Last Hurrah

As we get closer and closer to B-day, C. and I have been trying to do the things we love doing but probably won't be able to for a while. For the most part, this involves going to our favorite restaurants. On the top of the list, of course, is Gary Danko in SF.

I'm only going to mention the top three dishes of the night, the first one being the risotto that C. got. Creamy, buttery, delicious... Everything that a risotto should be. This is the second time I've made the mistake of not ordering the risotto (the last time was at Cyrus). The seared scallop was also very, very good, and also ordered by C. I should just let her order for me as well next time. And we both ended with the same desert: french macaron ice-cream sandwiches. How could we refuse? Very much on the sweet side, but they definitely brought a smile to our faces.

Since this was potentially the last weekend we'd have to ourselves, we decided a quiet getaway was in order and escaped to Sausalito. On our way up on Saturday, we stopped at the Hog Island Oyster Company in the Ferry Building in SF for lunch. C. had their delicious clam chowder, while I tried their oyster stew. We both preferred the chowder.

Once we got to Sausalito we just walked around the downtown area. Usually, the only reason we'd be in Sausalito is to eat at Fish. We've only really checked out the town once before.

Of course we went to Fish. for dinner... and walked the two miles from downtown Sausalito to the restaurant. We started with the Fish Parfait, a crab cocktail that C. found a little too spicy but suited me just fine. For our main course, I had the pozole with Alaskan halibut cheeks while C. had the hamachi over pasta. I thought the corn was a little strange, but it was a good dish overall. As for the hamachi, it's a shame that C. has to have her fish fully cooked, because it came out a little dry.

The next morning, we drove to Stinson Beach. After brunching at the Parkside Cafe, we just lazed at the beach for a while before driving up Mt. Tam. By then though it was getting too hot to hike, so just walked a paved loop near the visitor's center before heading home...

High Tea

C. thought it would be fun to try out something a little different and made us a reservation for afternoon tea at the Ritz Carlton in SF.

I had the Imperial Earl Grey, C. tried the Eros. Personally, I much preferred mine... :) Along with the tea, we had a wide assortment of bite-sized snacks. We both loved the scones, but in general thought that the portions were much too small. This probably wouldn't have been such a problem if we went at tea time, but it was serving as brunch and we were both hungry.

Tasty, but not worth the price. I doubt we'll be going back.

McNally Lighting Seminar

Went to a lighting seminar taught by Joe McNally last Friday, and I figured if I waited long enough, he'd blog about it and include some of the shots he got that day. Sure enough, he did.

The class was a blast, and I learned:

• a better way to approach thinking about lighting a subject.
• what the various light-describing adjectives mean. Many times I read about "soft" light or "creamy" light or whatever and have a hard time visualizing it. Seeing McNally slowly iterate through and improve the quality of the light with each shot gave me a better understanding of what they're talking about.
• he really does talk the way he blogs!

Now I just need to convince C to stay still long enough for me to practice on her... And maybe pickup a couple of those Lastolite trigrips that McNally was using to play with.

First Harvest

C picked and cooked our first non-herb harvest from the garden tonight: string beans. We've been harvesting basil, rosemary and thyme for a while now.

Up next, hopefully, are the tomatoes and peppers.

Kindle DX

C got me the perfect birthday present this year -- something I wanted but would never have bought for myself -- a Kindle DX.

I've been extremely ambivalent about digital book readers in the past because I think they're insanely overpriced, I love the feel and smell of books, and except for some rare cases, always buy my books used. After using the Kindle for the past couple weeks though... I'm a believer.

The basic act of reading itself on the Kindle is fine. The text is clear, and being able to change the font size is surprisingly useful. The big advantages of the Kindle over a normal book (apart from the size and weight) for me are:

• the built-in dictionary (just hover over a word and the definition pops up),
• being able to search through the book (especially on long books with a lot of characters),
• and being able to surf the web while reading (I've mainly been using it to look stuff up on wikipedia).

I'm looking forward to try it out the next time I travel. It'll be comforting to know that I'll never run out of reading material. Maybe now I'll have a reason to buy a travel guide instead of just borrowing it from the library (assuming more guide book companies start making them available in digital format).

Speaking of which, I still haven't bought any books yet and I'm doubtful that I'll ever buy anything with DRM associated with it (which rules out books from Amazon). The only exception to this that I can imagine, as mentioned above, are travel books. Multi-country trips with all the books on the Kindle? Now that would be super-convenient.

Up

Up is just an amazing, amazing movie. Sublime storytelling, and whomever is responsible for the music deserves an Oscar. It had me crying within the first 20 minutes.

Up isn't just a movie, it's magic. It's art. If you haven't seen it yet, do yourself a favor and go check it out. 5/5.

Tan Phaik Gan

At 10:27pm on Saturday, June 6, 2009, my grandmother died of heart failure at the General Hospital in Penang, Malaysia. It came as a total surprise. My mom had just spoken to her the night before, and she'd been insisting that she could take care of herself just fine despite the reports we'd been hearing that she needed help.

I was uncertain about flying back for the funeral, but in hindsight I'm so glad I did. My mom and I arrived on Thursday, a day after the cremation, and we interred my grandmother on Friday.

While cleaning out her room, we found a clock that had stopped at 10:30. A strange coincidence.

New Games

We've been a little obsessed with Agricola of late, but that may change with our latest acquisitions: Pandemic and Small World. They're all very, very different games, and are quite fun and (so far) very replayable.

In Agricola, you play the role of a farmer(!). Danny introduced it to us (thanks Danny), and now the problem is that he always wins whenever we play with him. *grrrr* As far as gameplay goes, there're a lot of strategies/options, and every game is different. Even the number of players can affect the feel of the game, which is a nice touch that adds even more variety.

Pandemic is a cooperative team game where you play the role of members of the CDC, trying to find cures to diseases breaking out around the world. One up side of this game is that when Danny wins, the rest of us wins too. Although so far, we win just as often as we lose. This game is easy to learn, but not easy to beat.

And in Small World, well, you basically try to take over the world. It's Risk-esque, without all the annoying dice rolling, and you can win even if your army gets decimated. OK, so maybe it's not like Risk at all. But still, a fun game. I can't wait to try it out with more than two players as C and I have only played it a couple times so far.

I should point out that we also got Dominion in the same shipment, but honestly, it's been eclipsed by the others. While Dominion is also a fun game, the past few times I've been given a choice between Agricola and Dominion, I've gone with Agricola. However, it definitely cannot be beat if you're looking to play something fast. You can easily play 3-4 games of Dominion in the time it takes to play a single game of Agricola

Sequoia & Kings Canyon National Parks

C and I went to Sequoia & Kings Canyon National Parks over Memorial Day weekend and spent most of the time either sleeping or hiking. Lucky for us we were blessed with great weather. Not too hot, not too cold, and clear blue skies throughout.

In Sequoia, we hiked a 6 mile trail that took us from the General Sherman Tree to Moro Rock. Once we stepped off the paved path after the first mile or so, it was as if we were in our own private world as we rarely saw anyone else. My favorite points of interest along the way were Founders' Grove and Crescent Meadow. The giant trees were a sight to behold, but I could probably have spent all day in that meadow; it was just such a serene place.

In Kings Canyon, we did a 10 mile loop that took us to the aptly named Mist Falls. This trail was fairly crowded and were never alone for long. There was always someone coming or going (mostly going, since we started late). Still, the hike was relatively enjoyable, although if we didn't know better, we'd have said we were in Yosemite.

Wheels

After 10 years of faithful service, it's time to retire my rollerblades to the great dumpster in the sky. I tend to prefer the lace-free models, and after the third clasp broke, they just weren't usable any more.

Even worse, none of the major manufacturers make lace-free models anymore. Boo! I have, however, managed to find a pair that has vestigal laces which I can just ignore. Yay!

High Level Play

I've recently discovered Sirlin's blog on game design and one line in a recent post jumped out at me:

"We were cautioned that we all suck too much to do this and it's mostly an issue for high level play."

Ah yes, I'm quite familiar with this, especially when the game is StarCraft. For an interesting read, check out his discussion on flux.

Nine Square Feet

Now that we're more settled in and spring has arrived, we're starting to decide what to do with the yard. One thing that C's been clamoring for is a vegetable garden, so I spent a couple weekends building a planter box out of a couple wooden pallets. We got some free compost from Sunnyvale, some plants from a nursery, and we're now in the gardening business. We're starting with rosemary, thyme, mint, basil, tomatoes, and a couple Chinese vegetables I can't identify.

The box is 3'x3' and is based on the ideas behind square foot gardening. We'll see how well it works...

Pastrami

I was in NYC over a month ago and I'm still dreaming of a meal I had there! What I wouldn't give to have another pastrami sandwich from Katz's Deli. The juiciest, most delicious pastrami I've ever had. Mmmm...

Churn

Tried my hand at making ice-cream over the weekend. For my first solo attempt, I thought I'd try something a little different so I took a basic vanilla ice-cream recipe and added a twist: after heating up the cream, milk and vanilla bean, I steeped a couple bags of Mighty Tea's Marrakesh mint green tea before continuing on as prescribed.

I'm pretty surprised with the results, because the flavor of the tea really came through. So much so that the mint overpowered the vanilla, which was a bit of a disappointment. I like the idea of using tea to flavor food and will have to try it again.

Car Trouble

We were driving home on Alma when I saw a guy with a baseball bat breaking a car's tail light. After a bit of indecision I called 911 and reported the incident. It was in broad daylight with lots of other cars on the road, so this guy clearly did not care about witnesses.

Twenty minutes later I get a call back asking me to confirm my description of the guy. Apparently they'd found him, and the car was his! The cops said that he'd been "unhappy with his car".

I guess that's one way to work out your frustrations with your car...

Trial and Error

I've been playing with our water heater's temperature setting over the past few weeks, seeing how far I can turn it down while still producing enough hot water for our needs. The goal is to save energy, since we don't really need to heat and maintain scalding hot water. Unfortunately, our water heater has notches instead of actual temperature readings, so I've been slowly turning it down a bit at a time.

Loos like I turned it down a bit too far last night and I had to suffer through a cold bath. Brrrr...

Google Voice

I've been using Grand Central for a couple years now and was a little disappointed when Google apparently just forgot that they bought Grand Central in 2007. Looks like I was wrong as they've finally taken the wraps off the new, Google-integrated reincarnation: Google Voice.

My account hasn't been upgraded yet, and I only found out about this via an NYT article, but I'm anxious to see how much things have changed.

Year 2 in Review

Today's our second wedding anniversary, and it's time to once again take stock. If I were normal, I'd probably be doing this on the first of January, but I just don't find that time to be particularly conducive for reflection.

We celebrated the same way we did last year, very low key, with some wedding cake and a nice hot latte at Barefoot. We've been going back to Butterfly Cakes for mini one-tier versions of what we got from them for the wedding.

All in all, things have been very good for us in the past twelve months despite the general economic meltdown. In our second year of married bliss, we managed to:

• have lunch at the French Laundry
• visit Alaska!
• go scuba diving in North Sulawesi, Indonesia (me)
• finally finish our remodeling (yay!) and moved back in (double yay!)
• travel to London (me)
• travel to Barcelona and Madrid (Charity)
• travel through Central Europe: Prague, Budapest, Croatia, Brussels, Lausanne, and Geneva
• help Peter and Felicia purchase a house close to us

I wonder what this year will bring? It is highly unlikely (alas!) that we'll be doing much more traveling. We've only been back in the house for a few months, and we've been focusing on making it a home. The furniture buying spree that started in December has sort of tapered off and we're working on giving everything that "lived in" feel...

Some personal goals for the year ahead: I want to make some of our own furniture; I want to become a better photographer; and seriously now, I want to be a little less sedentary than I've been to date.

Kong Hei Fat Choi

Happy Chinese New Year everyone! Welcome to the year of the ox!

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year, everyone!

The optimist in me thinks that the year's off to a great start with above average reports of snow at Tahoe and Obama's imminent inauguration, but the cynic in me sees more of the same for the near future: more Economic Devastation! Sectarian Violence! And Rabid, Ignorant Anti-intellectualism! But here's to hoping I'm wrong on this.

Peace and Love,
-Mark