the ground every time he bowled.


He did a few impressive belly rolls too, but sadly there are no photos of that.

The night was pretty fun with a few highlights. One was when the evening bartender finally arrived. Beer is a very, very important part of my coworkers lives and when the bartender finally showed up, I am pretty sure I was the only one still standing at the bowling lanes. Most people know I don't really drink, so Cynthia brought me some Pepsi with cherries! Then Jon did, too! He was disappointed that Cynthia beat him to it, but it didn't matter; I was thirsty and I gladly drank them both. After the games finished, people stood around talking for a little while longer. I tried to stick around, but quickly got bored and slipped out the door.

IKEA!

When I was in high school, I used to play the computer game Rollercoaster Tycoon. It was the only game I'd ever played where I would start playing, and lose several hours in what felt like 15 minutes. I love every little thing about the game. You decide where all the rides go, and where their entrances and exits lead. You can control the colors of the rollercoasters, the rollercoaster cars, the queues, and even the colors of flowers you plant. You have the ability to micromanage the park; there is complete control over the prices of each ride, each food item at each stand, every souvenir, how many toppings go on the burgers you sell, and whether your drinks come with a slice of lemon. You can buy more land if run out of space, and you can publish ads or coupons in all sorts of different publications in order to draw more crowds. Even more impressive, everything you do makes sense in a real life aspect; you publish an ad in a national newspaper, and more people come to your park. When the ad campaign finishes, less people come but the amount of people is still higher than it was before. You can even control how hard your employees work. You can hire security guards, mechanics, janitors, and those people who run around in silly costumes. You can see how hard they work by checking their laziness levels, and you can discipline them or fire them if necessary. You can also train them, or increase their wages, which makes them happier and less lazy. You can also restrict employees to certain locations within the park so that you have a more efficient arrangement. If you have an unreliable ride, you can set a mechanic to only work on that ride. If you have a ride that makes a lot of people queasy, but don't have enough bathrooms or trash cans, they puke all over your paths. My solution is to place more trash cans and bathrooms. Tim's solution is to assign several janitors to the path after a scary ride to clean the mess up. To make it all even better, you can read people's thoughts. If you select a ride, you can opt to read what people are thinking about it. Sometimes they think it is too expensive, which should tell you to decrease the price. Sometimes they comment on how cheap a ride is, too, and you can jack up the price. Other times they will think about how skimpy the fudge topping on their ice cream is, and you can fix the problem. Its a really smart way of feedback and really helps to run the park. It's a really cool game because you are building a huge amusement park and you can control just about everything. When I was in college, Rollercoaster Tycoon 3 came out. It was a 3d version of the original game, and I wanted it. I ran out to best buy the day I heard of the game and bought it immediately. However, when I ran home to install the game, I discovered that my laptops did not have a good enough graphics card to play the game well, even on a low graphics setting. This made me terribly sad. I tried everything I could do, but nothing worked. My friend saw my despair and told me I could install it on his gaming computer. He was a Warcraft addict, but he was generous enough to let me have some rollercoaster tycoon time. Even with this, I never quite got my fix.

Recently, I brought up the game to Tim to see if any of our computers could play it, and the verdict was that none of our computers had a good enough graphics card. My computer at work is good enough to handle the game, but I don't bring that computer home often. I also don't want a wonderful game on my work computer to distract me. The computer Tim leaves at school could also run the game, but that's at school. Tim likes to play some computer games too, so we decided to buy a better video card and other necessary computer parts and revamp the desktop. On Friday, Tim installed everything into the desktop and raged war to get Windows to install. I guess the bios chip wanted a specific form of windows that we didn't have, so Tim needed lots of patience and clever computer skills to make it work. I found a used version of Rollercoaster Tycoon 3 Gold (it has all the expansion packs!) at a game store on Telegraph Ave in Berkeley, and I snapped it up for only 20 dollars! I was so excited, but since Whitney was around this weekend, I didn't have any time to play it.

Monday swings around, and I'm tired from the weekend. I rushed home after work and took the dog out for a walk. Tim came home, and he starts playing Rollercoaster Tycoon! I sat and watched for a while, but he did everything wrong! Exits would lead to completely different paths than the entrance. There was too much space in between rides and the space was not efficiently used. He didn't pay any attention to the aesthetics of the park, and after a while I couldn't stand watching him play! I went and fussed around in the kitchen and then an hour goes by, and Tim is still hogging the game! Another half hour, and he's still playing. I become frantic that I won't get to play and I squeak, "when do I get to play??" He wakes up from his game-mesmerization and surrenders the desktop to me. I started a new game, and it was just like I remembered! It took me a while to remember where a few things were but as I played I started to remember where everything was. I think I lost myself in the game for a few hours. Bedtime swung around, and I decided to have a bowl of ice cream before bed. When I shut down Rollercoaster Tycoon, Tim wandered back to the desktop to play Halflife. I guess we will appreciate the modified computer quite a bit! We even moved our nicer monitor to the desktop and now movies look crystal clear!

There was one problem. Just one small problem. We didn't have a table for the desktop, so we were sitting on the floor playing. This is fine for a little while, but after time passes, your wrist starts to hurt. Your neck starts to ache. Your back gets sore, and eventually you are reluctant to play anymore. So we decided that we would go to IKEA and buy another desk to set the desktop on. Tuesday swung around and after work, I drove to IKEA and parked. I shopped around Emeryville for a while waiting for Tim to bike over after a meeting at school, and we met outside of Barnes and Nobles. We walked back to the car so that we could put Tim's bike inside since he had brought his fancy bike. While we were walking to the car, we bumped into Brit! Gabe's Brit, that is. She was going to shop in IKEA, too, so she waited for us to put everything in the car and then we all headed into the huge warehouse. While we were wandering through, Tim and I noticed this big wall unit that is basically an erector set for furniture. You can decide where you want certain things like cabinets, drawers, shelves, and in the middle, they were using a shelf as a desk. That's a wonderful idea! I loved it because we do need some more storage space such as shelves. We decided to get two side by side units. One unit has a shelf for a desk, and a shelf on the top. The other unit has a cabinet on the bottom with three shelves inside, and then three shelves above that until the top. I will add photos soon. We went home, and when we unpacked the car, we couldn't find Tim's backpack. I figured it was still sitting in the parking lot at IKEA, but Tim was devastated and convinced himself that someone would steal his disgusting backpack with his disgusting bike shoes, a bike pump, and a bright pink biking jersey that is shredded in several locations. We drove back to IKEA, and it was sitting in the parking lot! Tim was very happy. We drove home through traffic again and when we got home, Tim started to build the cabinet while I ran to get the dog from doggy daycare. When I got home, he had discovered that one of the shelves was missing the pegs we needed, and we had bought the wrong crossbars. Wonderful. We could still set it up because the cabinet kept everything square and standing, but we didn't put much weight on it until we had it assembled properly. It was too late to go back to IKEA, so...

Wednesday swings around, and after work I go back to IKEA. I suffered through an infuriating experience where the sales people wanted me to go and get the new items I wanted to get out of the exchange, yet the warehouse people would not let me go into the warehouse to get these items while holding onto the items I wanted to return. I ran around on a wild goose chase that definitely tried my temper, and managed to escape from the store with the proper items and without throwing any temper tantrums. I lost an hour and a half to the process though, so I was slightly grumpy. I got home, took the dog for a run, and she was bad! She didn't listen when I said to come, and was just a very naughty dog. I was going to take her to the beach but she was so bad that I decided I would take her for a run instead. She hates to run, but she was bad, so she can deal with the repercussions. The run helped to alleviate my frustrations at IKEA, and when Tim got home from music night, he finished putting the furniture together. We started moving things over to the shelves and into the cabinet, and it is wonderful! I love it. It is unfinished pine, but I will slowly finish it, shelf by shelf. I will add a photo later.

The Earlies

My sister and I are plagued with the earlies. It stems back to life with our mom and dad and no matter how hard we try, we cannot defeat the earlies. My parents are never, ever late to anything and I spent a lot of my life in waiting rooms because we often arrived thirty minutes early to appointments. It didn't matter that none of the doctors were ever running on time, we would arrive at least ten minutes early. I hated it as a kid, yet now that I'm on my own, I can't stop the trend. When Tim makes a restaurant reservation, I fret and panic until he finally agrees to leave. I become convinced that we will arrive two minutes too late and they will give up our table. I arrive to the dentist and the doctor 30 minutes early and end up waiting an hour. I carry a book everywhere I go because chances are I will have plenty of time to read. If I don't leave the apartment early enough, I go into a sweat and frantically pace around the room staring at the clock. I can't get anything done because I spend the whole time worrying up a storm, so I eventually surrender and leave. The worst part of the earlies is related to getting to the airport early enough to safely check in, go through security, and arrive at your gate with plenty of time for last minute bathroom runs and dashes for food. Nene and I traveled quite a bit with our parents and we always spent an hour and a half waiting at our gate because of the earlies. I never really minded the case of the earlies until I started traveling with people other than my parents a few years ago. Every time I have to go to the airport with a group of people, I desperately try to explain that we absolutely must arrive at the check in line two hours before takeoff or the world will end. Nobody ever pays me any mind and I spend the hours before takeoff in a constant state of panic thinking that we will never get through the check in line in time, and then security will pull all of us aside for special random checks and then we'll miss our plane and everything will go wrong and no matter how hard I try to stay calm, I fail pretty miserably. It's also terrible when I'm traveling alone. I travel to Florida for work sometimes, and I can never decide when I need to leave my apartment to get to the airport with enough time to make it through all the steps. A lot of my trips leave around 6 am, and so naturally that means I should wake up at 2:30 am, leave the apartment at 3:00 am, catch the bart, and ride it to SFO and arrive an hour or so later. Then that leaves me two hours to get through all the lines and security and sit at my gate with enough time to start and finish reading three novels. I spend the entire night before fretting over exactly when I need to leave the apartment, how much time I should factor in for emergencies such as the BART exploding in half, and then I have to re-analyze it all again and again. I can't sleep, and when it comes to my scheduled wake up time, I'm already showered and ready waaaaaaaaay before I planned to be. So the only option is to leave early and get to the airport much earlier than I should have. Recently, though, the airports haven't been open by the time I get to the airport. I end up sitting in the check in line leaning against my overpacked suitcase, dreaming about the extra hour of sleep I could have had if I wasn't plagued with the earlies. It is so frustrating. The last two times I've arrived at SFO, it was around 4 am, and the check in lines didn't open til 5 am. The same thing happened when Tim's father drove me to the airport in PA. He told me several times that I didn't need to arrive so early, but I persisted and insisted that I needed to get to the airport by 4 am or something would go drastically wrong. Of course, we arrived, and we spent an hour waiting for the check in line to open. So this weekend, when my sister's flight was to depart from Oakland at 6 am, she went through the same problem with the earlies. She wanted to be there around 4 am with plenty of time to get through all the lines, and she spent all of Sunday night fretting over it. Since I was not going on the flight, it was easy for me to say, "We'll arrive at 5, and the check in lines will have just opened, and you can get through all the lines just fine." She talked me back to leaving at 4:00 am and then she decided we'd leave at 3:30 am and then she decided we'd leave at 4:30 am and I watched my sister suffer from the earlies. I decided I'd wake up at 4 am to wake her up so we could shower quickly and get going, but 4 am swings around and my sister is sitting on the couch, wide awake, already showered, and ready to go. We leave early, I get her to the airport on time, and she gets through all the lines without much problem. The only problem was that when she arrived, the check in lines were already open. It is maddening because I was so convinced that she would be on perfect time, and I was wrong. So now my 5 am open up rule is broken, and I'm going to be plagued with a worse case of the earlies the next time I have a 6 am flight. I slept on the floor at work this morning. I work three minutes away from the Oakland airport, and I was too lazy to drive to OAK, drive home, sleep 30 more minutes, then drive right back to work. It wasn't very cozy, and I'm sure a few people were confused, but it worked out in the end.

Nene's Visit - Sunday!

I woke up at 7 am feeling very refreshed from our first day of shopping. I wandered into the living room, and Nene was already awake and looking through her new cookbooks with Navi laying by her side. I showered and looked up when the stores would open on a Sunday, and it turned out that nothing was open before 11 am. We got onto the computer and started a video chat with my parents, and we had a wonderful chat for about an hour and a half. It was really nice to chat with them when Nene was at my side, because when I didn't understand something Nene could repeat it to me. It is hard to read lips through a computer, especially since the video chats aren't crystal clear. I can glean a decent amount of what my parents say since I know them so well, but I still need Nene's help. My parents have gotten a new cat. My mom always comes home with cats from the humane society, which drives my dad bonkers. This always follows the same trend. At first my mom is convinced that the new cat is wonderful. After a while, she will start to doubt herself. Then one day, the cat will leap from a chair and my mom will find gouges in her perfect furnature and realize the cat is slowly destroying everything. After this, my mom will shove the offending kitty into a cat carrier and take it right back to the humane society. It is a never-ending cycle, so when my mom picked up a cat that didn't look like Milo in front of the camera, the red alarms went off in my head. A look at my sister's face showed she was thinking the same thing. The story of this cat so far goes that my mom came home with this cat one day, and his name is Manny. Dad didn't want a cat, but my mom insisted, so they let it stay for a while. Apparently Manny is very active and interesting. He jumps from chair to chair, jumps from the backs of chairs to the tops of curtains, and is just a constant acrobatic act. My mom noticed some gouges in the chairs, so she took Manny back to the humane society. When she got there, they said that the cats were sick and on quarantee, so she would have to keep it for two weeks before she could bring it back. My mom couldn't do anything, so she brought the cat home and put him in the bedrooms that Nene and I slept in. You can close off that section of the house, so she closed it off, put a litter box in the bathroom, and let him stay there. I guess a few nights ago, it was the night before mom could return Manny to the humane society. My dad walked downstairs to our bedrooms to say goodbye, and I guess his heart broke at the notion that he was sending this cat back. He went upstairs and woke mom up and said that they could always buy new furniture. So I guess Manny is now enjoying the run of the whole house and hopefully this cat is another one that lasts.

Tim woke up sometime in the middle of this video chat, and said hi to my parents. We had been chatting for a long time, and we decided we'd say goodbye, and take the dog for a walk since we had time before the stores opened. We walked the dog up the hill behind our house, and had a lot of fun on the rope swing. We took lots and lots of fun photos. Nene was wearing the purple shirt with the Amos Goldbaum drawing, and I was wearing my shirt with the doggy and fire hydrant that we got yesterday.

I couldn't decide which of these photos of Nene on the swing to include because she looks so happy. In the end, I decided to include them all.


Timmy had fun on the swing, too. He is always trying to catch sticks on the ground to throw at the dog. I cringe at the thought that someday a grab for a stick may not end well.


I had a lot of fun on the swing, too!


Even Navi was enjoying herself.


We played on the swing for quite a while, and then headed back down the hill. It was around 10:30 am so Tim and I decided that we'd pack his bike into the car and drive over to 4th street to shop. 4th street has fun stores like doggy stores and toy stores and a really neat gardening store, so I figured Tim would enjoy it for a while. Around noon we would go eat lunch with Tim, and then he could get his bike out of the car and bike home while Nene and I continued shopping. We got to 4th street a little earlier than 11 am, so things were just starting to open. We went into a soap store, and I was impressed because Tim was more fascinated with things in the store than Nene and I were. We finished looking at all the soaps pretty quickly, and turned around to usher Tim out and he was mesmerized with a motorcycle in the shop and photographs on the wall. Then we went into the gardening store, where all three of us found plenty to look at. Tim was fascinated with a childrens book with photographs of bugs up close. There were all sorts of gross insects magnified hundreds of times and some cool critter photos. We found some really cool sake glasses made out of clay. There was a lot to look around at, and we spent a good amount of time there. Then we went next door to the toy store, where they had this wooden set for marbles up. You could drop marbles into various places and they'd shoot along slides, down drops, through tunnels, and I think we played with it for 15 minutes. Tim was especially fascinated with the apparatus, and after Nene and I wandered off, we noticed him frantically scrabbling to catch marbles shooting all over the floor. Then we saw these tornado jars. They are the jars you are supposed to spin in circles and then a tornado appears. I don't know what is wrong with us but we could not get tornados to appear. We even read the directions several times to make sure we weren't missing some odd step. We got these little swirling motions but no tornado. Nene said it was like the tornado she had last week in Illinois; it was a very small tornado, and that was exactly what we were replicating in our tornado jars. Tim came over and tried, and while he was better, we still couldn't get a full blown tornado. On our way out of the store, Tim became fascinated with some bug vacuum gun and tunnel set. I guess it's a lot like the hamster cages with tunnels and all that jazz everywhere. You vacuum up bugs with the gun, and then release them into this jungle gym for bugs. I don't even know what to think. I'm pretty sure that if I bought him that for Christmas, he'd play with it every single day. I think it's kind of cool...but slightly disturbing, too. Maybe I can make him keep it on the balcony. We were hungry at this point, so we finished shopping on 4th street and headed over to a Mexican restaurant called Picante for a delicious lunch. On our walk back to the car, we noticed that the reptile store was open, so we went in. It was very surprising - there were all sorts of huge snakes, huge lizards, huge turtles. There were also some really cute tree frogs, tree frog babies, and all sorts of smaller critters. On our way out of the store, Tim commented, "That's how many poisonous things can escape from this place in the event of a major earthquake." That gave me an entirely new perspective on the store.

Tim left to go home, and Whitney and I drove over to the college area for some more shopping. At this point, we were pretty tired. I didn't think she'd like telegraph ave, but I decided we'd walk down it quickly, thinking that the shopping on college ave was much closer than it was. Telegraph Ave was pretty boring, and I don't think Nene was too pleased with the length of the walk to the College Ave shopping. We finally made it, and went into a store or two, but the stores didn't have as much pizzazz as the stores on 4th street or in the city. Eventually we passed Ici, and I bought the two of us two scoops of ice cream each. She got a scoop of mint chocolate ice cream and a scoop of coffee with candied walnuts in the ice cream. I got the same coffee ice cream and chocolate ice cream. It was delicious. The candied walnuts inside of the coffee ice cream were really nice. The chocolate ice cream reminded me of Schokolade Eis from Germany when Tim and I were in Heidelberg. I loved the ice cream in Germany. Every single day, I had to try two different ice cream flavors. I made Tim come on many mad dashes to try nice ice cream places. Thankfully he is tolerant that ice cream is a severe vice of mine. Actually, I think it is secretly a vice of his, too, but he can hide behind mine. After we sat on a bench enjoying our ice cream next to a man with a very sweet and calm puppy, we wandered around the rest of College Ave. We were pretty shopped out, and the stores weren't too appealing, so we ended up just walking back to the car. We stopped at Target on the way home so I could show her the amazing escalators for carts, and to grab some coffee from Starbucks. When we got home, Nene passed out on her air mattress for a few hours. She commented that ,"I shopped til I dropped...literally!" When she woke up, she wanted to take the dog to the beach so she could see Navi swim. Tim and Navi played fetch for a while on the beach. Nene was very impressed with how Navi will crash through the waves.

After Navi tired out a little, we showed Nene all around the beach and park and had a lot of fun. Whitney even had a good tug of war game with the dog and a very tough plant.



After the beach, we went to Sweet Basil, which is a thai restaurant that Tim and I enjoy on Solano. It was delicious. Nene and I ended up getting the exact same thing. It was a red chicken curry with pumpkin with a thai iced tea on the side. Yum. Tim got something else, but I can't remember what it was. On the way back to our car, Whitney saw another chocolatier that was open. We went in, and the woman was very friendly. We bought a few more truffles and chocolates and headed back home. When we got home, we did some sake tasting at home with our new sake cups! Tim had bought two sakes on his way home from the sake factory, and we had some left over from a few days ago. The first sake was an unfiltered sake, and it was disgusting. The second was a plum sake, which I love. The last was actually a plum white wine, but it is also one of my favorites. I'm not really sure what Nene thought, but I know she hated the first one as much as I did. Every time she took a sip, she shuddered. The truffles were all good, except for the hibascus (sp?) flavor, which was revolting. We ended up just relaxing in the apartment for the rest of the night, which was really pleasant. Whitney got everything packed up, which is pretty amazing considering how much we bought. It was a wonderful end to a wonderful weekend.

Nene's Visit - Saturday!

For my sister's birthday, I offered to fly her out to San Francisco to visit for a weekend. Her birthday is September 7th but she is one busy bee so I told her a few months ago. She picked a weekend, and this past weekend she flew out to visit! I was really excited because she had not met Tim and Navi yet and I have not seen her in over a year. On Friday, her plane was due to arrive around 8 pm, so I decided I would work from 12-8 pm and pick her up on the way home rather than battling bay area traffic four times in one day. Her plane was a little delayed, but at 8:30 I got the text message indicating that she had landed and drove to the airport to pick her up. I saw her immediately in the swarm of people and turned on the light in the car so she could see me. She ran to the car, and it was time for the weekend to begin!

It was late, so we just went home so she could meet Tim and the dog. We had some leftover couscous salad that I had made recently for dinner since we weren't very hungry. It was a pretty laid back night and it was really nice to have her meet Tim and Navi. I think Whitney liked Navi, but I do need to figure out how to teach Navi that jumping is not ever allowed. So many of our friends love dogs so they let her jump all over them even when I tell them not to. So, something is going to change. Anyhow, we ended up going to sleep so that we could get an early start and go into the city in the morning. Whitney wanted to wake up at 7 am, so I set my alarm. Morning swang around, my alarm clock woke me up, and Whitney took a few seconds to wake up. After an intial sleepiness, the shopping-deprived Whitney suddenly realized that she was going into San Francisco to go SHOPPING and became very excited. We rode the BART into the city and arrived at Embarcadaro right when the crafts festival was starting to open. It's one of my favorite places to shop in the city; there is a lot of handmade, awesome jewelry and unique clothing and it's a lot more fun to shop around than a store. Whitney loved it as much as I do, and she got a pair of green hand painted shell earrings. They were really pretty. I found this amazing bracelet that is made from beads from Ireland. The woman crocheted the bracelet using wire and wove the beads into it. I can't explain it, so I should put a photo up sometime. Whitney also saw some incredibly awesome shirts, so we snagged a few. One was made by Amos Goldbaum who does a lot of line drawings and had a few cool ones stenciled onto shirts. Whitney and I both liked one design quite a bit on a purple shirt, and it was cheaper per shirt to buy two, so we each bought one. Then Whitney's incredible eye for things I like found a teal shirt that had a block painting of a dog on the front and a fire hydrant on the back. It was so nicely done that it was incredible, and I had to have that shirt, too. So I got it, of course!

After wandering around the whole fair, and showing Nene the pins mom and dad had considered buying her, we walked across the street so I could show her the Ferry Building. I really like the Ferry Building because it has so many unique foods and very nice stores to poke around. When my parents came out to visit, they had enjoyed both the crafts fair and the Ferry Building so I figured Nene would be the same. She loved it just as much as I do, and we spent another hour poking around all the various stores. At one point, I saw the organic potstickers that my dad had bought for my mom and I to try with him. They had been really good, so I figured I'd buy six for the two of us to try, so my sister could experience the same foods my parents had. They were delicious, just as they had been before. I really love potstickers and these are some of the best I've had. After a while, we came to the Scharffen Berger store, which is one store I had been meaning to take Whitney to for a very long time. When I was Nene's maid of honor at her wedding, I asked one of the bridesmaids from San Francisco to bring truffles from a notable chocolatier in San Francisco. I was absolutely mortified to discover that the bridesmaid brought those Ghiradeli squares that you can buy in any grocery store in the country. I was so mad. My sister loves to try new truffles and other chocolates with ooies and gooeys inside, and all I had to give her was a bag full of standard chocolate squares that everyone has had before! Ugh. So I told myself that I would send Nene a whole box of wonderful truffles someday to make up for it. When I bought her plane ticket to visit me, I decided that I'd take her to Scharffen Berger, and let her loose. I told her she could buy as many truffles as she wanted, and she picked six of the most amazing looking truffles I'd ever seen. The flavors were orange sherbert, tiramisu, mexican chocolate, almond, and I actually can't remember the last two flavors. We got them boxed up, and finished wandering around the building and headed to fisherman's wharf. There isn't much to do in fisherman's wharf, but it is fun to see. Along the way, we stopped at the Fog City Diner to meet Nene's brother-in-law Matt and his wife Tyhler. We ate and chatted for about an hour and then Nene and I set off for Fisherman's Wharf. Before we left, we got a nice photo of the four of us.


Nene remembered Fisherman's Wharf from when we were children, and wanted to see it again. When we got to Fisherman's Wharf, we went to watch the sea lions for a little while, and then Nene saw the Gap. She decided that since it was on our way to Chinatown, we should stop in and look around. She had a coupon for 30% off and multiple uses! We walked in and both of us immediately noticed a purse that was perfect for me. I've been looking for a purse for forever; I don't have one and I've wanted one so that I can wear fancy clothes in public without wearing my old, worn backpack. I was really pleased because the purse was only 27 dollars with the 30% off coupon, which is quite a bit cheaper than the other purses I have liked. We rummaged around the sale rack for a while, and Nene found a pair of capris and a sweater that she liked. She also found a pretty dress. When she tried them on, she liked them all! She had been a little chilly while walking because of the wind, so she asked if she could wear the capris out. The staff obligued and when we walked out of the store, Nene was hot.

We wandered down Powell until we came to Lombard Street. From where we were, you could see the curvy section of Lombard. Then we headed over to Grant Street, where I took a photo of Nene under the stree sign since her husband's name is Grant.


After that, we shopped along Grant until we came to Chinatown. There was a really cute children's store and I found a book for kids about a dog that gets lost in the city. I liked the book a lot because I had taken Nene to a lot of the places the dog visited. I ended up buying it for her since she loves children's books so much. There were a few clothing stores that were interesting to poke around. When we got to the intersection of North Beach and Chinatown, we went into the City Lights Bookstore to find a cookbook for Nene that had some relation to San Francisco. She ended up buying a cookbook by the woman who started the restaurant Greens, because our parents took us to Greens when we were younger and she remembered it. We wandered down Chinatown and I bought Nene some bubble tea, since she has never had it before. It is a lot of fun because there are several flavors and they all have tapioca pearls at the bottom of the drink. You drink with a special, large straw, and you get a mixture of liquid and tapioca pearls! It's weird at first, but some people love it and others don't. I think Nene liked her drink, but was just a little weirded out by the tapioca pearls. After that, I took Nene to my favorite bakery in Chinatown, and bought some pineapple shaped buns and cream buns. We sat down on a bench and each enjoyed a very rich cream bun, and then wandered off to Union Square. When we got to Union Square we went into Williams-Sonoma so that Nene could buy the arborio rice she wanted. My mom says that the arborio rice from Williams-Sonoma is the best there is, so I bought a box as well. I will make risotto two nights in a row soon; the first night I will try with the arborio rice I already have, and the second night I will use the arborio rice from Williams-Sonoma. I am curious as to whether it is worth the extra bucks. By this point in the day, I was really, really sick of my wallet. It was a small wallet with enough room for 4 cards and a twenty dollar bill folded in half twice. Whenever I had a few ones and fives and twenties, I would have to take it out of the wallet, open it all up in front of everyone, count out what I needed, hold my money while waiting for the change, and then fold it back up and put it in the wallet. To make it worse, the wallet couldn't hold any change. It was infuriating and embarrassing because I don't feel comfortable with everyone seeing all my money. We headed into Macy's to buy a new wallet, and I found a nice wallet made by fossil. It is green! I like it a lot because I can put all my cash inside, and I can keep change and more ID and gift certificates in my wallet! It is wonderful. We wandered through a lot of stores in Union Square, and wandered through the San Francisco Mall as well. At this point, it was after 6 pm, and we were getting hungry for dinner. We got on the BART and Tim picked us up when we arrived back in Albany. We went home to clean up quickly and put on our new dresses. We posed for a photo!


After the photo session, we drove over to BevMo! to pick out some wines for later in the evening. Then we headed over to Ajanta, which is a wonderful Indian restaurant on Solano Ave. We had a fantastic dinner with manjo lassi and poori. Nene's husband, Grant, got food poisoning when he was younger from some raw lamb in his Indian food. He can no longer eat Indian food, so Nene is indian food deprived. She was so excited and thrilled that she could eat all sorts of food while with Tim and I. After dinner, we all headed home. We poured some wine, got ready to move a movie...and we all passed out, instead.