White X-mas

Randy's Party

"Love each other a lot, and remember you are loved. OTTF."

Paying Our Respects

The Chef & I will be heading to our favorite twin city to pay our respects to the one-of-a-kind Librarian's sweetheart -- and to give the Librarian a big squeeze. We are looking forward to sharing stories and smiles (and getting weepy) with the whole cheer squad of support.

It's important to salute the ones you miss and squeeze the ones you love while they are still around. Don't forget it!

Home Sweet Home

Stunned in Red Square

Who am I and how did I get here?!

Moustache Bar

My last night in London -- thai food at The Windsor Castle (of course that's the home of the Handlebar Club).

MB said it was okay to display her fancy moustache on my blog.

Flight Delay -- Please Translate

While I'm used to weather delays while travelling (see previous tales of woe) it's worse when you don't understand the airport loud speaker alerts. First, you notice the angry expressions and the eye rolling, and then you turn to the German person next to you and beg, "Excuse me, what are they saying?" Lucky for me, it seems that everyone in Germany speaks English. In this clumsy manner, I discovered my flight to Cologne had been delayed, and then cancelled. After much line standing and nearly stomping to British Airways to buy a one one ticket to London, I was rescheduled on a flight to Munich (Munchen!) where we were bussed and unloaded onto a plane on a tarmac. Wait wait wait waiting, and then another message in German and passengers erupting in groans of dismay with me pleading, "um, what are they saying?"

We had been rushed out there only to wait another two hours before take off.

The German flight attendants passed out chocolate Santas to placate us -- as if they had an emergency box stored just waiting for to appease an angry mob. We finally made it to London but that emergency choco santa was long gone.

Berlin

Gluhwein Santas

the Librarian's Sweetheart

with love, sandwiches and a red canoe. xoxoxo.

XO laptop

My mom is frantic about buying one of these -- so she asked me to figure it out for her because she has dial-up and no patience. I think she wants one because it looks simple and won't break, but now that I've "figured it out" (i.e. got on the website in less than ten minutes) I'm happy to support the cause and give this to my mom for Christmas (don't tell!)

I hope the other one goes to cute girls like this.

Hello, Comcast?

Aw, so long NFL Network - and we hope Brett's elbow gets better soon. For someone who gets paid a lot of money to bash people up, Nathan is getting super blamed on.

the Packers

Tonight the Chef & I are determined to watch the Packers game even though we are not sports fans. In order to do so we had to upgrade our cable package to include the NFL Network.

Ha! We will have to cancel this request tomorrow after the game is over.

Tonight was the perfect opportunity to invite people over to watch football and use up our Packers paper plates and napkins that my mom sent me the last time they were in the Super Bowl. Make that the last time they were in the Super Bowl and actually won. 1997?!
No one has arrive yet -- so TIVO is paused on the coin toss, and the Chef is starting the grill.

Go Packers!

Desert Gnomes

For those of you who enjoyed the glimpse of a little Mount Horeb, WI in the Arizona desert (uh, I mean golf course!) here's a few more from the series. Note that these are heirloom gnomes, hand painted by the Chef's mom back in the day.

The watermelon-holding-girl below has seen better days. The hot sun does not help her bright colors and it is rumored that she was vandalized by the renters next door. Children are not allowed to stay in Sun Lakes (it's an old people only zone) so they were not only bad renters, they were illegal underage gnome wreckers.


Here's the actual Gnome View from Sun Lakes. Note the bubbling fountain, and the golf cart in the background. Sometimes windows need to be replaced because golf balls fly off course. All this retirement relaxing can be dangerous.

Arizona Thanksgiving

Gobble Gobble!

Steak and Fruitcake

Steak! As in the Palace Family Steak House. We attended their special performance 4 kids at the Excelsior Playground -- because the Chef & I are young at heart (and we are TPFSH fanclub members).

Everyone was happy to wave their potatoes in the air (and, as instructed, not throw them.) Plus, those sign holders were dedicated to their job.

They child-proofed the lyrics to a few songs, including "Feel Like Skipping Rope" which are not the original words to the sexytime favorite by Bad Company.

This was the first time we witnessed TWO dancing steaks. All my pictures of the dancing steaks turned out very blurry, because they were always dancing.

The next day was all about FRUITCAKE -- as in our annual pilgrimage to the Dominican Sisters of Mission San Jose's festive Holiday Boutique. We headed down to Fremont to load up on their olive oil, fruit cake, persimmons and (hic) bourbon balls.

(If you are related to me, you will be eating some of this fruitcake soon. That is either a threat or something that you can look forward to in December.)

The Sisters produce and sell olive oil made with olives from their own trees.

As the sisters like to joke, it's "Extra Virgin" Olive Oil. Really, they do.

One of the nuns asked me if I had bought a raffle ticket yet and I immediately said "YES!" (because I am a compulsive people pleaser) before I realized I had just lied to a nun. Bah! I try so hard to support the sisters, but there is no way to avoid the easy-to-step-into guilt of a lapsed Catholic (make that a lapsed Catholic who is also a big liar.)

This annual tradition always reminds the Chef & I that the holidays are around the corner even though it seems like the seasons here never change. Yet when we see that big stack of fruitcakes down in Fremont, we know that it is no longer June in California.

New Paint

Pantaloons

Rabbits vs. Cats.

That's right, I'm thinking of you Librarian...

Elvis!

A whole night of "My Aim is True" plus a few extras -- all for Richard.

Toronto, eh?

It's true, I heard lots of "ehs?" come out of the mouths of nice Canadians in Toronto. It was a whirlwind trip -- but I can't quite call what happened there "work".

It was a "media event" but regular people would call it "a party".

Extra Hour

I wanted to use my extra hour to call everyone I know just to say hello. Chit chat. Catch up on everything, but more importantly, nothing. Just hear voices of the people I miss and eventually laugh so hard my stomach hurts. The usual. However, I think everyone had the same idea because I got a few busy signals, tried again -- got distracted and felt panicked as my extra hour sneaked away from me. My biggest success? IMing MB in London -- it was already evening there -- I was ahead of the clock, yet I was (still) frantically trying to squeeze more out of that hour.

Seeing that I was about to have a panic attack, the Chef agreed to go to see "Lars & the Real Girl" with me. Or as he said, "Might as well only waste one hour watching a bad movie instead of two!" The Chef has been cynical about movie watching these days (I blame "Waitress.") However (for me at least) two hours spent watching Ryan Gosling act like an anti-social weirdo from Wisconsin (!) was well-spent.

"Lars & The Real Girl" also managed to capture that ugly, stuck-in-brown-road-slush, woods without leaves drab Midwestern wintertime of February/March -- and that familiarity made me incredibly homesick. That, and the illusion that all people who live in small towns in Wisconsin are kind-hearted and supportive to delusional outsiders. I fell for it, even though I knew better. I recommend getting sucked into that particular movie magic.

That small town in Wisconsin even turned out to be Toronto, eh? What a coincidence -- I'm flying there tomorrow for work. I'm going to pretend it's Wisconsin and keep my eye out for Ryan Gosling.

Scary Movie

We celebrated Halloween this year with the help of the retro-tastic Presidio Social Club and a spooky silent film (music by the Willem Breuker Kollecktief) at the Palace of Fine Arts.

I realized that lately I've been spending too much time watching tiny, bad quality videos on my computer monitor -- as this b&w, silent big screen experience with a live orchestra just blew my mind. Take that Web 2.0!