Thanks, work, for sponsoring this trip to CA

I had an awesome vacation in California. Work shouldn't let me go on long vacations to CA because then I want to run away to there and live in the wonderful sunshine. As usual, after finishing the vacation I don't feel like I have the energy to describe it, but I'll make an effort, even though it's mostly a list:

Saturday - I flew out at the crack of dawn. Stupid US Air was having significant computer problems so I had to run to my flight that was leaving at 7am even though I arrived at the airport before 6. Even kiddie vitamins apparently can upset my stomach if I'm up early and don't eat anything. I got to learn some sympathy for people who get airsick during the flight to Phoenix. I felt fine for the second leg of the flight and by the time I met up with Andy in San Diego, I felt normal. We went out to Balboa park and took some fun pictures of pretty plants and natural history. I made Andy stand in the sunshine and watch stupid funny jugglers.

Sunday - A marvelously action-packed day that got started with drooling over stupid-expensive cookware at the Le Crueset outlet store. I don't need any more pans... but they are pretty and shiny... and pretty ... and shiny. Then we went to a stealth brewery where the food descriptions tasted better in my head than the food did. The room was amazing and I'd be happy to go back there, but it would be nicer if they had less fancy food done better. Then, we were most of the way to the Wild Animal Park!! So we went and watched pregnant elephants lumber around for a while and then squinted at giraffes. There was a super huge line to ride the train around, so I'll have to go back again some other day to be on a pretend safari. Also, next time I have to remember not to rub waterproof sunscreen into my eye during brunch. Apparently it takes many many hours of watery squinting for my eyes to be happy again. After Wild Animal Park, we went up to Temecula to have port in a chocolate shot glass which I remembered as being slightly better than it was, but I was very happy to have gotten to go back there. Then Andy (graciously and kindly) drove me all the way up to my parents house through the evil freeway terror of Riverside.

Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday - I lazed around my parents house. There was much sleeping. The cats were happy to see me, and I was happy to be in the sunshine. I ate two Rosa Maria's burritos, which are some of my favorite food in the world. Here are some pictures of me and Fatso (the cat) enjoying the sunshine, and some flowers in my parents backyard:

Thursday - I took the train to meet up with my friend on the other side of LA. We road-tripped up to the fancy hotel in Pebble Beach with a stop in Santa Barbara for lunch on the pier. Surprisingly, there was a small whale splashing around in the harbor! I hope it went further out to sea eventually. I really enjoyed riding up PCH with her, but it got dark before we got to Big Sur, so it was a little scary riding around all those curves and cliffs in the dark. The hotel was truly amazing. We had a fireplace in the room!  

Friday - I had a day of official meetings that were the main reason work paid for my flight out to CA. It wasn't too bad, and my friend and I were able to go over to The Inn at Spanish Bay to watch the sunset bagpiper. I was surprised at how enjoyable I found it to sit in the evening sun listening to the distant bagpiper watching the sun go down. I'm sure that the Raspberry Lemon Drop martini had nothing to do with it :) Friday night was a big fancy dinner with lots and lots of drinking. At the dinner they announced a special award to two employees who had made a difference in our corporate community work, and I was one of them! Yay big check! Part of it is totally going towards my new and exciting mortgage. Then I ended up staying out with some coworkers until 3am. Good bonding time, and lots of fun.

Saturday - After staying up late, it was very satisfying to show up to the morning meeting at 7am bright and perky and to giggle to myself at the people groaning and holding their heads with hangovers. Meetings got out at noon, so we had lots of time to go sightseeing around the peninsula. I maxed out on social time sometime in the afternoon and greatly enjoyed sitting in the lounge on my own with a tasty cappuccino and chocolate/pistachio biscotti. For dinner, a lot of my coworkers met us over at the bagpiper hotel for drinks and outdoor fireplace-time. It was very very nice to have so many people come over to hang out with me; I just told where I was going and then left them to decide what they wanted to do, and apparently, seeing the bagpiper beat out sitting on their own, or coming up with something else. It was not a late night; I was pretty exhausted by 10.

Sunday - I took a shuttle from Monterey up to the Bay Area to meet up with Rachel. It was great to catch up, cuddle her cats and to get In-N-Out for dinner.

Monday - I entertained myself joyfully with a Tivo and some Gilmore Girls for the morning, and then we went out in the afternoon to walk around SF for a while. Golden Gate park was pretty even though it was cloudy and the Haight was very satisfyingly San Franciscan. Then to Berkeley for my favorite deep dish pizza. mmm i love food.

Tuesday - I almost missed my connection in Phoenix, but thankfully only had to go over a few gates. Other than that, it was a nice, uneventful trip home. Now I'm home and still worn out from all that vacationing.

I guess that wasn't such a brief summary. Now I'll probably not update this thing for another few months :)

Except to be joyful about figuring out how to set up a git server (versioning control system) at work and how to instruct other people how to work with it. go me!

C25K (again)

I can't believe that in One Week I will own a mortgage and in 8 days, I will have moved there.

If the mild winter from December and January had continued, I'd be able to start biking to work right away, but since there are piles of ice and snow around, I think I'll start off riding the bus.

I'm also terribly excited that I've made it up to jogging (slowly) a whole 2 miles without a break in my most recent adventure with the nifty couch to 5k program. My new place is 3 miles from work along a trail, so I have been day dreaming about being so ambitious and organized as to jog to or from work some times.

I started packing yesterday and I own a whole lot more stuff than I did when I moved out here a 2 years ago.

Bike Commute?

The house stuff is going ok. I'm petrified of screwing something up about the mortgage.

I made a spreadsheet to figure out how I should split up any extra money I can put towards payments in order to minimize the long term interest accrued, which made me feel smart for a while.

I've also figured out how long a bike-commute to work would be. There's a bike trail that goes along the river, so it would be pleasant except when it's hot or cold (which leaves about 2 months of the year)

Ownership??

I'm making an offer on a condo! It's entirely conceivable that, soon, I could be the proud owner of a mortgage.

My productivity at work has gone Way Down since I started seriously pursuing this idea. Hopefully it will perk up again for a while soon.

I also finally have a local bank account -- inspired by the fact that I just used my very last check from my California bank account to give an earnest money deposit on the condo. Gah. Realizing that I was out of checks right before I have to start writing them made me spend part of the afternoon worrying that I'm too disorganized to try to own a house (or condo, whatever).

I hope I get it! I'd been planning to wait a bit to convince myself that I really wanted this one, but then someone else made an offer today! So I had to rush! I hate rushing! Gah! It's been a very exclamation filled day.

Maybe this year I'll also get a car. And a tv. The idea of buying house then car then TV totally cracks me up since it's so backwards of how anyone else would do it.

Update! They've accepted my offer! Apparently I provided a nice amount of ernest money, had a good desired closing date, and wrote a nice letter about how excited I am to live there in the future. So next up is home inspectoring and more detailed talks with the mortgage company.

PS Here's a link to the condo.

And when I live there, I can get a kitten!

Chili Bunnies

I had people over for Killer Bunnies, chili and bread last night and tried making the No Knead Bread and it was at least as wonderful as Peter described. In fact, it strongly reminded me of my absolute favorite bread from Berkeley -- the Acme Bread company's Sweet Batard. mmmm bread.

The chili was also successful. I put in some soy protein fake ground meat instead of getting real meat, and no one even noticed.

It feels really cold here today. Probably time to start wearing my long coat to walk to work instead of just a jacket.

I finished knitting my gigantic knitting project. 10 balls of discount blue varigated yarn and now I have a blanket that is a good couch size. mmm blanket. Now I'll have to come up with something else to do while watching Gilmore Girls on dvd.

Pumpkin Cheesecake

I made pumpkin cheesecake for a bake off today at the halloween party at work. It went over super well and I won a $50 certificate for some bbq place (ick). so I traded with someone who won a $20 certificate for starbucks (yum). The recipe is below. If I ever do it again, I would make more crust, and come up with a better way to crush the gingersnaps. The cake was so extremely rich and huge it serves a lot more than 10. The real problem was slicing it thin enough. A pretty slice was enough to kill a small creature from creamcheese overdose. It really really did take 4 packets of cream cheese. I thought that was a typo at first.

For serving, I made some whipped cream and put pecans on top. It was sort of overcooked, but people liked it.

Ingredients
CRUST:
- 1.5 cup crushed ginger snaps
- 4 tablespoons butter, melted

FILLING:
- 2 pounds cream cheese (softened to room temperature)
- 15 ounces pumpkin, packed solid
- 1 1/2 cups sugar
- 2 tablespoons all purpose flour
- 1 teaspoon ground ginger
- 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
- 1/4 teaspoon ground or freshly grated nutmeg
- 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
- 4 tablespoons bourbon
- 5 eggs

Container: 9" springform pan
Servings: 10
Prep Time: 45 minutes
Cook Time: 1.5 hours

Directions
Crust
* Preheat oven to 350F. Generously butter inside of pan.
* In a small bowl, combine gingersnap crumbs and melted butter. Press this mixture into the bottom of the springform pan and around the sides if you have enough. Bake for 10 minutes.
* Remove crust from oven and allow to cool completely while you run around trying to get the rest of it together.

Pie
* Mix flour and spices, and set aside.
* Beat cream cheese in a large bowl on medium speed until smooth.
* Add sugar to cream cheese and beat an additional 1 minute on medium speed.
* Blend pumpkin, vanilla and bourbon into the flour mixture.
* When pumpkin mixture is completely blended, mix in to cream cheese mixture.
* Beat in eggs, one at a time, on low speed. Beat just enough to blend each egg.
* Pour pumpkin mixture into completely cooled crust.
* Fill a 9x13 pan half full of water, and place this pan on the bottom rack of the oven. The moisture should help prevent cracking of the cheesecake.
* Place the cheesecake on the middle rack and back for 1 hour and 35 minutes. Do not open the oven door during the first hour of baking.
* After baking, turn oven off, open door and leave cheesecake in oven for 30 minutes to cool slowly.
* Then remove cheesecake to a wire rack and cool for another 30 minutes.
* Cover and chill for a long time (4 hours - overnight) in the refrigerator.

Melt the Belt

I'm having people over again tomorrow to play Killer Bunnies, and am excited about using the crockpot again. Tomorrow it will be corn chowder. And I made Cranberry Pumpkin Bread tonight, which sounds wonderful, but actually ended up sort of weird. Way too much orange zesting, and maybe cranberry and pumpkin shouldn't've gone together to start with.

And having chunky brown sugar that won't meld with the other dry ingredients didn't help much either. Oh well.

At least I finally got motivated to make my apt cleaner. The kitchen counters are awesome. The inside of the microwave, sparkling. The bathroom counters are gleamy, and the bathroom floor is no longer covered with hair (huge improvement). I made my bed with autumn sheets, and shook out my placemats and wiped down the table.

Then it was time to vacuum. Sadly, vacumming did not last very long, because I melted the vacuum cleaner belt into a smelly black mess that stuck to my fingers and stunk up my clean bedroom.

So, unless I find a new vacuum cleaner belt and get it installed without serious injury before people come over tomorrow, the actual rooms they will actually see will have sadly neglected looking carpet that is distinctly lacking in pretty vacuum lines in the carpet.

I guess that's how it goes some times.