Solar Eclipse, May 2012

In case you missed it...there was a partial solar eclipse.  Remember that you shouldn't look into the sun!  Instead, make a pinhole camera.  Or just use the leaves of a tree as your pinhole camera-the effect is neat-o!

The pinhole camera version

Turning your fingers into claws

The images are very diffuse and the crescent has a very wide angle.

 In areas where there is a lot of background light, he crescents tighten up, shadows look like flowers.

Areas with more shade, the crescents come through as bright spots.

NYC March 2012 James Beard Dinner

Weekend trip to NYC with the Fun Bunch!

We planned a trip to New York because of  dinner, a special dinner obviously!  We went to a James Beard dinner by Lon Symensma, world famous Asian fusion chef who currently owns/runs Cholon in Denver.  Of course we are not going to let a trip to New York go on without adding in a extras-this trip was two Broadway plays, two world-class museums and food food food!

We land in Newark and E- starts the food fest with a slice of Famous Famiglia's blanca.  Pizza purists will snear at Fame Fam's...but it was the college pizza we grew up with and my first non-tomato pizza so even a late night slice at the airport is nostalgic.

Why Newark?  Our hotel, Eventi, is right near Penn Station and the train is super easy.  They were having trouble with our room reservation, so E- and I hung out on the cushy couch, drinking strawberry water and using to free wifi to catch up on the Bronies!  Best. Night. Ever.

Saturday
Gotta have bagels at least once in NYC!  Then a day at the Met including our favorite classics Temple of Dendur, the Jain hall, Chinese garden, snacks in the American wing and exhibits we haven't seen in a long time.  We spent some time in the Monet rooms (okay, they are not JUST Monet, but he is my personal fav), at Washington crossing the Delaware (forgot it was so big...how do the painting logistics work???), the Stein exhibit (which I saw at the SFMOMA, but new to everyone else-SF was better laid out, but this still got the point across and I still like Picasso's chicken sketches), and finally, finally! the Islamic rooms are reopen.  I didn't appreciate the Islamic room until just before leaving NYC, and then they have been closed for practically ever!  I am drawn to the designs which are completely regular but intricate. But they now have much better displays of the weaving/hanging/rugs.  As always I love how they have a complete room that you can look into and my only disappointment is that there is just one peep window into the sitting room...

What to do for food?  We got a fun tip from a local friend to go to Eataly a combo marketplace/restaurant/snackbar.  You can sit down and eat, then grocery shop.  At the center are stand up tables where we get a bottle of wine and the cheese and meat plate.  It is lovely, just lovely, I bet everything is good.  Just note that it is currently popular and you will either have to wait an hour for a table at a restaurant, or hang out in the middle and pounce when a table opens.

Tonight we have a pair of tickets to see the oh so popular Book of Mormon...but we are 4.  What to do what to do.  Michael decides it is worth it to try for some of the last minute options-you can wait in the line for folks who return their tickets or are no-shows. You might be disappointed if you try it, but he was third in line and for 2 hours of waiting got fantastic seats-woo hoo!!  I certainly enjoyed it, but it really couldn't live up to all the hype, so I don't understand the folks who want to go see it over and over.  The songs are spot on, but I spent much of the show thinking-meh, yes Mormons are funny, but is there more?  There was more, but I had to wait until the end.  The performances and staging are very well done, but I don't believe it will become a classic.

Sunday
The rest of the fun bunch arrives Sunday morning and we go for a classic diner brunch at the Skylight diner.  We ear ourselves silly because they have ridiculous options like my chocolate chip banana pancakes drizzled with peanut butter!  On to the Highline!  Beautiful spring day, so it is filled with folks-good people watching.  Sadly my two favorite art installations are gone-the portal-like snippets from the water fountains and the Bells of New York.  but the day is lovely and the flowers are blooming and you can see everything from up here.

A quick peak into Times Square because we have a NYC virgin on this trip and who doesn't want to see Times Square?  Next up is Memphis.  My friend James is in Memphis and of course is the most wonderful part of the show.  He just somehow steals his scenes. Afterwards he lets us on stage-neat-o!! And then we all have dinner with my Dawn-Dawn!  Lovely Daniela Restaurant lets us sit upstairs so that we essentially have our own room and can chat for hours.  On the walk back to the hotel, Dawn 'makes' us stop for cupcakes the size of a quarter at Baked by Melissa.  We bought a dozen, but by the time I got out the camera exactly two were left.  Seriously, these are amazing.  One last drink at our hotel bar before we turn in for the night-weird giant tv outside...

Monday 
We took the subway to get to the Natural History Museum and accidentally got on an express, so we took the 'scenic' route of going up to 125th, crossing sides, and back down to 79th.  But when you get off, the entrance to the museum is right there-you don't even go above ground. How cool is that!  The museum is of course HUGE but we managed to do most of the exhibits.  We saw the planetarium show, the special space exhibit, dioramas, butterfly house, dinosaurs, snack bar and gift shop-phew!  My favorite part in the dinosaur exhibit was the video showing how they reconstructed the T-Rex when Science changed its mind about how we believe the dinos stood and walked.  The exhibit had been up for decades, but with scaffolding and planning they were able to make the changes in place.  Nice job curators!

My next favorite exhibit is the 'order of magnitude' exhibit (my name, not theirs...).  It is on the walkway outside the planetarium and takes you though  something like 70 orders of magnitude by referencing a few physical objects in front of you.  The size of space of mind boggling.  We are a little starving and have time for a quick pizza snack at Pizza Pete's just up the street (recommended by the security guard, turns out to be busy with after-school kids) before heading back to the hotel to change.

Dinner is at the James Beard Foundation which is in a brownstone that used to be James Beards, so we go early to look around.  We poke around the library, only one overlap between his library and mine, not really a surprise.  We say 'Hi' to a lovely random couple who are here for her birthday and the important people that Tonia knows, including Angelo from Top Chef!  How fun is that-he was totally like you would imagine from the show, full of teasing and flirting.

Dinner is of course amazing, we take notes on the food and the food/wine pairing-aren't we fancy.  At the end Lon answers questions and we learn some amazing stuff, like the shrimp chip?  Actually a pounded, soaked, freeze dried, deep fried beef tendon...um, seriously!?!  And the bubbles in the bubble tea?  Not tapioca.  Fruit juice held into bubble form by alginate (or some such...notes are a little fuzzy).  Finally before leaving we grab photos with the James Beard portrait behind us-Thanks James Beard and your foundation for being here and thanks Lon for the amazing meal!

Tuesday
E- and I get up stupid early to catch our flight and take a cab to Newark because it is a once in a lifetime chance to do so without traffic :)

Cheese and Wine in San Francisco, April 2012

A quick trip up to the city with Mandy and Krista to taste California cheeses and wines-brilliant idea!  Turns out that if you want to become a cheesemonger (not a profession I but on my list when I was ten, but maybe now that I am 40 my list should be revised) there are classes for that!  The Cheese School in San Francisco for example-who knew!

And if you want to be a knowledgeable cheese eater instead, you can take classes on that too!  The first available class happened to be all about California cheeses and wines-nice!

The space is small but nicely laid and they don't bring in too many people so it feels intimate, not crowded.  We got to taste 4 wines and 9 cheeses and a bunch of yummy extras (raspberry champagne jelly!).  The instructors were knowledgeable and engaging, one for the cheese, one for the wine.  First they explain about the cheese/wine-where exactly it came from and what was special about it, what to look for during tasting, why they paired this wine with that cheese.  But then they encouraged us to try different pairing, because you just never know what will taste good to you.

We had a fantastically fun time, all the cheese and wine was lovely, we learned interesting tidbits and more about what we liked in wine and cheese and we got to be a bit tipsy and silly.  What's not to love about that!

Jelly Belly factory, April 2012

Took a day off work to go with the neighbors on a trip to the Jelly Belly factory!

If you go on the weekend, you can visit the gift shop and buy Belly Flops, but if you go during the week you can see everything working-way cool.  There are lines of rollers that move boxes, conveyors that move the jelly beans, 60 rotating drums where they add coatings, the shaker/sorter that tosses out the wrong sized beans and stacks of plastic trays holding the beans while drying.  No photography allowed, so you will have to go see for yourself! On the tour you also see a number of portraits made out of the beans and you taste unfinished beans.  Oh, and you get to wear this spiffy hat!

The tour really only takes a half day so we stopped by Tilden park for the afternoon.  Ate a picnic lunch, fed the animals celery, sat in the butterfly garden, walked to lake, skipped stones, and played on the jungle gym-phew!

36 hours in Tucson, April 2012

Grampa turned 104, so of course we are going to visit and say Happy Birthday, even if it is just a short trip! While we are there, we sneak in some extra fun.

Entertainment-concert!
We timed it cleverly to see a number of our relatives in the Southern Arizona Women's Chorus in concert.  The are singing with a high school steel drum band, Jovert.  No seriously.  When I first heard I thought, huh, interesting, I'll check that out.  Turns out it was FABULOUS.  The large collection of steel drums allows an incredibly wide range of sounds that pairs beautifully with voices. Below is the program.

Tourist-drive up Mt. Lemmon
We finally took this opportunity to go up nearby Mt. Lemmon and into Coronado National forest.  The road climbs quickly and you pass from low shrubs to saguaro cactus to scrub to pine forest in 30 minutes-quite the trip!

At the top we ate at the Iron Door restaurant (rightly famous for homemade individual pie) which is right across from the ski lifts.  The lifts even run in the summer for the views-that will have to be next time.

Food
Jax is a restaurant that has links to a family member and was perfect for right after the concert.  Highlights were the fall-off-the-bone beef short ribs (special of the day) and the wine-Hullabaloo from Lodi :)

Sonoran hotdog at El Guero Canelo.  The idea here is to wrap your hotdog in bacon, use a sweet roll, and pile as many goodies on top as you can.  It has made an appearance on the Food Network and is definitely a regional specialty to be tried.

Weekend in Berkeley, April 2012

April 2012

Back in the day, our friend Mars introduced E- and I to Tom Stoppard (see the weekend in New York where we saw Arcadia) and so now I have been looking for opportunities to see more in the Bay area.  Sure enough a group in Berkeley, the Shotgun Players, are putting on Voyage, so why not go see it and make a weekend of it as well.

On the Saturday drive up we stopped at the JollyBee-which if you haven't been is a Philippino fast food joint.  The best seller is the Chicken Joy package, which is fried chicken and rice with gravy.  We tried the aloha burger-hamburger with a pineapple slice.  Next time I want the pie, which looks like any deep fried pie, but has mango in it!

We got up to Berkeley early enough to hike around Tilden Park, which is noted as one of the best parks in the area.  It is in the hills behind Berkeley and to get there you have to drive up and up and up.  On the way we passed a number of stair way paths.  These are public walkways to get up the hills without switchbacking on the road and seem like a fun thing to do someday.  Once you get to the top of the hill, it turns out the back side is undeveloped and just lovely.  The park is easy to get to and we ended up at the main area near Little Farm and the education center.  The park was filled with families feeding the cows, goats and sheep (celery and lettuce only!!) and it left the hiking trails empty.  The trails are really short and totally doable by small children.  We took the lower Packrat trail to Jewel lake and then up Wildcat trail to the peak lookout.  It was a relatively clear day and we were able to see the city, the bridges and up to the North Bay.  We hiked down Laurel Canyon trail to get back to the lake and finally walked back along the boardwalk.  Super cute little park with a little bit of everything.

We checked into the Shattuck Plaza hotel and did some shopping at Games of Berkeley. I found a fantastic new puzzle that is over 13,000 pieces!  Check back in about a year to see it get put together :)  We ate dinner at one of the many vegetarian chinese restaurants before walking over to our play.  I didn't know anything about the group, so it could have been lame, but it turned out to be quite good community theater.  The group has been around for over 20 years and they have a permanent space that is cozy, but has all the extras.  A pre-show talk, drinks and snacks you can take inside, bench seating, but with back pillows, and they paint the exterior to match the play.  The actors were locals and had worked for this group or others before and the quality was better than I expected.  The staging was well done-sparse, but had seamless scene transitions.

The play itself was not the most amazing I've seen, but more engaging than I hoped for, given that the topic is philosophy (of self and countries) in pre-revolutionary Russia.  I feel like I should go back and read the Cliff notes of a few philosophers.  If the company is able to put on the trilogy I will definitely get tickets and maybe even read up a little beforehand :)

March 2012 weekend in Tahoe

Our work group is spread all over the globe so we spend extra time bonding when we are all in the same place.  This year we planned a ski trip to Tahoe, even though the skiing conditions have been terrible all winter.  We lucked out and got a great pile of snow just before the trip.  The rental house in Tahoe Donner was big enough to house an Army, which was good because many folks brought their families too.  The house also had an amazing view-no obstructions at all, and a bouncy house that fit in the downstairs living room!

Most everyone skied, but a friend and I spent the morning crafting and chatting.  I took a quick break to build a snowman on the porch-perfect snow for it, dense and sticky.  We lunched in historic downtown Truckee, across the street from the Amtrak station.  We window shopped all the home furnishing, clothing and knickknack stores during the sunny afternoon.  Nice and relaxing!  Thanks to M for the great photos!