(A different kind of) Ladies who lunch.

I spent a lovely day in San Francisco yesterday. I met up with three wonderful ladies for lunch at MarketBar at the Ferry Building. Well, there were four of us eventually, poor NR trekked down from Sacramento and had a bit of parking trouble before switching to BART. I indulged in a fantastic BLT and pomme frites, which will be my inspiration to keep going when I want to quit before my 30 minutes of running are up later today. Or maybe it will be the Miette cupcake I had with NR after our other two lunching ladies had to go back to work. We grabbed some coffee, having both slept in and not managed to have any before lunch and headed out back to enjoy the view. Here's a photo I found of someone having a similar experience, I've admired those cupcakes for so long, I'm pretty excited to have had one. The cake is bittersweet chocolate and the frosting is marshmallowy meringue goodness. Have I ever mentioned that although I prefer dark chocolate and hate overly sweet things, for some reason I have a soft spot (perhaps literally) for marshmallow? After undoing all the good several miles of running had done in the past couple days, we headed further into the city and managed to do just a small bit of shopping. We wound up having a drink at Zazil in the Shopping Centre and just enjoyed getting to chat in person. Something I don't get to do with certain friends nearly enough. I'm really relishing time spent like this right now. I'm so grateful for a summer full of good times with good friends.

I have to say, I know some pretty amazing women. I'm not going to discuss their personal lives on my blog, but all three of my friends at lunch yesterday have incredibly cool stuff going on in their lives right now. We met online while planning weddings but real and valuable friendships were born. Another thing I am very grateful for.

Preparations for heading to Zurich continue to go well. We keep thinking we're procrastinating or misbehaving when we run off to Davis for the night (like we did last week, pretty much just to see two friends' bands play), go on another stock-up shopping spree or take the time to watch way too many episodes of No Reservations. But really, we've done a good job planning and everything is going smoothly... so far, knock on wood. After slinking back home in the early afternoon on Saturday ("Gotta get up early and head home, sorry we can't stay longer, mom!" Sheesh!) we got to sorting out what was going into our shipping container. We had to decide what was too heavy to get to Switzerland any other way, and what could we stand to do without for most of two months. Once I started making that division in my wardrobe, it was basically all over. Reality is setting in, this is happening soon! We got through a good deal of our stuff on Saturday so Sunday became yet another shopping day. Most of the loot we brought home came from REI, I now own hiking shoes, and the rain shell I've avoided buying on the past two trips to Europe because "I'll never wear it at home." Oh, how life can change. CF is too good to me and offered to pay and not let me see how much we spent. He knows me so well! We finished our sorting easily Sunday evening and were totally ready for them when they showed up on Monday morning.

They brought the whole damn twenty-foot shipping container to our house! It filled the street! Not. Subtle. To make matters worse the postman pulled up and started asking loudly if the house was vacant, or were we moving. Not. Helping. I think the container was at least half empty when they finished. And we probably could have done without half of what we sent! We're taking a bunch of our kitchen stuff, but they are leaving most of theirs. I took more books than I've probably read in the past ten years, how many do I really think I'm going to read this year? Oh well, at least I didn't have to decide right now. So that's on it's way. The air freight will go shortly after CF does. And we'll both be packing up two suitcases, at least. Eventually we'll get everything there. Including me. I'll be there in less than a month! Eek!