Lizzie and Jonny visit!

Tim's older brother and sister, Jonny and Lizzie, came up from San Diego to visit this weekend! They both flew into Oakland on Saturday morning, so Tim and I woke up early to feed, love, and walk Navi to daycare and then we drove over to the airport to pick Lizzie and Jonny up. Lizzie has come to visit a few times before, but this was Jonny's first time visiting us in Berkeley, so after picking them up we drove over to campus so that Tim could give them a tour of Berkeley's campus, the labs he works in, and downtown Berkeley. We parked somewhat close to campus and we walked all around and we even showed them the dinosaur museum on campus that has a cast model of a T-Rex skeleton. We talked about whether a T-Rex was big enough to eat you up in a snap. The verdit was that yes, yes, they can. After showing them around, we wandered into downtown Berkeley and realized we were hungry! Jonny and Lizzie had been up very early in order to catch their plane, so after we realized that most restaurants weren't open yet for lunch, we decided breakfast was good, too! We sat down at a new restaurant on Shattuck Ave (I have forgotten the name) and had a delicious breakfast. After we were full, we wandered back through campus, toured around a little longer, then headed back to our car.

Then, we headed to the Berkeley Botanical Gardens to show them around, which was a lot of fun. I can't help it, but I always seem to fixate on animals rather than plants. We found two adorable frogs in the little humid greenhouse for tropical plants. There were also orange newts in the little lake, and a big water snake! We played with water skimmers for a little while. Oh, and there were plants, too! After wandering around the entire botanical gardens, we were hot, and tired of the sun. We got back into the car, and headed to the Sake factory for sake tasting! Neither Lizzie or Jonny had experienced sake tasting, so it was very new to them. I don't much like sake, so I just tried sips of Tim's drinks rather than suffering through entire glassfuls of sake. After the sake tasting, Jonny seemed pleased that now he will understand what to order for drinks when he is eating out at a sushi restaurant. When we wandered out of the factory, Tim decided that we had all enjoyed the frogs at the botanical garden so much that we should go to the reptile vivarium! So we wandered the 5 or 6 blocks to the reptile vivarium where we lost another hour or two raptly staring at all sorts of big frogs, little frogs, tiny frogs, bumpy toads, gross snakes, incredible lizards and newts that climb the glass, other disturbingly large reptiles, horrifying hairy spiders, and silly turtles of all sizes. When we emerged from this unique place, we were pretty hungry. After going home for a little break, we headed to dinner at Sweet Basil on Solano, which is a thai restaurant that Tim and I like. I was excited because the specials that night included the pumpkin curry that I've come to love! Dinner was very, very yummy. On the way home, we picked Navi up from doggy day care, and she was besides herself with delight to see Lizzie and Jonny again.

On Sunday, we had plans to go for a bike ride with their Uncle Doug. We woke up early, took Navi for a walk, and the four of us headed off with four of the six bikes Tim and I now own. Lizzie rode my commuting bike, Jonny rode Tim's commuting bike, and Tim and I rode our race bikes. We got onto the bart and headed towards the city and met Uncle Doug at the Ferry Building. Some of us wanted coffee (everyone but Tim) so we headed inside to pick up some coffee and some bread to eat before we started. This was unexpected, so we got off to a later start than we had expected. There were hordes of tourists so every time I checked, the line to the bathroom was far too long to be tolerated. We headed off, biking down Embarcadero around the city and to the Golden Gate Bridge. We biked over this and into Marin, where we biked along the shore and across the bike path Tim and I had seen numerous times on our drives down highway 101 in Marin, around lots of hilly roads, and finally arrived at Picco Pizzeria. We stopped for lunch, and had some yummy pizza and soft serve ice cream with a dark caramel sauce on top. After lunch, we headed back the way we came, and biked home. It was a really nice ride of about 40 miles or so, and I think Lizzie and Jonny had a lot of fun. It was also really nice to see Uncle Doug, and have fun with the lot of them. When we got home, we all showered and laid around for a while until it was time to take Jonny to the bart station so he could get to SFO and fly home. Lizzie is staying until Tuesday, so she has more time here with us!

Broccoli Quinoa Salad with Avocados!!

Ever since I moved out to CA, I've been hearing a lot about this grain called quinoa that is a complete protein. A lot of my co-workers are vegans, vegetarians, or some other type of odd diet, and they always have odd quinoa based salads for lunch. Over time, I started becoming more and more piqued by quinoa, and the final straw was when my friend Pam showed me a recipe she'd found online for a broccoli quinoa salad. She ended up really liking the final product so I put the ingredients on my grocery list. Well, today I went grocery shopping, so I stopped by Trader Joes to pick up some quinoa. When it came to deciding what to make for dinner, the broccoli quinoa recipe jumped to the top of the list!

The recipe can be found on this website, and I recommend that you try it! It is very simple to make, and it doesn't take long at all! When I took my first bite I was unsure as to whether or not I liked it. As I ate a little more I found myself really appreciating the meal. I was nervous that Tim wouldn't like it, but he did! The quinoa was pretty neutral, but it's nice to have another easy grain to whip up for a meal. The broccoli and garlic pesto ended up having a really nice flavor to it, and the avocado and pepper-y olive oil on top really finished the deal. I will make this again.

Broccoli Quinoa (adapted from 101 cookbooks)

Ingredients:
1 cup uncooked quinoa
2 cups chicken broth (you can use water or a combination)
1 pinch salt

6 cups broccoli florets
3 medium garlic cloves
2/3 cup sliced almonds, toasted
1/3 cup grated Parmesan cheese
2 pinches salt
2 tablespoons lemon juice
1/4 cup olive oil
1/4 cup heavy cream

1 avocado, sliced

1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
3/4 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes

Preparation:
Rinse the quinoa very well for 4 to 5 minutes in a fine mesh strainer. Place the quinoa in a medium saucepan with the chicken broth and pinch of salt. Bring to a simmer, reduce heat, and simmer for about 15 minutes or until the chicken broth is absorbed and the quinoa is fluffed up. The quinoa is done when you can see the curlique in each grain. Drain any excess liquid and set aside.

Make the fire oil by placing the 1/4 cup of olive oil in a small saucepan. Heat until hot, and add the crushed red pepper flakes. Remove from heat and set aside to cool so that the flavors can blend.

Barely cook the broccoli by placing 3/4 cup of water in a large pot and bringing it to a simmer. Add a pinch of salt and stir in the broccoli, cooking covered for one minute or until just barely cooked. Transfer to a strainer and run cold water over the broccoli to stop it from cooking further.

For the broccoli pesto, place 2 cups of the cooked broccoli in a food processor along with the toasted almonds, Parmesan, salt, lemon juice, and half the toasted almonds. Drizzle in the olive oil and cream and pulse until smooth.

When ready to serve, toss the quinoa and remaining broccoli in a large bowl. Add 3/4ths of the broccoli pesto and adjust according to taste. The mixture may need a little more lemon juice, or more salt and papper, or maybe more pesto. Mix in the remaining toasted almonds, as well. Portion the quinoa salad onto plates, and cover with the sliced avocado. Drizzle some fire oil on top, and feast!

Note: Timmy and I discovered that this recipe doesn't keep well, so don't make more than you can eat in one sitting! At least it's easy enough to make for a quick one night meal! This recipe made enough for Tim and I to eat for dinner with a decent amount left over. I think next time, I would try to either make 2/3rds of the recipe, or halve the recipe and serve with something on the side.

Some Drawings

Hey! Look at my new bike!!!

When I was at RIT, I realized I really loved to bike because I was always riding my silly hybrid bike around campus. My friends would get drunk, come over on Saturday night, and want me to go riding with them around campus. It was always a blast, and the combination of loving to bike and having friends that all were in the triathlon club and riding fancy bikes around ended up in my buying a quintana roo private reserve compact triathlon bike. I loved that bike. I loved it more than anything. When Tim and I decided to move out to Berkeley, we weren't completely sure what to do with our bikes. Then, we decided that our bikes wouldn't get us across the country, so we had to buy new bikes for the bike trip. I ended up selling the bike and moving on.

Now that we've been in CA for a while, I've really missed having a sweet bike to take on loooong road rides. Timmy still has his pretty pink carbon fiber bike, and he left me in the dust whenever he rode it. I couldn't really get my mind off of having a quintana roo again because I loved my first one so much. I always found really good deals in bike stores for really good parts and then a few weeks ago I saw a year old Quintana Roo Lucero frame on sale. I bought it without a moment's hesitation. After buying a few parts and gathering everything we needed, Timmy and I slowly started assembling the frame and building the bike. It was a lot of fun, but it involved a lot of clueless nights wondering why a piece of a bike part wasn't depicted in the part assembly directions anywhere. I can't even count how many flimsy plastic pieces we found and had no idea what to do with them. We could never tell whether they were just there so that the bike part arrived to its designation safely during shipping, or whether it had a purpose in the bike assembly. Half of them were completely unnecessary, and the other half were entirely essential. Then, we also had a fiasco because of the internal cabling of the bike! Instead of all the cabling for the shifters/derailleurs and brakes being on the outside of the frame, all the cabling for this bike is inside the frame! The bike came with some tubing and what we were supposed to do was thread the cabling through the tube, and remove the tube after threading the cabling through. What we actually did was yank the tube out. Then we had a lot of fun trying to re-thread the tube through the holes because the entire frame is hollow, and the inlet and exit holes are NOT a straight distance away from each other. We tried a lot of ways to rethread the tubing through, and the final solution was to stick a metal hangar inside of the tubing until 2" away from the end or so, stick it in one side of the bike, use a flashlight to find it on the other side, catch the loose side with the cable, and use the cable to guide the tubing out. It was a pain in the ass. While we were going through this, we also realized that a lot of the cabling would be rubbing on the internal curvatures of the bike frame. This bothered us, so we ended up having to spend a lot of time cutting the tubing to be exactly the length that it would fit inside and prevent cable rubbing. I have never appreciated external cabling before in my life, but hey, the internal cabling is really pretty now that the fiasco is over!! After two weeks of assembling this bike, it's almost done! We have to iron out a few kinks, but look at the final product! Isn't it beautiful?! I can't take my eyes off it. The photograph is a little sad, though, because you cannot see how beautiful the carbon fiber weave is unless you see it in person. All the more reason to visit us!

I've not ridden it much yet, because I just got my wisdom teeth out on Friday. My jaw is really sore, and I don't appreciate riding because of all the jolts I get. I'd rather just wait a little longer, and really enjoy the maiden voyage. We did bike it to Pam's house though to see if we could tell whether my bike or Timmy's bike is lighter by using Celeste's bathroom scale. Celeste's bathroom scale didn't like us, though, so the verdict is still undecided.

Happy Birthday, NeNe!

It's my sister's birthday! Yippee! :)

Grizzly Peak, Revisited!

I didn't realize how much I love biking until my road bike went out of commission. It's driving me insane that I can't just bike over to the nearby stores to pick something up. I have to walk with the dog and tie her up outside, or I have to drive. I don't mind walking with Navi because she loves to go for walks and I've even taken her on a few 4 mile walks to do a few errands, but sometimes it's not ideal. Sometimes it's too hot to leave the dog tied up to a post or in a car, so I end up not going because if I walk, I'll waste an hour while Navi sits at home all lonely. I'm still waiting for the new chain ring to arrive, and I hope it arrives soon. I was really going insane because on Sunday, Britt and George went on a ride through wildcat canyon. On Monday, a few of our friends decided to ride Grizzly Peak, and I decided that I was going to go road biking on my mountain bike. I locked out the shocks, put the road slicks on, and pedaled up a storm trying to keep up with Tim, who was on his fancy road bike. Given that I was riding a silly mountain bike on the road, I wasn't able to keep up with him, but I didn't do too bad. Not that I can ever keep up with him, but it was worse than usual. When we were halfway up the mountain, we passed a man and a woman who were stranded on the side of the road. The man had hit a ditch or a pothole, and his tire had gone way out of whack. He needed a spoke wrench, and hey! My tool has a spoke wrench, even though most don't! Yay for me! I got my tool out, gave him the spoke wrench, and we sat around for a bit while he tried to fix his wheel. We chatted for a while, but after a bit of time with no success at fixing his wheel, the man decided to give up. He gave us back our tools, his wife biked home to get the car, and we set off on our way up to the top of the mountain. I didn't do too bad with my mountain bike, but I do hope my road bike is up and running soon!

Cassie's Birthday!

Cassie's 25th birthday is around this time, though I'm not exactly sure when. Her mother figured that Cassie isn't going to get married anytime soon (those are her mother's words, not mine), so she decided to throw Cassie a big 25th birthday bash at her house. Cassie's parents live south of San Francisco in San Carlos, and Cassie invited a lot of her friends from high school, college (UC Davis), and Berkeley. The party had a catered dinner, a bartender, and a lot of friends, so Tim and I decided to go. We picked up George and Matt around 3 pm, and drove over to the party. When we arrived, all of Cassie's aunts were astonished about my bloody knee, which I got this morning when I was hopping around rocks at the beach on my mountain bike. I guess I didn't exactly stick that particular landing, and my knee came into contact with a very hard rock. Anyhow, a lot of our friends from Berkeley were already there, so we hung around and chatted for a while. The bartender had lemonade, which made me infintely happy. I must have drank his entire pitcher of lemonade. Oops. Eventually, dinner was served, and it was delicious! I was very impressed with the potato salad. Tim and I decided not to sit with the Berkeley crowd, so we could meet some new people. Cassie's neighbors ended up sitting with us, and we had a wonderful conversation. We talked about a million random things including biking, new (and ridiculous) bike laws in San Francisco, critical mass, RIT, NTID, UC Berkeley, the town of Berkeley, Tim's current projects, medical technology, other nearby towns, how beautiful CT is (some children in the neighbor's family went to Yale) and we even talked about Lancaster, PA. We talked about amish quilts, and amish pretzels (which Tim has yet to take me to try) and I was not once bored in what must have been an hour long conversation. It was wonderful, and I am so thankful that we sat at a random table. There's nothing like that; meeting people and having an incredible conversation for an hour. It is so much easier now that Tim helps me out by interpreting what I don't understand. After dinner, the neighbors headed home, and Tim played a game of beer pong. Cassie got a one way ticket to Europe from her parents, and her parents sang her a loud song about "she's got a ticket to flyyyyyyyy she's got a ticket to fllyyyyyyy she's got a ticket to flyyyyyyy but just one way!" or something along those lines. Cassie's mother is very crazy, and she is a painter. I liked her. The whole family was really nice, and around 9 pm, Tim and I headed home to play with the doggy.

Long Walk

Today, I was bored...and since I can't ride my bike, and I wanted to go to the library and to the hardware store, I decided to go on a very long walk with the dog. It looked to be about 4 miles, but that's ok...the doggy and I like our walks! We meandered up over the hill and down the other side. We wandered up Solano Ave, and people watched along the way. We skipped over to the library together, and I ran inside to pick up a few books that I had on hold. At this point, I was worried about how absolutely hot it was. I was worried that Navi was going to be really thirsty and not have a fun time. When I was checking out my books, I asked the librarian if she had any plastic cups or something I could have to fill with water for the dog. She took one last long gulp from her soda can, and handed me the coke bottle. I was a little thrown off at first, but why not! I took it to the bathroom to wash out and fill with water, walked outside and Navi was really excited that I had water. I poured it out and let her drink from it, and I noticed that several people were staring at me with horrified faces. "You're giving your dog coke? That stuff dehydrates you!" I explained that it was water, but they weren't so reassured. Navi was happy though, so I went back inside to fill the soda can up again, and then Navi and I meandered our way down the greenway. Along the way, she would poke the soda can with her nose and demand water! It was kind of embarrassing because of all the horrified faces I got when I poured water out of the soda can for her. To make things worse, sometimes when she drinks from pouring water, she gets a lot of air, or water goes down the wrong way, and she starts gagging. I'm pretty used to it, but it normally doesn't happen unless we're backpacking in the middle of nowhere. There were a LOT of people walking their children home from school, and they thought that my dog was gagging because I was giving her coke. I tried to explain that it was water, but in the end I gave up and yes, yes, my dog is gagging because I'm giving her a drink from a coca-cola bottle. Along the way, there was a water fountain, so I filled the coke bottle up again. Navi jumped up, and drank her fill from the water fountain. Then she gagged on the water fountain, and then wanted more water from it. She drank some more and then we wandered the rest of the way to the hardware store. At the hardware store, I tied her up outside, went in to grab what I needed, and also picked up a bag of old fashioned watermelon hard candies that I am currently incapable of not eating. I will have to go back and try all the other flavors, because they are incredible. Then Navi and I continued on our way home, and she continued to poke at the coke can for more water. It was a really hot day, so it was pretty understandable, but I am really surprised that I forgot to bring Navi's nalgene along. At least I found something for her, but it would have been nice not to get all the astounded, disgusted faces at the whole ordeal. I love the dog to smithereens. :)

Poor Sequoia

Well, when I tuned my bike on Sunday, I forgot one thing. My chain rings have about 10k miles on them, maybe even more. The middle chain ring gets most of these miles. The reason this is important is because the teeth on the chain rings are very worn, and the teeth on the middle chain ring are almost non-existent. When I was riding my bike before I cleaned it, the chain was also very old, very rusted, and stretched out. For this reason, it could still grip onto the middle chain ring. When I put the new chain on, my bike became unrideable because it slips like crazy when you're in the middle chain ring. The middle chain ring is most convenient for getting around town in, and I'm nervous that if I do try to ride, even if I only shift quickly through the middle chain ring to get to either the largest or the smallest chain rings, I will be damaging my chain. I ordered a new middle chain ring, and I guess my bike is out of commission until the new chain ring arrives.