Hangover at Tiffany's

Intentions of Reinvention

2009-04-22T10:33:00.002+02:00

Whether I knew it or not at the time that I stopped blogging, I wasn't writing the blog I really wanted to have. I'm taking a wonderful on-line course right now called Blogging Your Way and my head is spinning with ideas. On day 1 we listed blogs we read and why, as well as bloggers we'd wish to be like. Suddenly the fact that I was struggling became a lot less confusing. What I was blogging was not anything like the blogs I enjoyed.

I do intend to give this blog a rebirth. I'm not sure if it will happen before this class is over. So to my classmates that might be stopping by... thank you for coming over but I know there's not really anything here for you to critique! I really appreciate the great network of bloggers in this class; it's very inspiring and encouraging.

As for the rambling travel journaling... I think I can tell you about my European adventures without taking up quite as much of your time. Sorry Grandma, I know you enjoyed reading every last word!

Time Out!

2008-11-14T16:25:00.003+01:00

Sorry to have to call a time out in the middle of telling you about Italy but we're heading for the airport in about 12 hours and remember what I said about not being about to blog when I'm feeling scattered? I can't believe it's time to head back to California for a visit already! I had hoped to be all caught up with the blogging by the today but obviously it ain't happening! It is so bizarre knowing we'll be back in the States tomorrow. I am thrilled to see my family and friends, I am anxious to shop all these great sales I keep hearing about (I am coming back with two suitcases and only one of them is even half full), and I hear the weather is going to be fantastic in San Francisco this weekend. At the same time I am feeling more at home than ever in Zürich, and I keep noticing new holiday decorations going up around the city... I almost hate to leave!

It's been a sprint to the finish, but I think we're going to be ready. I actually spent a couple of hours at the gym today, hitting spin class (I finally brought him a CD of good spin music, he was so blown away!) and sweating it out in the hamam (no gross men this time!). I feel like and relaxed now. Tonight we're going to the Sara Bareilles concert and then getting a few hours of sleep before we head off to the airport at 5am. Wish us luck! I'll see some of you soon... and I'm bringing chocolate.

Italy Part 1: Emilia-Romagna Adventure

2008-11-13T14:39:00.005+01:00

The day we found out that CF would be taking this year long assignment I saw Mr. PZ on GoogleTalk. "Hey, when are you guys going to Italy?" I knew they had been thinking about going. So that was how I told the Z's the big news about our big Z, Zürich. And basically right from the start it was decided that we would all spend some time in Italy together. They picked set their itinerary, and we decided we'd like to see Siena and since they were going to Florence/Firenze for mostly weekend days we decided to revisit one of our favorite cities. Somewhere along the way we realized if CF took one more vacation day off from work we could spend two straight weekends on this trip so he and I decided to see some of the region known as Emilia-Romagna. Returning to Italy was one of the best parts of moving here, the anticipation was killing me as the date grew nearer.

We booked our train tickets to stop in Parma. We figured we'd spend a few hours in the city of ham and cheese before moving on to Bologna, where we had a room booked for three nights. The difference between Switzerland and Italy was clear to me the moment we got off the train. Italy is much more chaotic and rough. It took me by surprise, I think I had started to lump all of Europe into one too closely related image. Living here really makes you recognize the variations, and appreciate what makes each place unique. My first mistake made itself known very quickly, it turns out the reason I could not find info on the lockers at the Parma train station is that there are no lockers at the Parma train station! We went through a range of gut reactions and considered just getting on the next train headed for Bologna. We decided to feel out the situation a bit better and resolved to haul our suitcases around with us for as long as we could bear, and figured we'd just move on a little earlier than planned. I double checked with a hotel right near the train station that we couldn't pay to leave our luggage. "No, because of September Eleven." Interesting. We saw signs directing people to the Tourism Office, some place we rarely ever go, and I decided to ask them if they knew where we might find a locker. "You can leave your bags here." they said, "They're not locked up but we do not charge you, just leave identification while you're gone." Since even after just 20 minutes of dragging our luggage around had put us in a bit of a bad mood we decided to take our chances on this. We kept the laptop and camera equipment, the most anyone was going to get by stealing from us was our cheap American clothing and maybe a Tiffany's necklace.

We were so proud of making the best of our situation in Parma, so it was all the more of a blow to the ego when it turned out that all the restaurants and cafes were closing down between lunch and dinner just as we were finally free to sit down and eat. Very disappointing to see this happening just as we were about to get a meal in the foodie capitol of this foodie nation. We wandered around and saw a good portion of this small city. I suppose we were easing into Italy slowly and gradually this way. The streets seemed so empty! It was sort of odd. Eventually we found a cafe that was staying open between meals so we went inside. We actually had a really nice meal of ravioli and two different salads. And for dessert we went to a gelato place we noticed while wandering, and even on this chilly day in Parma we decided it was time to dive back into one of our favorite Italian habits! Their gelato was absolutely amazing, I had salted caramel and CF had pistachio. Delicious. I'd say our stop in Parma was justified in one small cup of frozen milk! We collected our bags, thanked them profusely for watching them for us, and made our way back to the train station and bought tickets for our short ride to Bologna. As we walked to the station we noticed the shops that were closed before were reopening and the streets had about 5 times as many people in them. Our poor trip to Parma was unfortunately timed right during a very serious siesta.

Our train was delayed, another reminder that we were no longer in Switzerland. But we got to have a nice conversation with a lady waiting with her friend for the same train. CF gave them his space on the bench we were waiting on and she told him that he was a sweetheart. She ended up telling us all about her trip to the US. She had been to so many places I have never been! New Orleans, Boston, the Grand Canyon. I think coming back after a year will make us pay more attention to not taking these places for granted. Our train finally came and everyone hurried on board. It wasn't long before we arrived in Bologna.

We were arriving a little bit earlier than expected so we took care of that by starting off in the wrong direction for a minute or two, but we corrected quickly. After a 15 minute walk we found the door to Múa Bed and Breakfast and got checked in. Our evening was a bit rough, one of our usual "first night in a new city" types of experiences. I wanted to go to a certain restaurant just around the corner from us but we went in right as they opened at 8pm and were told we could not dine without a reservation. So we went down a few doors to the wine bar I noticed on our way to the B&B but CF said he didn't feel like munching on happy hour snacks in a crowded bar. By that point we were so cranky that we just decided to call it a night and start fresh the next day. Going to bed early during one of our adventures seemed quite appealing anyway.

I woke up early the next morning after turning in for the night so early. We were the first ones in our small, 5 room B&B out to breakfast. The woman putting out the food was not the woman who checked us in the evening earlier. We helped ourselves to some great food while she made us our first Italian cappuccini. The best part of breakfast that day, and every morning in Bologna, was the prosciutto and Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese. In Emilia-Romagna is should come as absolutely no surprise. Turns out our breakfast hostess was Danish, but some reason her accent sounded just like Catherine Zeta-Jones to me.

We spent a lazy Sunday wandering this new city, we knew very well that many places would be closed. However, we encounter plenty of good stuff. We stopped in at a coffee shop and enjoyed 1euro espresso, which after paying 4 or 5chf for crappy coffee in Zürich seemed like an amazing deal. They also had some very tasty cookies and some delicious looking gelato. Had the temperature been as scorching at 11am as it was during our first trip to Italy (in '05) we would have been ready, but we practiced a little restraint just this once. After wandering a bit more, through a park with rather strange statues and past a Spainish funeral procession, I noticed a good number of people going into an osteria. So we decided to grab some lunch. We were led downstairs and seated at a table for four. They were offering a few daily specials and then a wide variety of crostini and panini. We ordered a mixed crostini, a pasta dish and a meat dish. A full Italian meal split between the two of us. There was an interesting beer on the menu but he said it was finito. So CF order our first half liter of red wine. Ah, we're getting back into the swing of things now! I was a little embarrassed when it appeared that we were the first table in the room to get wine. But once our platter of yummy crostini showed up and the wine made them all the more enjoyable I didn't mind so much. The tables filled up, another couple was seated with us. The room was buzzing now! This was a great pick for lunch. By the time our pasta came I noticed most of the room was now drinking wine. We had to wait a bit for our meat dish, I think we got lost in the shuffle, but we made the most of it by ordering just a bit more wine.

After lunch we wandered in the direction of an award winning gelateria. Their dark chocolate gelato would make you weep! We were kind of frozen in our footsteps it was so good. We just stood outside and ate our dessert. CF went back in to use the restroom while I started to read some Bologna tips and recommendations contained in their news clippings posted outside their shop, "Could you grab me a business card while you're back inside?" I asked. I guess I sort of noticed when an alarm started going off, but I was lost in a fog of chocolate heaven. CF came back out of the door and walked right past me. I acted mildly offended, "Reaaaaally?" "Yes, really." He said. He sounded upset. Turns out he thought I was asking if he had set off that alarm I heard. And yes, he reaaaally had! He thought the toilet flushed when you pulled the cord. It turned out to be one of those emergency pulls that we had seen in every bathroom in Italy last time, but didn't think they really worked. Well, this one sure did. Hilariously, he had still grabbed me the business card even as he hung his head in shame and exited and quickly as possible.

We decided to head back for a bit of a siesta (and to shake off any lingering embarrassment). While we were relaxing in the room I heard music being played nearby and I leaned out the window to try to figure out where it was coming from. It turned out to be from the very small gang of musicians playing at the end of the alley where Múa is located. Somehow they spotted me almost right away and pretty soon they came down the alley, playing their 3 or 4 instruments and smiling up at me. CF threw down a coin and decided to take their picture. But right then they were stopped by our downstairs neighbors, it seems there was a baby napping and the music was much too loud. The buskers argued with the weary parents, while CF and I grinned down from above very amused at the scene playing out below.

We went back to a wine bar that we had gone past earlier in the day and enjoyed the happy hour culture. Basically as long as you're buying drinks you get to munch. This place had great jazz music playing and a huge wine list. For once we were just ordering the house red and the focus really was more on individual glasses of wine. I got to try a number of things I'd been curious about, like lambrusco (a fizzy red) and vin santo (somewhere between a dessert wine and port). They were cooking up little pizza bites and crostini to put out with potato chips and olives. We ordered a little extra antipasti plate and basically made a meal out of what we enjoyed there. Afterwards we went to another popular gelato place and had more amazing gelato. The girl behind the counted looked completely burnt out from a night serving rowdy University students. I selected a flavor that was a blend of white chocolate and cherries, I didn't know what flavor to combine with it (any other cream flavor would clash, but I wasn't sure it was quite right to put a fruit sorbet with it) so I asked for her recommendation. CF said that was the only time she smiled the whole time we were in there, and she picked out berry to put with my pick. Yum! Bologna is definitely a good time.

Monday morning we were the first to breakfast once again, this time because we had to get to class. I had signed us up for a one-day course in pasta making at La Vecchia Scuola Bolognese... Old School, baby! CF realized the code he thought he had assigned for our in-room safe was not working, and our train tickets from Florence to Zürich, as well as our passports, were inside. So along with a quick breakfast we got some assistance from the lady with the CZJ accent, she had the master key and we decided to leave the safe open for the rest of our stay. "It's too bad," I teased our breakfast hostess, "I thought we were just going to have to stay for good." She laughed.

We hurried off to class and found a very mixed group of people waiting in front of the school. It was in a mainly residential neighborhood, in a modest but charming little building. Everyone else was chatting in Italian, and I started to wonder if just because they said the class could be offered in English meant that they'd do it even if most of the students were Italian. From across the street we heard cries of "bongiorno!" and the fearless threesome that runs la Veccia Scuola made their grand entrance into our day. They were obviously forces to be reckoned with, beaming huge smiles and carrying armloads of cooking ingredients. This was going to be fun! We all filed inside and the youngest of the three teachers, Stefania, said hello to people and I let her know who I was. "Ah, it is you!" Turns out CF and I were her only students for the day. Her uncle was teaching the longer term but amateur course while her mother taught the regular professional students. We all worked in basically the same space, though the future professional chefs spent most of their time in the actual kitchen while we rolled out
sfoglia (pasta dough) in the prep room.

We measured out flour by weight and made it into a little bowl on our table, we cracked eggs straight into it and that was it, time to mix these two ingredients together. She showed us how to do it, first with a fork while it was sticky and then with our hands as it came together. I gently kneaded, hoping I was doing it right. But it was CF who made her gasp, "Oh NO!" He was smooshing it flat with every push of his palm. Doesn't know his own strength. Part of the appeal of fresh pasta is the little bubbles of air that remain in the dough and make it springy when you eat it. She gave each of our rounds of dough funny little taps trying to show us how mine "sang," as it was full of little holes. CF's? Not so much. We mixed filling that would later go into tortelloni while the dough rested and then it was time to role. She showed us how to get nice round flat sheets of sfoglia just waiting to be cut into any type of pasta. And for the most part we did pretty good at replicating her work. We made one sheet into bow-ties and another was folded over itself several times and then cut into tagliatelle. I liked unrolling the ribbons of pasta as CF did the slicing. Another sheet was cut into squares like the bow-ties started and then we used little gnocchi harps to roll the squares into penne like tubes. All the while the classroom buzzed with the sounds and smells of the kitchen. Stefania and her uncle would goof around while the students were focusing on a task. He'd pick her up and she'd yell for help. Every so often he'd bump into us on purpose and I would giggle. "Oh, sorry!" he'd throw up his hands and say, I couldn't quite tell how his English compared to his niece's.

The most fun we had all day was making the tortelloni and tortellini. We cut squares and piped ricotta and parsley filling into the centers. Apparently I was too modest with the filling, CF did a bit better filling them right. Pasta expands when it cooks at ultimately you want the tortelloni to be half pasta and half filling. At one point the uncle grabbed the pastry bag and went back over a few that I had done. He overloaded one and then playful scolded CF, "Is too much for tortelloni!" Without blinking CF pointed an accusing finger at me and the master pasta maker through his head laughing. He patted CF on the back. I think these two are rather like-minded. Just for the record, I had trouble folding these more filled squares!

The cooking class ended with most all of the students standing around one table filling tiny squares of thinly rolled sfoglia (Stefania rolled this one, we as beginners probably couldn't get it thin enough) and folding them into tortellini. The filling for these was a mix of pork and aged parmigiano. We had been on our feet for the couple of hours since breakfast and CF thought it smelled delicious, along with the scents of the food cooking in the kitchen. "Oh, it smells SO good." He whispered to me. The other students were whispering too, I tried to follow what they were asking Stefania but I just don't know enough Italian. I'm fairly sure I picked up that they wanted to know if we (CF and I) were only here for one day and were we already cooking students. CF said later that he got the overall feeling that they were generally impressed with us showing up and working so hard while we were on "vacation." The Italians don't realize the thrill of this for us!

Finally we all sat down to a huge meal together that we had made together. The pasta that we and the amateur students had made was the heart of the meal. The tagliatelle was served with a beefy ragú, the tortellini were in a broth so we ate them from a bowl with a soup spoon and the tortelloni were smothered in a fresh tomato sauce (the other pasta was dried so we could take it with us). The professional students had made the sauces as well as the braised beef and grilled vegetables that rounded out the meal. There was wine, there was water, there was bread that was barely touched because look at what we had to eat! Other members of Stefania's family had shown up to eat as well. It got to the point where we couldn't tell who was family, who was student, who was employee. This family style meal was just that, we were all family working together for the day and eating together was the perfect way to end this experience. Stefania's mother, who we had barely seen all day as she was ruling over the kitchen, sat across from me and teased CF that he "doesn't eat so much" after he filled his plate for the second or third time.

I left promising Stefania advice for her upcoming trip to Napa (which as I write this I realize has already happened, I hope she had an amazing time). We paid our bill once the class was over and felt that every euro cent was well spent. This class blew any class we've ever taken in the States out of the water. This is the kind of small business that you can't help but want to support. I wish nothing but the absolutely best for this amazing family.

After class we walked to the train station and bought train tickets for the next morning and then went and had a little down time after a long day of cooking. We finally met Uberto, our fabulous host, in person. I had spoken to him on the phone two weeks earlier and had managed to tell him that I spoke very little Italian but could understand a little more which he liked so he'd talk to me in Italian and then I'd respond in English. It worked well until the day's German lesson somehow slipped onto my tongue and a "Ja." came out of my mouth instead of yes or si. My poor scrambled brain!

After a rest we decided that we should take the opportunity to go see the indoor market that had been closed by the time we arrived on Saturday and was closed all day Sunday. Good thing we weren't hungry because the food there was incredible. It seemed like anything you could possibly think of to eat was in there, even imported produce for ethnic cooking. The large warehouse liking building was filled with food stalls, and along the sides were little shops where things like bread, salumi and fresh pasta were sold. It drives me a bit crazy to see stuff like this and not get to buy anything, but we were so glad to just know it's out there in the universe.

We wandered around and enjoyed the lovely evening. Eventually CF needed a restroom and I suggested stopping at a tiny little bar we happened to walk past. We ended up staying for well over an hour. They had the best happy hour spread we had seen, a huge quarter wheel of gorgonzola, little sandwiches, pizza, olives, crackers, and much, much more. They were playing even better music than the night before and the vibe there was so much fun. People were stopping in for a quick drink, a family was gathered around the high table next to ours, the father dancing a little to the music, one of the bartenders kept slipping away to flirt with a girl or two, while the older gentleman behind the counter just kept making drinks and snacks while looking impossibly cool. I could have stayed in that setting all night and been very happy. But all good things come to an end and happy hour must lead into dinner time. I tore myself away and when we left I noticed it was almost 8 and they'd want to be closing.

We wandered around looking for a place for dinner but nothing was going to compare to happy hour. How awesome is it that a tiny little no name bar can basically put Bologna way up high on my list of great cities? I'm sure Bologna was full of tourists, but they were Italian tourists, even the touristy restaurants are going to have good food. The city isn't perfectly clean, it beautiful portico covered walkways are covered in graffiti actually, but I felt safe everywhere we walked. I really got to feel la dolce vita here in this city just big enough to be exciting but small enough so that you could connect with the life in the people around you.

For the third morning in a row we were first to breakfast. This time because we a train to catch. We paid for our room and thanked Uberto's wife and our breakfast hostess (her face had even started resemble Catherine Zeta-Jones to me) for a wonderful stay. "I'm sorry about the tickets." Faux-CZJ teased me back for the joke I made the day before, "We should have kept you here forever." I quite agree.

London Whirlwind

2008-11-10T19:40:00.003+01:00

So, now that we had started to learn some German it was time to visit an English speaking country. CF's good friend and former coworker, Mr. PB, was in London for two weeks and we had decided to go see him for the weekend in the middle. We booked plane tickets for Saturday morning and Sunday evening. That's right, an overnight trip to one of the most famous cities in the world, and I had never been there before.

It was my first experience flying out of Zürich airport, last year we left on the train. And the public transportation here had another chance to shine in my eyes. It was 2 or 3 minutes on the tram down to HB, trains to the airport run about every 10 to 15 minutes, and the ride to the airport is only about 10 minutes. We're talking come up the stairs and you're in the airport and ready to go through security. It's so sweet. Our arrival in London was not. We flew with EasyJet, and that meant landing way out at Luton airport. We had to fill out landing cards, one per household. I noted our visit was a whopping one day. "What can you do with one day then?" we were asked at passport control. I was wondering the very same thing. "Just a little weekend getaway, come to spend your money?" CF joked with him that their economy was doing about as well as ours. "We'll all go down together!" we were assured. I had consulted with JLF on the best way to get into the city center, but even if the express train hadn't been delayed it still would have taken a while. We arrived in Central London with just over 24 hours to explore.

The first order of business? A stop at Leicester Square and a visit to something rather familiar, the TKTS booth. I couldn't let my only night here go by without seeing a show, the boys would be happier without me tagging along anyway. Unfortunately the timing wasn't so good, the shows I'd wanted to see had closed, or were closed as they moved from the equivalent of "Off-Broadway" to the West End. I considered seeing a "classic," I haven't seen Les Miz or Phantom in years, it would be interesting to see them where they started. I thought about taking the opportunity to finally see Michael Ball perform, I used to think he was so dreamy and wore out my Aspects of Love soundtrack on cassette tape listening to him. Then I realized I'd just cry the whole time because he's playing Edna, the mother, in Hairspray, I couldn't bring myself to it. I was having a hard time deciding, I've seen many of the shows playing, I'm so spoiled/lucky. In my pre-trip research I somehow started reading about a brand new show, one with classically trained Flamenco dancers (Love!), sword fighting (Have I mentioned I am a huge sucker for swashbucklers?), and music by the Gipsy Kings (Really? Cool!). And even though I knew I'd be embarrassed every time I had to tell someone what I had chosen to see, I ended up buying a ticket for Zorro, the Musical. Go ahead and laugh, it's all right, I'll wait.

So after collecting a half-price day-of ticket I was feeling right at home in this city and we proceeded to our hotel. We were staying on a great street, just far enough away from the noise and chaos of Picadilly Circus. PDP stays here on business trips so we had a good recommendation, and I liked knowing we'd be so central since it was just one night! We got checked in, freshened up a bit, and we were finally ready to go track down PB for lunch. Poor guy had been waiting and waiting while we wasted the day away in transit. He informed us we were benefiting from some unusually nice weather and it was true, this was not the dark, gray London I had expected. The sun was shining, the people were speaking English and I had a ticket to the theater in my purse. Lovely! I had a nice lunch with them but then excused myself to go explore a bit.

I often say that everything I know about geography I learned from musicals. This is especially true of London. Most of the places I hoped to see were in song lyrics from one source or another. It's a quick mention but Harrods does come up in a song from Evita, a song which gets stuck in my head every time I hear something about that store. My interest was piqued, I took the Underground there. I found "the tube" to be muggy and slightly claustrophobic, but the goober in me was sold once the little voice said, "Mind the gap!" at one of the stops. Hee!

Harrods was overwhelming and mesmerizing. I wandered through the fancy clothes (I have to say, on my short visit I saw a number of men dressed in a way that can only be described as "dapper," loved it) and designer gowns a bit. I found the Aveda counter (I had learned in Dublin that they sell it at department stores in the UK) and considered buying a body spray I was regretting not purchasing before but then I realized it was more than 3 ounces so it wasn't coming home with me on the plane. I got a bit lost trying to find my way to the famous food halls and ended up in the basement looking at their branded merchandise. I bought myself a little makeup bag with a peacock feather pattern and the store logo centered on the front. The clerk who rung me up sure seemed to be sincere in all the nice things he said, and then he asked if I needed directions to my next department. At least they know how confusing their store is! I lied and told him I was fine, I'm so stubborn, I know. But I quickly found the food halls anyway, and enjoyed wandering there for a while. I did a double-take when I walked past the Galler Belgian chocolate counter, this was where I got Ms. LT the famous cognac filled dark chocolate bar in Brugges, the one that she tried to send me back for! The night before we left for London I had the funny feeling there was something I had hoped to purchase at this store and it was killing me that I couldn't figure out what it was. Mystery solved! I had looked up the chocolate brand a year ago when my beloved trainer had teased me about needing more. I was finally able to meet her demands! And I didn't even have to spend my own money, she was smart enough to send me off with a envelope full of euros she had from spending time with her family in Lucca (Italy), marked "Chocolate Fund." I hadn't expected to convert those to Great Britain pounds for her, and I also hadn't expect to be able to come home at Thanksgiving with exactly what she was hoping for. Very cool. My third and final purchase at Harrods was something that Ms. ShoppingsMyCardio had sent me after. She is a former London resident and happened to know that they had opened a Ladureé in the food halls, this is the most famous maker of macarons in Paris, and most likely the world. She had passed along some great advice on her old city and had requested I eat a salted caramel macaron in her honor. I did better than that, I had 4! The only thing I could see that I didn't like at Harrods was Krispy Kreme donuts, yes, they let them into the food halls too! And even worse, they appear to be doing good business, with people carrying large boxes of dozens away even as the business all but completely dies off in the US.

I wandered the neighborhood a little bit and then caught the tube back towards the hotel. Another tip from SMC was stocking up at Boots Pharmacy, and I was craving some skin care products! I don't quite know what's going on with my skin here but I know it's not happy. However I remembered that I was still limited in what I could get back to Zürich on the plane, stupid liquids limit! I got a few things and decided to get changed, since I had bothered to bring a nice shirt to wear to the theater. I checked in with CF via text message, they were drinking beers in a pub somewhere and having a fine time. And with that it was time to hurry over to the West End. The day was going too quickly!

My seat, as so many great TKTS seats have been before it, was up close and way off to the side. Not the best seat in the house, but quite an experience. The show was very good, a bit silly at times, but the dancing and music was seriously amazing. The swashbuckling was great too but it scared me to pieces, I was so incredibly close up I feared I'd end up a part of the action if Zorro ever lost hold of his sword. I saw sparks from metal hitting metal, it was crazy! At two different times and from two different directions Zorro swings in over the audience, and landed about three feet from where I was sitting. I ducked and was sure I was about to be kicked in the head both times. The fun part was eye contact from the flirty male dancers... some things never change. I know it was an odd choice but I thought it was fun to see something that will probably never transfer across the pond to Broadway. The show is getting great reviews and the cast is extremely talented. Given the lack of English language theater available in Zürich, I really revelled in this night. After the show I sent a text message to CF to see where he was and what was the plan. I waited for a reply and got one: he said they were almost done and just to meet him at the hotel. As I standing around communicating via iPhone I noticed members of the orchestra were departing from the stage door, and then cast members, and then, oh my god, Zorro himself. Hilarious, the actor was leaving on a motorcycle! A group of girls who were standing around wondering what to do after the show noticed him, I can't help but assume that he made sure of it. They screamed and begged for photos and autographs. I was highly amused. A crowd formed, even the drunken college students at the bar next to the theater were getting in on it, "Hey, come 'er guys! It's Zorro!" they called out. Eventually, when I'm sure his ego had been quite stroked, he put on his helmet and rode away from the crowd. What a scene! He was very good in the show, I have to say. And it turns out he recently played Che in the big Evita revival, making sure Evita stayed stuck in my head for days, and he also played the lead in a revival of Aspects of Love, the role originated by none other than Michael Ball. What are the chances?

I was very hungry at this point and decided to look for some takeout. Aha! Wagamama, an Asian-fusion place we had tried in Dublin. Ms. KZ is a big, big fan as they are very British. I ordered one dish to go and walked back to the hotel. I changed into my little nightgown I had packed to save space in my backpack and switched on the telly (it's in England so that's what it's called!). Red Dwarf reruns! It was even the episode with a guest appearance by Jane Horrocks (Bubbles from AbFab)! I sat in my comfy bed eating delicious noodles with chopsticks and decided I was having the perfect evening. And then CF came home. I don't mean to imply that it wasn't as good once he was around but he was jealous of my Wagamama meal, which meant getting dressed again and bye-bye Red Dwarf. We wandered around a bit and I showed off how I had learned to navigate the neighborhood pretty darn well in a matter of hours. Big Ben looked lovely in the distance, lit up against the dark sky. However by the time we made it past Wagamama they had just closed, so CF had to settle for scoop-and-serve Chinese food. As we walked back to the hotel he asked, "Are we going the right way?" And I knew it was a day of sitting in pubs speaking but I laughed as I answered, "Ummm, we're on our street!"

We slept a bit later than I had meant to, I was hoping to skimp a bit on sleep in order to pack more into our 24 hours in London. But the bed was oh-so comfortable! So oh well. We visited the breakfast buffet and served up a little bit of eggs and bacon along with a pastry. I noticed our plates were quite skimpy compared to the hearty appetites at the tables around us! We packed up what little we had brought with us and decided that with only a few hours before we had to start our trek back to Luton we should carry our backpacks instead of having to come back for them. We headed out with about four hours to explore.

We started with a walk through Green Park, it was another beautiful day! Then we saw a crowd at Buckingham Palace. Oh great, there was a marathon crossing our path! We walked along the runners for a ways, wondered if we could wait it out, and then followed the example set by plenty of others and ran through a break in the participants. We laughed the whole way across as our backpacks were jostled around and I hung onto my camera. Just what I'm sure those poor runners needed, American tourists tripping and falling in their way! But we managed to make it across and joked how we could now tell people we had run in a marathon. Onwards! We walked through part of St. James Park (I think I have my park names right, correct me if you know better), and then approached Westminster Abbey, the House of Parliament and Big Ben. We crossed the Thames on Westminster bridge, I believe it was pedestrian only because it was Sunday. Once we crossed we walked along the water for quite some distance. We saw the London Eye above us, St. Paul's back on the other side of the water (no time to visit up close, next time!), and bridge after bridge. We walked past the Tate Modern and the Globe theater but I couldn't see a darn thing from the outside. I had considered seeing the show playing there the night before but it wasn't even a Shakespeare play! Eventually we made our way all the way to the Tower Bridge. We sent PB a text message and asked if he wanted to meet up with us for a little while before we had to leave. We crossed the bridge and walked past the Tower of London. We got a couple sandwiches for lunch and joined the majority of people out and about that day in having a soft serve ice cream cone. PB met up with us just in time to wander around the waterfront a little longer before we jumped on the Underground one last time and headed towards Luton. There was a Boots at the airport after security so I got a little fix after all! However they didn't have the specific things I had wanted to buy, but it was still a nice little bonus. I liked London very much and will go back whenever I get the opportunity/reason. It was strange to be back in an English speaking country, but I think about half of what I overheard on the street wasn't English and a good deal of the English I heard had American accents! London is truly an international city. Perhaps even more so that expat and banker filled Zürich. Which is where we were a couple of hours later, shocked that we had only left the morning before.

Language Learning

2008-11-10T18:44:00.007+01:00

Right around the one-month mark, I finally got an email indicating that our German lessons at CF's office would finally be starting! I was relieved and horrified at the same time. I was hoping to function a bit better while out and about in Zürich, maybe read menus better and be able to transition a conversation on the street into English a little more smoothly than, "Uhhhhhh, sorry." But I was worried because everyone always says German is so hard to learn, plus most of Zürich is actually speaking Swiss-German anyway, and really, I just don't enjoy language classes like some people I know. The first week I not only had nerves to deal with but a miserable cold. I was blown away on the first day when people seemed to pick the pronunciation in mere moments. Since then I've learned that many of these people have taken the class before and either dropped out or have come back down to the "Absolute Beginners" level. Plus the large majority of them are working on their third (at least) language, if they can learn English as a foreign language than German probably seems easier.

My pronunciation is awful, but I can already understand signs and announcements better. It's almost sort of annoying how many words I can pick up in public, but not quite enough to know what someone is saying. I took some shirts to be dry cleaned and ended up charging the 30chf the order was going to cost. As I was being rung up the woman behind the counter said something to the woman who had just come in the shop and was standing behind me, I heard the word "dreissig" and wondered if they were making fun of me. Very frustrating! But at the next shop I went into I recognized the word "fragen" when someone approached me, so I knew they were saying to let them know if they have any questions so I thanked them. Baby steps.

We have class twice a week, our teacher is great but the text book? Not so much. To avoid showing a preference for any native language, it teaches German in German, I'm constantly flipping around in my notebook looking up words. Our class is made up of people from all over. On the day we learned to say where we had come from she kept having to write different country names on the board. By the time we got around the whole room the board was full and half the world was represented there. People seem rather impressed that we've been showing up to class so regularly when we're only here for a year. I struggle a little bit with the amount of time it requires every week (trekking to the office, going to class, and all the workbook pages I have started doing just to be prepared to participate in class), but for right now it seems like the right thing to do. However, we'll be back in the States for two weeks, I'll be back for a week, then I'll be gone another week, and then we'll have house guests and holidays... hopefully I can keep up enough so I can jump back in full force when things blow over.

It gets all the more interesting when you look at the big picture. The week we started German class I was also trying to use some Italian over the phone making lodging reservations for the following week, and then we went out to a Spanish restaurant and were confronted with German speaking Spaniards... I can't tell you how confused I get sometimes! I end up wondering how well I know any language, even English. Well, we were going to speak some extra English that weekend; we had booked plane tickets to London!

You only live once! (Warning: Crazy tales of Intoxication)

2008-11-09T22:10:00.009+01:00

We had been in Switzerland a month, though it felt like longer and what with the French and Italian we had encountered along with German and Swiss-German we felt like we had been more places as well. But after a month in this country it was finally time to see more of Europe... and what better place to start than Oktoberfest in Munich? The train ride wasn't too long but we had reserved seats just to be sure. We left early Thursday morning, and boy, could you tell we were on the Oktoberfest train! I felt like the only female in sight, and the few others I noticed departed long before Munich. Two guys are boarded with us, one of them in lederhosen, who were very excited about where we were headed. To celebrate they were drinking schnapps and taking pictures of the guy riding across from them who had fallen asleep, as well as with a slightly befuddled train conductor. I could tell this was going to be interesting.

We arrived in Munich, hit an ATM for our first euros, and hopped on a tram towards our hotel. Another very exciting thing about this trip was that we would be meeting up with friends from back home. They had already been planning this trip and we asked if we could join them. AR and ML had lodging booked already so we decided to stay at the same place. Hotel rates during Oktoberfest are so obscene it's best just not to think about it, but the worst part was they didn't have any double rooms left! So we ended up with two single rooms next door to each other. Together our rooms made up the size of one double room, and the narrow beds were really just separated by a wall. We didn't really think about who took which room, but I later realized that if you took away the wall I was still sleeping on "my" side of the bed! Too funny.

M&A were already in Munich, they had arrived the day before from Greece, they were on a bit of an extended vacation. They had already gone to the fest to look for seats in a beer hall, so we hustled as much as possible to meet up with them. We got a text message that they were in the Paulaner tent at table 15, so that's where we headed. Hmmm, no sign of them. CF called A's cellphone. It was hilarious when they realized they were not in the same Paulaner tent because the brass band in our tent stopped playing while the music continued over the phone. We quickly found them once we were in the right structure. What fun to have company from California, well, actually they live in Oregon now, but still... They were only about half way through their first beer, which is plenty of course because we're talking liters! We toasted being at Oktoberfest together and all shared stories of recent travels. Weisswurst, Knödeln, Sauerkraut and one gigantic Brezel were all ordered and enjoyed while the beer seemed to just flow and flow. The beer hall was quite a sight to see, with the band was on a raised stage in the middle of the hall and hundreds of people crowded into tables like ours all around. The kitchen had dozens, if not hundreds, of chickens roasting. The large massen (the glasses that hold a liter of beer) were carried with ease by the bulking biceps and forearms of the servers (both male and female). Everyone was having a great time, there was singing, a little dancing on the table and we were happy to be with friends. At one point our waiter told CF to put out his hand and he tapped out a little snuff which CF was instructed to snort. He did it without hesitation, no surprise there, but what happened next thought was hilarious. We all did it, each of us later expressing shock and a little bit of dismay. M&A were particularly creeped out by the thought of it and CF just wonders why anyone would ever think that following his example was a good idea.

Usually when we reach a new city we're a bit lost and unfocused and end up dining somewhere not up to our expectations which leads to total and utter crankiness in this duo. A few hours into Munich we were quite satisfied and quite tipsy. CF decided he was done and wanted to go take a nap at the hotel, I got up and started walking out with him. That was when I made the enormous mistake of deciding that I'd actually like to stay and I sent him off to the tram and I tried to get back to M&A. First they didn't want to let me back in the hall. As the day wears on it gets harder and eventually impossible to gain entrance unless you have a table reserved (something that is not easy to achieve unless you've been going for years). To make a long story short, I wandered around a while, eventually got in through the side door but my friends were gone, and then decided to walk the long way back to the hotel since I didn't want to waste money on another tram pass (CF had carried away our double pass, A&M had a group pass so I could have gone with them). Well, remember I had just arrived in Munich and had gone straight to the hall, I had never seen a map. I didn't realize there were actually two ways out of the festival area, I followed the tram tracks but just couldn't seem to make any progress. This was because I was going the completely wrong direction! I stubbornly stuck it out for much longer than was reasonable and eventually the sun was going down and it was starting to rain, I swallowed my pride and caught a 20 euro cab ride home. Oktoberfest seems to ignite a fair bit of traffic! Remember when CF almost lost me at the station while we changed trains on our way to Cologne last year? Hmmm, he always trys to ditch me in Germany! The funny thing is because of the early start at Oktoberfest there was time for all this mayhem to go down and still go out to an 8pm dinner!

We agreed on an early start in the morning, it was the German reunification holiday, getting seats would not be easy. We decided to get to the Wiesn well before the doors opened at 10am... or so we thought that's what we were doing. I'm pretty sure you had to be there around 8am, and perhaps the doors opened around 9, by the time we arrived the halls were filled to maximum capacity and we stood outside in the crowds wondering what to try next. Of course this was when the pouring rain began and our little band of soggy "late" comers tried to stick it out for a while but eventually decided to cut our losses and try a beer hall elsewhere in Munich. We scored a table in Augustiner's hall, had some beers and a great lunch. I had venison, which was hearty and tasty and also added another point to my Omnivore's One Hundred score. The hall filled up, the line backed up outside, we were pleased with our decision to hit this place up when we did! We dried out, warmed up and everyone was happy again. The rain had pretty much stopped so we wandered Munich for a bit and somehow came to the conclusion that we should try our luck back at Oktoberfest, hoping to catch a break between the afternoon and evening crowds somehow.

The crowds were huge, there was an amazing amount of people watching opportunities. Some of the best was watching the amusement park rides, I just can't imagine those are a good idea with a belly full of beer! It is slightly easier to find seats in the beer gardens surrounding the halls, you just lose out on a bit of the atmosphere and have much less protection from the elements. When we saw an empty table we decided to make the most of it and have some dessert... an a beer. The sweets were delicious, but damn it was cold. AR was freezing and the cold beverage didn't help. He fell behind the rest of us and when a waiter came to collect our empties he decided to give the straggler a hard time and pounded the empty massen on the table while A chugged as best he could. I tried not to laugh. And A, I'm sorry for telling the story! It was too cold to sit still so we came up with the idea to see how many different gardens we could have a beer in. We moved on to a nearby garden and were looking for seats when I felt the increasingly unfamiliar feeling of warmth start seeping into my blood. Space heaters over head! My eyes went to the people at the table next to me at the moment, there was room for us if they were willing to accept us. The guys I had pegged to share some elbow room with shrugged and I corralled my shivering friends. Our frozen fingers had a hard time holding up the number "four" to show the waiter how many beers to bring. Our table mates laughed a little. But this is Oktoberfest, it wasn't long before we were all chatting and that was how I met David, Phillip, Phil and Chris. All about twenty years old, from a town near Frankfurt, and here they were enjoying their first Oktoberfest as well. New found friends and delicious heating? We settled in for the night.

The conversations had at that table were great. They taught us how to toast properly and shared their thoughts on American politics. The Germans were extremely pro-Obama ever since he spoke in Berlin back in July. "McCain is an asshole!" one of them exclaimed to my surprised and they all cheered and clinked glasses and laughed. I think there was a bit of beer talking. Speaking of beer, this is where the evening becomes fuzzy. M and I took a couple of trips to the ladies room (after being lost alone in Munich the day before I was determined to not be alone for the rest of my time there), the shock of the cold as soon as we left the proximity of our heated haven was incredible, but the wait was amazingly never bad at the restroom. Oktoberfest is clearly dominated by men, and the women who participate are appreciated, and respected, for the most part. We were flirted with in many different languages throughout the night. I was shocked to hear my name being shouted at one point and laughed when it turned out to be Chris from our table who had wandered off for a while. And on another trip back from the restroom, when my brain was particularly foggy, M grabbed my arm and leaned in and said, "You only live once." And she pulled. Later I would piece together that she had somehow tagged along with someone into the tent. We were in! But our husbands were not. Oh dear. We stayed a while, boldly joining someone's table and standing on the benches with them, beers were somehow put in our hands, we tried to sing along with the songs being played. It was almost too crazy to accept it was actually happening, "I've lost my head and it's all because M only lives once!" I thought. Eventually I wimped out and dragged the party queen back outside into the cold with me and we rejoined our guys. I think I was a bit relieved to have the group reunited, and I celebrated with a little more beer. Which is just about where my clear recollection of the night ends!

The next morning I woke up in my silly single bedroom barely remembering how the heck I had even gotten back there. I picked up my camera and looked at the last photo taken. Suddenly I remembered seeing CF taking my picture, and I remembered wondering why he had moved to the next table over. Well, it turns out that it was I who had moved. I had decided to make even more new friends, the young ones were falling asleep at our original table, and I had joined a group of guys who today I could not tell you where they were from or what language they spoke. I couldn't even tell you what they looked like if I hadn't seen their photo on my camera, with me blowing kisses at CF in the middle. Oh my.

Eventually we all rallied and made it out the door. Mercifully, since I couldn't stomach the thought of beer, we decided to see more of Munich and not try to fight for seats on the last Saturday of the Fest. We saw Nymphenburg Castle, had some lunch, and wandered through Munich's fantastic outdoor market. One booth had intriguing bottles of schnapps of different kinds, each one displaying a picture of whatever fruit or plant gave the liquor its essence. CF fixated on one bottle, it had a picture of a bear. "Woah, what is it?" He said, like we would know. He was obviously curious but started to walk away. Then he asked if we could go back, he picked it up again, talked himself out of buying it again and then walked away dismayed, "I'm going to regret not buying that bear liquor for the rest of my life." Were more ridiculous words ever spoken? "Then go get it!" I instructed and realized that A and M were both saying the same thing with me. And so, the bottle was purchased and was carried for the rest of the day. We huddled into a stand selling some tasty cappuccinos and cookies and then took a little subway ride out to the huge and beautiful English Gardens. We had a lovely stroll through the park. At one point the sun was starting to set and the autumn colors were lit gorgeously and a group of ducks had somehow decided to march single file over to the stream and go for a single file swim. So cute! We were all very happy to have covered some great ground in Munich. And now, what to do for our last night? No one could even pretend that they thought we could get in to a beer hall, but we decided to go back over there and check out the food stands that we had mostly been ignoring since arriving.

We ended up having a great meal patched together at different stands. I enjoyed some of my favorite tastes from traveling last year: frites with mayo and apple slices dipped in batter and fried. We all agreed that Oktoberfest was an amazing event. It could never happen like this in the US. Everyone would be drinking out of tiny plastic cups, there would be fights and yet also police force everywhere. I'm not saying that craziness wasn't the overarching impression here, but it somehow was all happening without much of anyone getting hurt and/or angry. A&M's flight home to the States was quite early the next morning so we headed back to the hotel. CF and I had a great time with them in Munich, we hadn't traveled with them before and we definitely found them to be kindred travel spirits. We said our goodbyes that night, by the time we woke up in the morning they were gone.

We packed up our suitcase and headed to the train station. We wanted to do something with our last couple of hours in Munich but didn't want to have to return to the hotel so we left our stuff in a locker. CF was torn between returning to the Wiesn for one last shot at a moment in the halls or going back to the market we had seen the day before. I said I thought I had done Oktoberfest right (in large part due to Ms. M) and didn't need to go back but I was up for anything. Would you believe he actually picked the market? And would you believe we actually didn't think about the fact that it would probably be closed? We wandered a bit more through Old Town Munich and realized it just might be time to visit the Hofbräuhaus. It's packed with tourists, it's what Sudwerk could have been like before the booted everything German from their menu, but everyone knows it and we had been told it was worth seeing. We went in the door around 11 and sat right down at a table. The room smelled like stale beer and the guys at the table across from us had maybe been there all night, one of them was still asleep. We decided to move further into the restaurant and the crowd quickly filled in around us. We were joined by a mixed group of Germans and Americans, one of the German guys had been an exchange student with one of the Americans (also, one of the Germans confirmed my suspicion about the "bear liquor" that CF was cradling in his backpack with a disgusted face after being shown the bottle). There was a band playing songs herd at the tents, spirits were high, I wondered if the waitresses were relieved that Oktoberfest was coming to an end. Our meal was actually very tasty and one of the cheapest we had in Munich. I got into the setting enough to even have part of another beer (my first since Friday). CF had a great time and stated that this experience was great closure to his time here. And when I let him finish my beer he said it now could not be more complete. That sounds like our cue to go get on a train!

The train was absolutely packed, thank goodness we had those seats reserved. People looked tired, a long weekend in Munich had worn us all out. At one point during the ride home a man came down the aisle selling Heineken, the gruff looking German across from me looked and laughed a little, like the mere sight of it hurt him. Further down the car there were English speakers watching little movies taken on digital cameras and the familiar sounds of Oktoberfest filled the air one last time.

Wo Wohnen Sie?

2008-11-08T14:50:00.005+01:00

Taking a break from the story telling for a second, I just have to get this out...

From my first experience with international travel (India) to moving here most of five years later I have pretty much always answered the question: "Where are you from?" with "I am from California." It started because the people in India usually wanted a specific answer, but I also knew it told people more about me than just saying that I was from the United States. I love California. While traveling the country with the band in college I saw plenty of nice places, but where was the variety? I even met some nice people, but I met many more of the unpleasant variety. While traveling in Ireland I saw many gorgeous hillsides, cliffs, beaches... they were on a grander scale than I was maybe used to, but I felt so spoiled when I realized that every place reminded me of Mendocino, Santa Barbara, Big Sur... and so on. I have fallen in love with spending time in New York City, but I've never seriously considered moving there because I couldn't really imagine leaving California for good.

The expats in Europe are all celebrating the end of having to be embarrassed of being from the US. And it's true, it's nice to be proud to say it! But the moment is a bittersweet one right now, as one friend put it on Facebook: "More proud to be an American than a Californian for, like, the first time ever." After this week I guess I'm going to have to practice how to say "the United States" because my heart has broken a little each time recently that I've given my usual answer. The Swiss are being their usual neutral selves and no one has really shared their thoughts on the matter of gay marriage. This struggle for civil rights is not over, but right now my sadness is the lost feeling of state pride, and it kills me. 52% of the people who voted in California have made it feel further away than ever. I can't believe I have friends whose own family would vote to remove their rights. I really thought we were more accepting and loving than this. I am ashamed.

I recently got back in touch with a friend from a show I did back in 1994 who started dating this great guy at the same time that I met my great guy. Even after all these years he was so genuine when he told me that they are still hoping to get married some day (this was about a month ago). This week he said that he thinks it's great that so many people would happily celebrate their, and that he believes the other people will come around. His optimism was one of the few comforting outcomes of this stupid vote.

I don't really have anything new to say on the actual issue so I won't really get into it. I just believe in love and that it's always the right answer, so there you go.

Alternative Setting

2008-11-07T10:21:00.005+01:00

The funny thing about me blowing out my legs hiking down Monte Bré was that back in Zürich I had a meeting with a trainer at my new gym scheduled for the next day. Luckily it wasn't anything like I was expecting, I had been told it was a "fitness test" by whoever it was that scheduled it for me. Instead the trainer showed me around the gym and wrote down a strength training program for me to follow. I think he didn't quite believe me when I told him how strong I am, he kept telling me he didn't know any women who could lift what I said I could do easily. Near the beginning of our meeting I told him how much weight I've list in the past couple of years, it took a moment to sink in as I'm sure he sort of converted it to kilograms in his head. His eyes got really big, "Mamma mia!" he exclaimed, and please note: he is not Italian.

It turned out that he did want to do a bit of a fitness test, I think he just couldn't wrap his head around what I was telling him I could do. So the next day I came back and met with him again. I was set up with a heart rate monitor on a stationary bike. He had me start pedaling at a certain speed and told me he'd increase the resistance every three minutes until my heart rate got up to a certain point. I had to go twice as long as he was expecting before I was over 150bpm. He kept asking if I was all right, "Yep, I'm just fine!" I was so amused at how I was puzzling him so. He crunched some numbers afterwards and told me I rated in above average fitness level. I guess you can be super fit and still be overweight (according to so beloved BMI chart I am actually still just into the obese category). This did encourage me to start using my heart rate monitor more at the gym, I think I had been pushing my speed too hard with the running and I was over-stressing my legs.

Speaking of my poor legs... I was still hurting from our hike down the mountain! I thought a little extra heat might help so I decided to take my first visit to the hamam. I scraped together 5chf from the coins in my wallet, this pays for the extra stuff required to bathe (a towel to wear, the scrubbing mitt, the copper bowl for rinsing, the robe to wear after). They even had brand new directions in English! I was to sit in one steam room for 15 to 20 minutes, then go scrub and rinse, then soak in a medium temperature pool for a while, then a different steam room, then scrub again... I was glad to have instructions and a floor plan! I liked the experience. It felt very refreshing, which surprised me considering the trouble I've had in humidity before. It was a little odd getting into a pool wearing just a towel, I decided to just sit on a bench but a couple of people were managing to move around the pool just fine. The instruction card said very clearly to wear your towel at all times: no nude bathing. Imagine how startling it was then to be sitting in the next steam room and suddenly the guy who just entered the room with his girlfriend rips off his towel and slaps it down on a bench to lay on. Ummmm, okay, I think I'm going to move sort of around the corner so I don't have to look at that, thanks! I managed to mostly banish them from my awareness and enjoyed the rest of my Hamam experience. It looked like some people were going back for another round of soaking and/or steaming, I just followed the directions I was given but maybe the routine is a little more choose-your-own-adventure than I thought, the dress code obviously is! The hamam appears to be wildly popular, the locker room is always full of girls putting on red and white checked towels while the cardio room where I spend so much of my time is often quite and half empty. I'm looking forward to thawing out there this winter if I ever start to turn into an ice cube.

Not quite Italy... but we can see it from here!

2008-11-06T22:15:00.006+01:00

Lugano was chosen as our rebound from so-so day tripping to Lucerne the previous weekend. Why was I so certain this was the place to help us bounce back? It's in Ticino, the Italian speaking part of Switzerland! Ticino is actually surrounded by Italy on three sides, it just dips down into "the boot" like a little peninsula into another world. Lugano is quite close to Milan and Lake Como. We reserved a hotel room with a few days notices as opposed to a few hours like our last weekend trip. The train ride was twice as far, three hours, so we figured we should be well prepared. We packed one suitcase with a change of clothes and after reading about the hiking found in the area we packed our newly arrived boots. They were too late for a Gruyeres cheese hike but we knew we could still put them to good use! The train ride was ridiculously pretty. It was like we had been sucked into someone's ideal model train setting. Hills and tunnels, bridges and meadows... CF said he expected to see Heidi running by any moment now.

We arrived in Lugano and wandered a bit before we figured out how to find our hotel. We got a peek at the Lake and I knew we were in for some lovely views! The last time we had been in an Italian speaking setting (besides the restaurant down the street from us) was my family's 2005 trip to Italy, only the second time that CF and I had traveled out of the country together. We had taken an Italian class before going, but it had been years with no brushing up. Like trying to remember some French in Fribourg, Lugano tripped us up with Italian. But it wasn't too long before we got a bit of it back, at least enough to be polite. We mostly just wandered that day and enjoyed feeling like we got our Weekend Travel Warrior groove back. For lunch we had a disappointing pizza and for dinner some bizarre Chinese food. Hmmm, I didn't think the food would be so bad when you can pretty much see Italy right across the water! What's going on here? We did have a good time getting reacquainted with Italian culture, you know, like gelato and prosecco happy hour drinking!

The next day we put on those hiking boots and took off in the direction of Monte Bré. We hadn't done a whole lot of reading but we knew the experience included taking a funicular up the mountain and then there was hiking to be done up on top. So when we got to the ticket booth and they asked if we wanted round trip fare for the funicular we both nodded and wondered if this guy was crazy... of course we were going to come back down! We got seats on the funicular as it was filling up and off we went, into the sky. There were a bunch of kids on some sort of excursion together in the different sections of the strange vehicle. It was the littlest one who noticed CF and I speaking English to each other though, I realized this when I heard her mother, or maybe teacher slowly whisper to her, "Where are you from?" She was prompting her! The little girl looked at me but shied away, I tried to think of a way to start talking to her but got distracted by the amazing view revealed as we came to the top of the mountain.

It was incredible. Perhaps the grandest view of my lifetime. And we both agreed that my mom would cry (this is our new way of judging the beautiful things we see). We meandered around a bit, I think the view had blown our minds. And then we saw the trails sign. Ohhhh. All of the sudden we realized we had overpaid our funicular fare; if we really wanted to hike, we were not leaving this mountain the way we came. We almost got a little overly ambitious and took off in the direction that would have actually brought us down into Italy. However that hike was pushing three hours in predicted duration and we weren't carrying any water or food. So instead we decided to descend towards the water, it was estimated to take about an hour and a half and the view appeared to be dazzling. So after soaking in just a bit more gloriousness we started downwards.

It started with 10 minutes of cement stairs and then we arrived in the small town of Bré. Then we found our trail and I quickly realized this was not going to be easy. The trail was almost entirely made up of steep, steep stairs. CF's long legs climbed down the path easily. My legs are quite short and it wasn't long before my quads were tingling. I wasn't sure at first if it was muscle fatigue or if I was shaking a bit from worrying I was going to fall and go tumbling down the hillside. Maybe it was a bit of both. CF was a great hiking partner, he had brought his backpack and when he realized I was nervous he took my heavy camera and carried it whole way. Halfway through I thought to myself, "I'm not having fun. But there's no way I'm going back up that hill so all I can do is keep going!" After a little while the drop off the side of trail wasn't quite so... severe and I relaxed and actually enjoyed the hike. I hadn't had a tough work out like this in quite some time!

Most of the way down we were actually enveloped by trees, so much for the great view! Eventually (closer to two hours later), the trees opened up and we were deposited into the small town of Gandria, right on the water. Hungry and thirsty from our adventure in funicular-fare-wasting we quickly spotted Ristorante Gandria and decided to have lunch. We were given a lovely table out on the terrace and had a great meal. It was the kind of meal I was expecting to have in Lugano, aha, maybe you need to get out of the more touristy city! Once we started to get into the right mindset CF thought to order a half-liter of house red wine, and we were happily accommodated. We had a nice caprese and a great polenta dish (which is the Ticino specialty) with braised beef goulash served over it. The bad side of the hike sort of faded away and I was just so pleased to be right where I was, somewhere I couldn't have planned to end up.

Gandria itself turned out to be teeny tiny and practically spilling into the lake. We figured out this was our chance to get out on the water and bought tickets for the next boat back to Lugano. There were two restaurants right by the boat dock, each with a large back patio filled with happy diners. There was a man playing accordion in one patio and a few people were dancing. Including the chef! It was all very charming. The small waiting area we had filled with people as we waited most of an hour for the next boat. Scoring seats on the outer deck or even by a window was out of the question, so it wasn't the best boat ride but it got us back to our luggage quickly. During the 20 minute boat ride I saw little hotels and restaurants along the water. I wouldn't actually recommend staying in Lugano, if I were going back I'd stay somewhere just out of town and on the lake. This was a happy little paradise.

We hadn't learned much from our wander the day before and getting back to the train station didn't go so well. The good part was getting another gelato, I tried to order two fruit flavors together: melon and strawberry. However, my pronunciation of "melone" sounded too much like "marroni" and we ended up with creamy chestnut! CF was a good sport and ate most of the erroneous cone while I had chocolate and hazelnut. We ended up climbing a terrible flight of stairs, between CF carrying our shared suitcase and my blown out legs we were very unhappy. We just caught a train though, so we didn't have to wait at the station once we were there. Maybe we should have waited, the timing of our departure meant that we were on a route that required a train change. And oh what a change it was. A whole slew of people ran from our train to our new one just across the platform and we found one very full train. The older gentleman who had crossed the platform found a seat and I was glad for him. We were not so lucky, so we started walking towards the other end of the train, one car at a time. There were no seats to be seen. We passed some open space where two people had settled on just standing, my gut told me this was the best we were going to do but for some reason we kept going. A bunch of people in front of us just gave up and decided to stand in an exit way, leaving us bottle-necked behind them in the aisle. The seated passengers were started to look up at us annoyed by our semi-hovering. There was an Indian family behind us who were budging when we turned around hoping to go back. I guess they thought they could somehow move forward? We squished through them and then found a man standing in the aisle holding a dog. And he wouldn't budged either. It was all very weird and suddenly the language barrier seemed worse than ever, when you find yourself in a bind and needing of some extra understanding it is best if you can at least ask for help nicely. CF lifted the suitcase up, trying to lift it over his head so he could get past this man with the dog. The train car rattled a bit, CF stumbled and BAM, went our suitcase into the face of a man in the seat next to this hot mess. I was horrified. CF, who had been insisting on using his Italian all day poured out apologies in English. What an awful moment. We mostly just kept walking, we needed out of that car. We got back to the open space and found a little corner to lean in. I found looking out the window of the exit door fascinating but riding while standing up was making CF motion-sick. I'm not quite sure how long we rode like this, but finally there was a stop that was fairly big and enough people left so we were able to snag seats. The train car was muggy and smelled awful. Why is Sunday travel always so miserable? We could not have been happier to arrive back in Zürich that evening. We take the good with the bad, and this trip included that incredible view, challenging hike and rewarding meal so we did our best to shake off the terrible train ride. However we did agree that we needed to reserve seats when traveling on Sundays whenever possible from here on out!

Small World

2008-11-06T21:15:00.004+01:00

A long, long time ago I said I was going to tell you about the small number of degrees that seem to separate the people I meet here. Now, that's not too many people really, but it is clear to see that while a large percentage of Zürich are expats (I've heard anywhere from 20 to 30%), the overlap in social circles is huge. CF let me know a while back about the spouses group made up of people (I won't lie, it's all women) from around the world. I've met great ladies from England, Scotland, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Sweden, Australia, and yes, even a few from the US. Sitting at my first coffee with them I realized that one of them knows some of the bloggers I had been following since learning we'd be coming here. Bloggers often reference other blogs with links, and clicking away from one I'm subscribed to I quickly came to a reference to one of the spouses I had met via email before moving here, but unfortunately for me she was moving back to California right around the same time. This spouse is also a blogger (are you confused yet?), and she told me I should meet up with yet another blogger who was moving back to Zürich, having lived her for a number of years not too long ago. She and I had coffee one day, she showed me where to get the best cappuccinos in town, and then it turns out that someone who works for the company from which I quit to come here was her college roommate. It almost seems silly sometimes how everyone knows everyone.

The catch is that the expat community is also likely to move on. People are more than courteous but real relationships are hard to establish when you know that chances are high that your new friend will move on. I've pretty much have come to see myself as a lousy candidate for "friend." I disappear almost every weekend and I know already that I'm only here a year. I have no expectations of anyone really reaching out to me. That being said, everyone is so nice. It's a great support system!

Even our friends from the great night out with Italian food and beer have moved back to California, they were here for two and a half years and were ready to go home. Luckily, another part of this small world theme is visits from friends from California. The internet seems to be keeping me connected with my friends and family via instant message chatting, Facebook status updates, and video conferencing (I can already see how my little niece has changed since I last saw her in person). Every so often I start to feel out of touch and somehow that ends up being the day I Skype with my mom or exchange snarky comments on Flickr with Mr. Bertha (FYI, he told me to call him this, long story involving a Lady) and then I feel okay with the world again.

And while we're on the topic of the world and whatever size it is. Here's a gorgeous sunset as seen from our balcony. The weather has gone colder and I miss eating dinner out there already! Wait until you compare the view we saw just a few weeks later!

Feeling at Home

2008-11-06T18:07:00.008+01:00

After the late delivery of our air shipment our expectations were not too high for when we'd see our surface shipment. I'm happy to report it was delivered on the last day of the original window we were given, so it wasn't late! And on top of that nothing arrived damaged, broken, or even missing! We quickly unpacked as many boxes as possible as the movers assembled the guest bed, that way they could take away the cardboard boxes. Cardboard recycling only happens once a month here and we just didn't want to have to deal with it. I spent the entire day unwrapping paper and putting things away. CF helped with the kitchen in the evening. We were left with a fully stocked kitchen but we also brought quite a lot of our own favorites. We packed up a number of their things using the paper and boxes that had just brought our things to us, and those boxes are being carefully stored in the attic (and one in the basement) while we put our year of wear and tear onto our own pots and pans. The apartment took a huge step towards feeling like home with the addition of some of our things and furniture. It really is a great space, I love it here.

Invigorated by the completion of our "move" I went out to the market the next morning and came home with, along with produce for the week, a bundle of branches with two different kinds of berries and leaves. I noticed people leaving with these bundles before I even got to Bürkliplatz. This guy with a van full of the greenery was making arrangements on the fly. It seemed ever so shady, but lots of people were buying so why shouldn't I? I loved the look of them even more once they were displayed on my dining table. A much bigger arrangement than I could ever stomach if it were flowers, the branches reached up towards our ridiculously high ceilings. I was obsessed with them for days and started photographing them repeatedly. You'll be seeing a lot of them in this post as I have little else to illustrate it with!

Finally feeling at home in my apartment it was time to make the most important connection with my city. I had meant to join a gym the moment I touched down here but I got sick and then I visited the rather bare-bones gym just down the street and wasn't quite sure what to do. There was a sign up that appeared to outlaw shorts and tank-tops there! I finally heeded the advice of the many nice expats who had ALL recommended Fitness Park and went to check it out. The cardio equipment was all purchased this summer, no sign of an overly modest dress code, and a hamam downstairs! Haman is a Turkish bath, which sounds like heaven while anticipating the coldest winter of my life. Back in California this summer I was talking to my chiropractor about looking for familiar services over here. He suggested looking for a gym with lots of perks so people will be hanging around, since I wouldn't be working it might be a place to make some connections and friends. "Look for a place that has a juice bar, that's what you need!" So I suppose I should have just handed over my money when I came upon just that while I toured the gym. I tried to resist the pricier gym but in the end I signed up for their 12-month membership.

My first workout there was rather amusing. I somehow hadn't even thought about the fact that I could barely read a word of German and didn't know much about converting miles-per-hour to kilometers-per-hour, not to mention what my weight in kilograms would be or how many of them I could lift! I faked my way through cardio machine programming as best as I could and enjoyed sweating after being cold for what felt like a long time. I had to get used to the fact that here I am the exception to the rule, and the few "overly naked European women" encountered at the locker room back at Gold's are now the majority. I was so uncomfortable with locker rooms before, I used to borrow CF's cellphone so I could set an alarm earlier than everyone else's on band road trips so I could get up and use the showers before the other girls got up. I think I made it through my entire band career showering alone. Now, this is a fancy gym so there is just enough privacy, but with everyone else being so relaxed about it I guess it was hard not to follow suit. And I can't help but admit that with a body that I sometimes feel hangs off of me like a deflated balloon, it's been comforting to witness many different body types. Nobody's "perfect." After sweating and a nice warm shower the cold air outside feels refreshing instead of daunting. Sometimes I even walk home, or at least part of the way.

At the end of my first week at the gym I decided it was time to brave spin class. I introduced myself to the teacher, "Grüezi, hello, I'm new to the gym but I'm not new to spinning. So I'll watch you carefully and I should be able to follow the class just fine." I was met with a skeptical and slightly amused look. As nice as this gym is, it is located in a city so space is not totally unlimited. There is only one class room so the bikes are stored along one side of the room. I dragged my bike out and got ready to ride. I tried to ignore the couple other skeptical looks I was getting, I realized I was back to being the biggest person in class. Man, there are some skinny Swiss girls! Well, talk about feeling at home! It barely mattered one bit that I couldn't understand what he was saying. There are three hand positions in spinning, and I knew how to count from one to three, so I could follow that. I watched the person riding next to me for whether to turn the gear up or down and pretty soon I figured out what "lower" and "more" sounded like. The teacher kept a careful eye on me, but about 15 minutes in gave me a huge smile. I guess I had proved myself that quickly. When I couldn't understand what he was saying I would just smile and sort of imagine something DD would be saying in class back at home. The class was a breeze, and afterwards we all grabbed paper towels and spray bottles and cleaned off our bikes. This could never happen at home, the next class would be rushing in. In Zürich there are about as many spin classes in a week as Gold's would have in a day. As I waited for a chance to grab some paper towels the teacher came over and started grilling me about spin in California. Do they pay attention to heart rate zones? Do they just go crazy fast? What kind of music did we listen to? Any recommended music? Can you give me this recommended music? It felt great that I had disproved the assumptions I had encountered here. And I was yet again making friends with the spin teacher. Some things are just the same wherever you go!

Going back to Lucerne...

2008-11-06T15:16:00.005+01:00

"Going back" because it happened over a month ago, and also because I had been there before...

Around the time of my distant-but-most-recent post I went to meet the spouses for coffee at Manora, the cafeteria in one of the department stores on Bahnhofstrasse. That was when I made a friend from the States, who blew me away by coming out on this cold day with her 11 day old baby! We were chatting and figured out that we were in the same neighborhood and decided to try to have dinner sometime. The very next morning she emailed me saying they had a babysitter (for their older two kids) lined up and could we go out that night! So that was how we ended up going out on a Friday night for some surprisingly good Italian food just a block and a half down from our apartment. Turns out her husband and CF had sort of known each other back in California before they moved to Switzerland. We had a nice time talking to them about their time living in Zürich and their advice to us was travel, travel, travel. "On the weekend you'll think it's time to sit back and relax, no! Get your butt to the train station early, Friday if possible and GO!" We shared some stories of our trip to Fribourg and Gruyeres and assured him that we had lots of trips planned. They were impressed with what we had planned! We were all booked to go to Oktoberfest in Munich, so the subject turned to beer. And that led to me going out with the two guys (mom had to go home when the babysitter was due to leave) to two interesting pubs. CF's pick was a place that makes their own beer. It was up the hill from us, closer to the University, and while the beer didn't blow me away it was at least more interesting than the Swiss brews I'd sampled before this. Then MM took us back down the hill to the Bonny Prince Pub. It's a long, skinny, smoky place boasting a jukebox full of heavy metal tunes and more Scottish beers than you've ever heard of. We were here to try Old Engine Oil. Dark and licoricey, I think it surprised MM that I liked it so much. Eventually we all stumbled back up our hill, and as I went to sleep I wondered what this late night would do to our weekend plans... wait, what were our plans again?

Oh, that's right... I wanted to take CF to Lucerne. You might recall I took a day trip here last fall but I thought CF should see it. When I visited alone it was a cold, misty and downright moody day. I thought it suited the setting, especially for viewing the Lion Monument, Löwendenkmal, which was the most moving part of my day. This time the sun was shining, the sky was blue, there was a wedding getting out of the church, the market looked splendid (okay fine, they were packing up around the time we got there, the late night led to a later train than planned)... and about a million other people had also decided it was a good day to visit Lucerne! Ugh. The streets were packed so wandering through the Medieval old town didn't have the same appeal. So we wandered over to the old city wall. You know, the one I climbed last year and was then scared out of my mind while trying to climb down? Well somehow I found myself up that stupid wall again, AND climbed that tower I avoided last time. Yes, the view was very nice, but I was practically shaking by the time I had slowly descended back down all those stupid stairs!

We had a nice lunch at a great place called Wirtshaus Taube. The main dish I ordered actually reminded me a lot of my lunch in the same city a year earlier. I remember being pleased with the appearance of vegetables at the time but then when we decided to come here for the year I remember thinking that if that tiny serving of starchy veggies was worth getting happy over that I was in for disaster. It certainly has been easier to eat healthy in this country while mainly shopping and cooking for myself. After lunch we took a nice stroll by the Lake; we saw plenty of boats out on the water, men playing bocce ball, locals encountering friends out enjoying a lovely Saturday. Lucerne is quite the living, breathing city, and I could barely tell last year. This visit was very different than the last! Eventually I made CF go up to the Lion Monument with me. The pond in front of it was drained for some repair work, gobs of people (most of them one large tour group) swarmed around the park... and I had already blown it and told him how this work of art had moved me to tears before so there were expectations in place. It just wasn't the same! (However, armed with my new telephoto lens I got some better shots of the haunting lion.)

I was mildly frustrated with the decision to come to Lucerne. It's close to Zürich so it will make a good day trip when we have visitors, but I myself would like to leave it misty and moody in my memories from last year. At the same time this is when I told myself that a lot of stuff is going to happen this year, and it can't all be perfect. I decided to be a little more mindful of planning weekends in the future but that this one was all right for now.

We wandered a bit longer, crossed the lovely wooden bridges and even did a little watch pricing for a friend. Eventually we called it a day and decided to catch a train home. We had to scramble a bit to find seats, and accidentally ended up in seats that were reserved for riders boarding in Bern. We rode a little ways not quite sure of what to do. Across the aisle from us two Spanish speaking girls were counting to ten in English for their father, over, and over, and over again. I think this was karma seeing how CF loves to count in languages he's learning and I'm sure he's inflicted native speakers with this annoyance at one point or another. Passengers started to prepare to exit as we approached Bern. We quickly swiped some forward-facing, un-reserved seats and the rest of the trip home was rather uneventful.

At this point I can't seem to remember what we did the next day. It was Sunday so everything around the city would have been pretty much closed. Hmmm. Well, anyway, I hope we rested up while we could, it was the last weekend day we would spend in Zürich for quite some time!

Experience now, write later.

2008-11-06T15:00:00.003+01:00

I am so sorry for the silence, I'm embarrassed to admit that it's been a month and a half since my last blog post! Yikes! Luckily for you I am, as my husband calls me, the Human Video Camera, so there are still plenty of stories to tell. If you're really dying to know what I've been up to I hope your following along with my Flickr photostream because I've actually managed to keep up with that pretty well. I post photos on Mondays after returning to Zürich from a weekend (or more) of traveling. It's a nice way to easily revisit the adventures recently had and I'm basically I'm too worn out to achieve much else. Writing, on the other hand, requires a spark; I blog when I'm so revved up about a story I want to tell everyone. So when I'm useless on Mondays it doesn't happen. The rest of the week suddenly gets sucked up by German class (plus studying), going to the gym, or planning and preparing for the next adventure. It's amazing how quickly the hours and days fly by! And then almost every weekend we're off to another destination, seeing amazing new things, soaking up life in other places, and of course eating yummy food. But I write when I feel grounded and focused... and there's the rub, that feeling doesn't seem to happen very much right now. So forgive me for periods of non-blogging, and I thank you for your patience.

The Good, The Bad and The Lovely

2008-09-18T21:30:00.005+02:00

The Good... I found CF's peanut butter! He insists on the kind that is only 100% peanuts (I agree that it's best). This earned him a PB related nickname from the hostess of our favorite NYC lodging two years ago when she asked what we'd like stocked for breakfast. She had to hunt it down at the health food store, and then got hooked on it herself. When we learned we'd be coming here he mentioned he was concerned there would be no peanut butter, but then he saw it at the office when he was here in July so he said he was no longer worried. Well, all the groceries stores have one of two brands that include added sugar, salt and oil. Even Jelmoli and Globus which are known for being good resources for expats to get food products they miss from home. So today I found myself face to face with a health good store and I have it a try. I quickly found a number of nut butters and was going to at least pick up some of that, but then I spotted the peanut butter. Mission accomplished!

The Bad... I stopped in front of said health food store because I needed to stop and sigh after walking out of Kiehl's. My skin is drying out from the sudden cold and I needed some extra exfoliation help so I went looking for a body scrub. I didn't know until the moment I was handing over my credit card that I was paying three times as much as it would have cost at home. Whoops! Tally Kiehl's up under "Things that are more expensive here," (believe it or not, there are some things that are less expensive here) and I'll enjoy my liquid gold.

And The Lovely... I went to meet CF for dinner at work tonight, I hadn't seen the office before now. It had started raining late in the afternoon so I didn't go out quite as early as I had planned, I was going to go on a bit of a photowalk since I haven't done much shooting in Zürich yet. But once it was time to head to dinner I slipped on my trench coat, newly arrived in the air shipment. I love this coat, it felt good to put it back on. I hopped on the shuttle bus that's running on our street while the tram line is all torn up, and switched to a tram at Bahnhofquai. It was one of the old cars, with little wooden seats. We rattled down the Bahnhofstrasse, with the sun going down, the lights coming on, city people out and about on their way home from work, meeting for drinks or stopping to shop. It was charming and I melted into the moment.... and I realized right then that I had just fallen for the city.

Notes from a blogger...

2008-09-17T11:39:00.005+02:00

Random thoughts:

I went to Ikea in Dietlikon yesterday. It was much easier than I had expect and didn't take long at all. Now, I haven't been to an Ikea in a while, so I'm not sure if it's just where they've progressed to or if it's the fact that I'm closer to the Ikea homeland, but the displays on the showroom level were much bolder and more fantastic than anything I remember seeing before. They almost made me wish I had to furnish an apartment here. I purchased a huge bag made from plastic tarp to carry everything home in, it cost a franc and I believe I get a franc off my purchase every time I come back with it, so that's cool. They had started selling those bags at the East Palo Alto Ikea and I didn't understand why anyone would want an Ikea tarp bag to take home with them. But now that I could only shop for what I could personally carry home on the train I understood the appeal. I bought us new fluffier, firmer pillows, a fabric shower curtain which we both desired instead of the plastic one that was here, and a dish drainer like the one we have at home because we couldn't seem to get anything to stack right in the nice one that was here. Between this trip and our air shipment arriving things are feeling much homier at home.

It's cold here. Have we seen the last of the heat? The sun shines through at times, but I'm going to need warmer/more socks. An old friend from high school who is living in Prague has just posted a Facebook status wishing that summer would have at least said goodbye. I agree! I have some more clothes coming with our large shipment but my wardrobe is just ridiculous. I might need to check out H&M sooner than expected.

I just want to take a moment to apologize for my lack of editing on this blog. I try to fix typos when I catch them, but I don't get them all. I also am hit and miss on my special characters. I'm sure I've switched back and forth on using Zurich and Zürich... I'm not even sure if when I use the Mac command for "ü" that those of you on PC's see it corrected. And yes, I ramble. A lot. That's just me... this is my journal as well as my way of telling people about my wacky adventures. So consider this my official recognition of my own bad habits, but I'm not going to worry about them too much. There's more important things in life!

And, please remember that I don't post all my photos here so keep an eye on Flickr for more good stuff. I uploaded some things out of order recently: a couple random Zurich shots, then Fribourg, then I went and caught up with Monterey from July and San Diego from August, and then posted Gruyeres. So I started a collection that's at the top of my photostream, on the right hand side, "Our Year Away..." is where I'll stick photo sets from different adventures this year. Since the line between travel and being home is blurred.

All right kids, this blogger needs some socks... my toes are freezing! Remind me to soon talk about the expats and bloggers and also the spouses of CF's coworkers and how these circles of friends are so intertwined.

How do you say "foodie" in Swiss-German?

2008-09-17T11:30:00.000+02:00

Hooray! Our air freight finally arrived yesterday. CF sent a stern email on Sunday evening and suddenly they were ready to deliver. Hmmmm. Well, we're just going to appreciate that we have more of our stuff here now. Including our hiking shoes and my trenchcoat and great rain jacket that sort of matches CF's. Ummm, I'm ready for my cheese hike now! Drat!

We also got some of our kitchen stuff. A fully stocked kitchen was left in place by our gracious hosts from whom we are subletting, but we still brought plenty of our stuff so we can use familiar tools and also spare their belongings some of a year's worth of wear. It's going to be a bit tricky to figure out where everything goes and I almost don't want to deal with it until the bigger shipment arrives, which may or may not be next week. I'm not getting my hopes up again!

I have to say, I haven't quite gotten the hang of our kitchen. The fridge is small, the foods less processed... you can't buy too much or it's just going to go bad. But at the same time I feel like I am constantly buying groceries. I think I will learn to balance this better as time goes on. This awkward stage, along with the fact that the foods we've been eating are just different from the routine things I tended to buy at home, has led me to have some weird moments of not feeling satisfied by anything I eat. It's weird, I can't explain it. Maybe it's again related to not feeling like I'm traveling but not feeling like I'm at home either? It's starting to get better though.

I've been cooking up a storm lately. We've been enjoying plenty of fresh produce, much of it is Swiss but there are also items from Italy and Spain. There's basil growing on our balcony. The cheese is all fantastic whether it comes from the market or the cheese counter or the plain cheese section of the grocery store. Dried and cured meats are very popular, prosciutto everywhere, I love it. I've been trying to use the ingredients left behind, as well as experimenting with items rounded up from my many grocery shopping trips. Last week I faked my way through stuff pasta, I found the tubes in our pantry. I cooked up ground beef, stirred in ricotta, stuffed it in the tubes, drenched it all in sauce and covered it in shredded mozzarella... didn't know what I was doing but how could I really go wrong? This week I faked my way through lasagna, which was a tiny bit more tricky. I browned the meat, I broiled eggplant that needed using, I sauteed shallots and spinach in another pan, decided to combine the spinach and meat as well as the ricotta, then needed to season the crushed tomatoes I was using as sauce so washed the little pan I had cooked the beef in and got that going, didn't really have the right spices so that was frustrating (I've since purchased crushed red pepper, garlic powder and onion powder), then realized I couldn't read the pasta box and wasn't sure these were no-boil but took a chance (whew, they were!), settled on putting down a thin layer of sauce, a layer of noodles, the eggplant, the meat/cheese/veggie mixture, a second layer of noodles, the rest of the sauce and then shredded mozzarella, I baked it about as long as the stuffed pasta (that box had included English so I knew I could stuff the dried tubes)... and somehow after all this madness I actually got a pretty good lasagna, it just had a little too much black pepper in the sauce. Whew!

Also in the same kitchen and sort of at the same time, I made a dessert to bake. I got the idea over at Geeks in Zürich. Italian Prune Plums had seemed sort of familiar, turns out we used to have a tree when I was little, and they're all over the place right now. Zwetschgen, as they are known here, are smaller than other plums and pit very easily. I followed the same recipe as Mama Geek, although I had no measuring cups and I didn't know if what I had in the pantry was brown sugar or something else but it tasted pretty close. You just cut up the plums and sugar them a little. Mix ground walnuts, flour, sugar and cinnamon (it asked for cardamom but I don't have any here) with some melted butter, and blend it with a fork. Pour the mix on top of the fruit and bake it for most of an hour. I think I used too much of the dry ingredients and therefore not quite enough butter, the topping didn't look as pretty as it could have. But man, was it delicious! CF has maybe never been more impressed with something I've cooked. We happened to have a little vanilla ice cream to have with it. Cooking by the seat of my pants seems to be working out just fine.

Where's the Cheese?

2008-09-17T10:36:00.000+02:00

Whoops. So much for "not much else." The breakfast buffet proved too much for us to resist and we ate a bit more than we had intended. There were cheeses, pastries, salami and dried fruits. Delicious! Washed down with a good dose of coffee and I was much fuller then intended but quite a happy girl. We packed up and checked out, leaving our suitcase at the front desk. "Do you need an umbrella?" the concierge asked. We assured him we had two small ones and would be fine. "Sorry, you didn't get lucky with the weather but... it's Switzerland." "Well, we're leaving in Zürich for the year, so..." "Ahh, so you understand."

Today's adventure: Cheese. Gruyere to be exact. We took a half-hour bus ride to Bulle, and a cute little train took us to Pringy where we visited the La Maison du Gruyère. If we had our hiking shoes we could have done a two hour or so walk to chalets in the area where we could have probably had some amazing cheese. But in our less-than-suficient city shoes we couldn't quite make the hike, so we settled for this popular spot that was right across from the train statin. CF observed that we were at a tourist destination, but we were rather in the middle of nowhere and it wasn't exactly straight forward how to get there. The cheese making demonstration was in process so we paid our 7chf admission fees and hurried upstairs. It was quite exciting to see the huge vat of milk emptying while the cheese molds were filling and the liquids streamed out the bottom. Lots of action - the windows steamed up with a cheesy fog. We snacked on the cheese samples that came with admission, three pieces of Gruyere, each aged a different length of time. 6, 8, 10 months is all well and good, but I had purchased 12 month or older from the market at the train station last week. Still, it was a tasty little cheese snack. The vat was empty, the liquids all drained out, the two cheese makers went to work labeling the wheels, pulling the extra frame out of the way now that only solids remained, and putting equipment in place for the pressurizing stage. The cheese spends 16 hours like this and then 20 hours in a salt bath before it goes to the aging cellar.

CF likes to fantasize that one day he'll become an artisanal cheese maker. He loved seeing this process, I could just see the thoughts set in motion by this demonstration. I asked him if he'll be selling his cheese at a card table at a little farmers market. He liked the idea. We went and looked at the cellar and watched their high-tech robot take wheels out of their place, flip them and slide them back in. Sooooo much cheese in this place. How nice to have a little robotic help in taking care of it.

Afterwards we headed up the hill to the actual town of Gruyéres. The views were ridiculously fantastic. as we climbed higher and higher. CF hasn't been in much of Switzerland outside of Zürich, so he was really blown away. It was about 11am and the town was quiet besides a few other wanderers and shop keepers just setting up for the day. We went to one edge of town and looked out over the countryside. It was here that I realized we were surrounded by the soft sound of cowbells. Livestock in every direction couldn't help but disclose their location. You might not think of cowbell ringing as peaceful but at this volumn it was the perfect soundtrack to the sights.

We climbed up around the back side of Gruyéres to the castle, or Chateau as the case may be. It felt vaguely like some of the places we visited in Ireland but with fewer people around. We decided against paying to go inside but enjoyed the highest vantage on the area yet. We soon walked past a creepy looking sculpture and I realized we were walking past the HR Giger Museum and the creature depicted was some sort of alien. Giger won the Best Visual Effects Oscar for Alien and is quite the sci-fi designer. Across the walkway from the museum I saw people going into a bar, and when I looked in the window I saw the entire interior was Giger-esque. Super creepy... and slightly cheesy (no pun intended), "I kind of want to go in!" CF admitted. I had noticed their sign out front advertising their coffee and meringues which were things I wanted to be sure to have here so I agreed to go. Inside it seemed there were a couple of locals (even this tiny little town has its locals) at the bar and two friendly bartenders. We settled in, hanging jackets on the bones of our throne like chairs (the ones at the bar rotated but not ours). I ordered coffee with the famous Gruyéres double cream and CF asked for something similar. But then we observed "Alien Coffee" on the front of the meny and he decided to be silly and bold and went to the bar to change his order. The platter that was brought to him was quite impressive. A huge cup of very good coffee, two shots of the delicious double cream, 3 perfect little Gruyéres meringues, a glass of a Gruyéres liqueur (which was optional but he went for it), and a tea bisquit (just to push it over the top). He shared very nicely, lucky for me. The double cream was amazing; it made for some of the best coffee I've had since arriving in Switzerland. A fantastic treat/snack, in a very unusual setting. I was rather amused when it sunk in that this spine-decor bar was playing punk music. "I am the antichrist! I am the antichrist!" The Sex Pistols proclaimed making this experience all the weirder. CF said, "You have to take some pictures, no one will understand this if we just try to tell them about it." I agreed and got out the big camera, which I had tucked away when the mist had turned a little too much to rain outside. I don't think we'd have been so amused by this place if we were at an amusement park like it almost felt... but here it seemed so bizarre that we just laughed and enjoyed warming up for a while. Through the windows I noticed that more people were starting to stream through the tiny street, it appears we were just ahead of the "rush."

There wasn't too much more of the town to see. We did a little window shopping and considered, just for a second, buying a Heidi costume for The Niece. Now, when I had told Ms. D where we were going to end up for the weekend the first thing she mentioned was onion soup. Of course, Gruyere is the cheese melted on top! I swear I could smell it as lunchtime came around. Gruyéres is little more than one long town square, we zigzagged back and forth checking each restaurants' menu for the soup... no luck! Couldn't believe it. Maybe it's a winter thing like fondue? Well, here they were serving fondue year round. We settled for a fresh made ham and cheese crepe. I was surprised they offered Gruyere or Chevre, Chevre was tempting but I couldn't see ordering that in this very town! We purchased some meringues to take home and decided to head back down the hill.

CF noticed there was onion soup on the menu at the restaurant inside La Maison (we'd gone inside so I could borrow the restroom), and there wouldn't be a train for half an hour. When the steaming bowls were brought to our table we couldn't believe our eyes. A mere few shreds of the cheese they were making in this very building were sprinkled on the squares of bread floating on top! "Hey, where's the cheese?!?!" CF gave his homage to Clara Peller. Obviously we weren't going to get the experience we were after. But again: cold day, warm food, good thing. We hurried our server a bit to pay our bill and scrambled off to the train station. I made the lame comment that everything had worked out so well with our weekend despite little to no planning. So it shouldn't come as any surprise that once again my smugness got shoved back in my face... the hourly train skipped this hour on Sundays. Ugh. We wandered around a bit but then just settled in at the station and played with our iPhones. Eventually we got a cute little train back to Bulle and the bus back to Fribourg.

If we had hustled we could have gotten our bags from the hotel and made the next direct train to Zürich. However, since the weather was much better than the previous day and I was armed and ready with my better camera I asked if we could go for another walk in Old Town. We had covered most of the streets already but noticed some interesting details which we had missed from under umbrellas the day before. The city was pretty empty, most of the businesses closed. I forgot to mention in my previous post that I had seen a family emerging from one of the great Medieval buildings, inside I could briefly see a foyer and stairs leading off to divvied up spaces. How incredible to live in a building with such history! Even the Thai restaurant where we had dined was up a narrow and twisted flight of stairs with the bar that seemed practically not related to it at the entrance level.The restrooms had been placed into the odd, almost cave-like spaces between the two levels. Very cool modern uses of historical structures and spaces.

We collected our bags after our walk and head once again to the train station. There were a lot of people waiting with us and it was a mad dash to get a seat. After we pulled away from Fribourg I realized we were in seats that were reserved for someone from Bern to Zürich. The train was packed with families. Sunday is a popular day for travel since businesses are closed. It's nice to see families out and about together but it made for quite a lot of noise and chaos. Across the aisle two Spanish speaking young girls were having their father teach them to count from 1 to 10 in English. They did it over and over again. I thought of CF learning to count in French, something he liked to do while in Belgium last year, and wondered if any French speakers ever had to listen to him practicing. A mild sort of karma. When the train was about to reach Bern we quickly snagged seats that were emptied by people departing there so we got to ride the rest of the way home facing forward and didn't have to change trains at all.

The train station was almost as packed as the train. We found the Marinello in the HB was open and had fresh bread so we selected a pretty loaf. We are sampling our way through different breads. Turned out this one is basically pretzel bread. A funny discovery but it was good. We sauteed up some of the massive amounts of spinach CF had bought at the farmers market having confused one kilo for one pound, and had a little cheese and salami, also from the market. I melted some chocolate and coated some of the meringues with it (a way of serving them that some of the restaurants might have done but we didn't end up dining in Gruyéres besides the bar). CF dubbed them "sugar bombs." We curled up on the couch and purchased and watched another episode of No Reservations. The Berlin episode! Germany got us thinking about going to Munich next month, one of the first things we planned once we knew we'd be here. And I think we were both feeling much more geared up for that adventure now that we had completed such a successful last minute getaway weekend.

Sorry for rambling... it takes me a while to go through all the memories but it's actually faster than trying to edit them down! I probably won't manage to journal everything we do this year, but I thought I could start out with a strong effort! Thanks for reading!

Familiar Ground...

2008-09-15T11:06:00.006+02:00

I think part of my feeling unsettled here has to do with not really knowing what to make of the new situation. It feels familiar, but that's because it feels like travel. I am actually much more used to the traveling than I am to moving. My days in Zurich are a little confusing because internally I'm not sure how I want to behave. I'm sure this will come with time.

However, we just had our first weekend trip and I have to say it was a pretty big success. Overwhelmed with the huge range of options to pick from (when you want to go everywhere and try everything where to you begin?) we had somehow managed to put off planning all week. Friday morning we decided that since we had nothing planned we'd just do a day trip to St. Gallen. Ease into things. But when we really got down to the wire we both knew we could try a bit harder and we decided to try to make a weekend adventure happen. We pulled up recommendations for hotels in Fribourg on the western side of Switzerland, called up NH Fribourg and just like that, at 10pm on Friday, we were going away for the weekend.

Saturday morning we went out and stood in pouring rain for our shuttle bus, scurried into the HB, and easily bought our round-trip train tickets. With our half-price cards we spent about $100. We had planned on waiting a half an hour for the next train that would take us directly to Fribourg, but instead we got the train that would require one change that was leaving in 5 minutes. That's how easy it is, just buy your tickets and get on. I love it. We spent the next hour wooshing through the country, eaves dropping on about every tenth word or so from the Italians across the aisle. A 7 minute stop-over in Bern and we hopped on our next train. Shortly after that we were at our destination. It was still only 10:30am, but the hotel had a room ready so we got to check in. CF had been talked into the upgrade and for an extra 20chf we had a lovely hillside view.

We geared up and headed out to explore the city, rain or well, more rain. The old town section is very lovely, with winding streets and alleyways leading in all sorts of directions, small but still somehow tricky to navigate. We discovered the farmers market was in action. "Just so you know, I am very happy right now." CF told me. The market's offerings were beautiful. Later he would keep talking about how there was a guy selling cheese that he probably made at home from a little card table. Unfortunately the next couple hours were the worst of the weather and the narrow street was filled with umbrellas that seemed to reach under mine and spill their runoff onto my canvas peacoat. Damn it, where is our air shipment? What am I doing here without a raincoat? Stupid. I regret now that we didn't get to enjoy the market more but instead we went inside for some lunch at Cafe des Arcades.

Fribourg is in the French speaking part of Switzerland. We were pleased at how quickly what we knew came back to us, although I guess that's not saying a whole lot so of course it didn't take long. But I think we felt a bit more at ease with our bonjours, mercis, and au revoirs than we do with much beyond grüezi while back in Zürich. I ordered crepes du bacon, each one had 3 strips of bacon cooked right into it. CF ordered a salad topped with chicken, tomatoes and avocado. I'm not surprised that avocado can be grown near here, I expect it was from Italy, but I didn't know if I should expect to see it on many menu items so it was a pleasant surprise. We split our meals half-and-half... and also had an order of frites... we were cold and soggy, what can I say? The rain got a bit worse during our meal, but it actually stopped for a while after our meal.

If you know much about the way we travel you know that if there is a craft-beer option in town then that is where we are headed. Our Lonely Planet book had mentioned a one-room brewery in town run by a couple of friends as a bit of a hobby. We found a lovely view off a very high bridge, the town certainly has a high part and a low part and I made a joke that where we were going was probably down below. As we were walking away from the bridge we saw some people disappeared down some steep stairs and we both widened our eyes at each other. "I kinda want to know what's down those stairs, but I'm worried I'd have to climb back up them." CF confessed. I was worried they'd be slippery in the rain. "Come on, let's go find beer." Well, it turns out, of course, that we were indeed headed down to the lower part of town. We got there by easing down a slanted walkway. But after all that work, we found the brewery closed for renovation. A message was left scrawled on the window, it said something about Saturdays. CF worked on translating it with his new favorite toy, his iPhone. "Ahh! Aha!" He held it up for me to read. It said they were selling beer at the door at the back of the house on Saturdays. We were hopeful, but several tries to find the right door and not wanting to be too pushy led us in circles and we had to give up. Drat!

We settled for a less interesting beer at a pretty interesting local bar that I noticed on the walk back towards the hotel. The interior was all fun pirate themed murals. And then we went back to our room and had a nice nap. That evening we went back out, okay, I admit it, we made one more pass by the brewery, hoping to find some sign of this "must try" beer. Boo! CF had his heart set on some Thai food but they were closed for a wedding party until 7:30 so we went to a bar for another round or two of beers. We paused outside to shake out umbrellas and I thought for just a moment that it was getting dark, it's no longer day. I stepped inside and got a slightly tentative look from the woman clearly in charge. "Bonsoir," I said with a smile, and she replied with the same. I felt rather satisfied and proud of myself for remembering that one as it came out of my mouth. CF stepped in behind me and I started to walk into the bar... and promptly stumbled as I didn't see the step below my feet. Smooth, maybe if I stopped smugly congratulating my puny language skills in my head I could watch where I'm going.

After a beer or two and long enough for the memory of my grand entrance to fade we paid the bill and headed back up the sloped walkway and found the Thai restaurant. We managed our way through the meal with a bit of French, bit of English, tiny bit of German and plenty of pointing. It was very good and we had a very nice time. I had a nice glass of one of my new favorite drink, port, and CF had his usual girly sounding and looking but surprisingly strong cocktail. The waitress giggled when he ordered it. We had some pad thai and red curry pork. The red curry had no coconut milk, this was the second time I've had something recently that I was used to getting drenched in it and found that I liked it just as much without it (the first was a Thai iced tea I had at a popular place in Zürich last weekend). Interesting, the things you can learn when you don't know what you are ordering!

The portions seemed small, but I felt incredibly full. It was also some of the most expensive Thai food we've ever had, but that's Switzerland for you. We declared ourselves properly indulged and decided that was enough for the night. There was cheese to be discovered the next day so we needed to make some room. "I hope this breakfast buffet tomorrow is a lot of coffee and not much else."

Ladies and gentlemen, we have sleep.

2008-09-10T09:31:00.004+02:00

Still quite sneezy and sniffley around here but I almost jumped for joy when I slept from about 10:30 to 4am and then from shortly after that until 7am. That is the most sleep I've had in a long time and it was very sound and restful. Thank goodness! I really was about to lose my mind. This calls for a great breakfast. I finally went out to get fresh bread from the bakery a few doors down and we ate the figs, prosciutto and gorgonzola that we already had. I'm quite in love with the Nespresso machine that was left for us to use. We've already figured out where we need to go to buy the capsules it uses. No wonder this thing sells so well in Europe, it makes some darn good coffee! Ahh! I'm beginning to feel like myself again.

Back to Before

2008-09-09T15:09:00.007+02:00

Whoops! I forgot I was going to post a bit about how I spent my time before leaving.

The day I put CF on a plane to Zürich I went out with some friends in San Francisco. The DP's planned a fantastic outing for KZ and me to enjoy while our husbands were in different countries (PZ was in India). CF and I had actually met up earlier that week with the DP's for sushi in Half Moon Bay and PDP had the idea to go to Slanted Door for dinner on Saturday. Now, I knew KZ had been dying to go there so of course we had to make it happen. The best reservation we could get was quite late but we decided to go for it. We didn't tell KZ where we were going but we guessed it and guessed right. So of course we had to throw her off. We were having cocktails before dinner at one bar and then switched to a restaurant (Can I just say that I will miss the current cocktail trends in SF, basil and lillet blanc seem to be in every other drink!) and told KZ that was where we would be dining. Then when it was time to actually go to the Slanted Door P told her our table was ready and then we ran up the stairs and out the door. She was so confused so we finally spilled the beans. She was sooo excited. It was great fun. Then we proceeded to eat and drink away our cares. You can always tell that I've had far too much to drink when I stop being subtle with my camera. I was snapping away with the flash on. Shameful! It caught up with the me the next day though. I didn't get to enjoy my breakfast until about 3pm when I could finally bring myself to eat more than a few bites. Thanks for a fab time DP's!

Then I headed down to San Diego to visit the Niece and her parents. She is beyond adorable and we had a great time playing with my computer. My sister was a bit terrified with how much I let her touch the keys, I'm sure I'm not making her efforts any easier, sorry L! We ended up on Skype with CF a couple of times and the Niece and he would launch into a hilarious routine of exchanging kisses. This involves him kissing at his webcam so his lips would fill the screen and then she would kiss towards him on the screen, which mean that my webcam could only catch the top of her head. All CF could see was crazy blonde curls fluttering back and forth. Soooo cute! She knows an amazing number of words: names, numbers, colors, etc... and she can read some of them too. And I'm not just being a biased aunt when I say that she is absolutely gorgeous. I think she attracts a lot of attention and people on street like to say "Hi!" in a drawn out, high pitched baby voice. So she's now taken to waving to people and saying "Hiiiiiiii!" with a little voice that sounds something like a southern belle. I'm so glad I got to go spend some time with her before leaving the country. Apparently after I left she was pointing towards their computer and asking for CF, and when she was trying to talk on the phone with my brother she was a bit thrown off by not being able to see him as well. We've already video chatted with her once from here in Switzerland and she did a repeat performance of the kissy exchange and also "beeped" our noses for us a few times. I had noticed in August that she didn't seem phased at all to see CF in the computer, but I wondered if she was a little confused as to how I was there now too. Oh, the things kids' brains have to learn these days!

My last week at home was packed full of socializing and lots of meals out. I got to see a lot of friends and really wrapped up a successful summer of connecting with the people I care about. The Saturday before I went to see UC Davis play San Jose State. The football game didn't turn out the way we would have liked, but it was perfect to get to see people one last time before I left. I just hated the moment it was over and suddenly people turned to me to say goodbye, the thing I had been putting off all summer. Riding back home with the DP's I asked if we could grab some dinner, I had very little food at home. We stopped for a burger, which totally hit the spot and seemed quite appropriate for one of my last meals in the States for a while. PDP said, "That's a big smile, M." "Well, I'm a happy girl."

The day after that my parents and brother came to visit and we went out to my favorite Mexican restaurant, Hola, to celebrate T's birthday. The food was all incredible (we all picked out great dishes), we had lots of good margaritas, we had a great time. The family helped me go through the house and look for any loose ends to tie up. Thank goodness my sister and her family were coming just a few days after I left so they could fix up anything I failed to get done! I had to say goodbye to my parents but T spent the night, graciously sleeping on the couch. We went for a nice walk on the Bay Trail the next day and watched plenty of No Reservations (which by the way, we have been watching via the iTunes Store in the week I've been here, makes me feel right at home!). Then I had to put him on a train back to Davis.

Once I was alone is when all hell broke lose... which takes us back to where the first post I wrote today started. All my readers back at home are going to wake up to a whole lot of babbling to catch up with on their Tuesday morning!

Under the Weather

2008-09-09T13:38:00.004+02:00

We've done a bit better with the weather since that first day. It has rained off and on, but it's also been sunny a good chunk of the time. I think you just have to go out prepared for anything! Yesterday I went out in jeans and socks and carrying an umbrella, jacket and scarf... and it was lovely the whole time I was out. I saw someone in sandals and capris as I headed home and remembered regretting those choices a few days earlier. I'm sure we'll figure out what to wear when. But I also just think we'll have to be good sports about it when we're wrong. The other night we got home from being out most of the day and decided to go back out for some beers just as it started to rain and we went out anyway. I'll admit I regretted it a little when the beers we sampled that night were not really worth the hassle, but I felt better about it when we picked up some bottles to take home from a store in the train station called Drinks of the World. My favorite Belgian was there, Rochefort 8, for nearly half the price it was at home! Shhh! Don't tell them.

I thought I was having some of the worst jetlag ever but it turned out to be a bad cold. I still haven't had a great night of sleep. I don't know if I got it on the plane or running around in the rain, but it's driving me crazy right now. Last night was the worst, I had been feeling better but laying flat out on the bed with one little flat pillow let me only sleep for about two hours before outrageous pressure started building up in my head. I am desperate for a good night's sleep at this point. Blah! The only thing more embarrassing than my mumbling in English here is having to sniffle and blow my nose while I mumble. I'm so ready to dig in now and get settled but I'm waiting until I'm a little less gross to encounter. Hopefully I'll be feeling better enough by Thursday to attend a weekly coffee get-together with the spouses of CF's coworkers. We'll see.

Our street is quite torn up right now, what timing I have! The trams have been rerouted and we've had to walk a little bit further than usual ever since Saturday. I think they meant to have everything put back together again by now but I'm guessing the rain didn't help. The construction workers are giving it their all though, working late into the night and in the pouring rain. I was a little hesitant to like the fact that the trams go right past our windows, but it makes it so easy to go hop on one heading in your direction and now I miss it already. Hopefully they will be wooshing by again soon.

The days following my arrival here have been a bit of a blur. I've unpacked what I have here with me, which isn't much since neither of the shipments have been delivered yet. The air shipment was supposed to beat me here by at least a day! Hopefully that will show up soon and at one point the estimated arrival for the surface shipment was the end of this week.

We've done some exploring of the city and the shopping options. Particularly the food shopping options, you know us. We have been quite pleased with what we've found, there's a bakery just a few doors away and a corner bodega. Not too far in one direction is a Migros and down near the train station (again, not too far) is a large Coop, we like this store a lot. We took a spin through the food offerings from Jelmoli and Globus, which are department stores but the basements remind us quite a bit of Whole Foods. We've spotted an amazing cheese shop and a couple of meat shops. Sure, the prices are steep, but there isn't much we haven't been able to find. I even found a pound of fresh spinach for the same price it would be in California. The dining out options are indeed expensive, but I think we'll have a great time cooking at home.

I am very happy to here, despite having to put a few things on hold until this cold blows over. Saturday we wandered around the city and saw at least twice as many people as I ever saw last Fall. There were also all kinds of festivities going on... street booths, fun bands, demonstrations, and crazy performance artists in ellaborate costumes. A very different Zürich than the one I met before. The apartment is amazing, the high ceilings and windows make for incredible light and the views in every direction are so pretty. We're very lucky to get to live here, CF says everyone is impressed when he tells them his address for the year. I'm just hiding out until I'm a bit more presentable. If we can drown our sorrows in enough vitamin C this week than this weekend we will start on our travel habit. A good one to set for the year!

I'll sign off with this silly band we saw on Saturday. I'm afraid this video doesn't do them justice. We had gone past them already but I went back to see them when I could hear old timey singing, which turned out to be through a megaphone. Soon after I stopped this video they did a whole chorus without actually playing, just doing exaggerated horn movements and then went right back into the song. The showy trombone player appears to be in charge, he started one song with some intense chanting right in the face of a pretty girl who happened to be walking by right then. It was amusing. CF and I both noticed: saxes in front! I looked up their website, which is a little confusing, but found photos of them in other crazy costumes. Maybe we'll encounter them with another look sometime soon.

Welcome to Zürich

2008-09-09T11:44:00.005+02:00

The journey was over but the transition was just beginning. CF's challenge was to keep me awake until at least 9pm. So after the shower and snack it was time to head out and get some errands done. It was a gorgeous, sunny day... something I saw very little of in the week we were here last year.

We walked down the hill to a transit ticket booth, and right away I purchased an annual Zone 10 transit pass, and a half-fare card to discount other travel within Switzerland. Months earlier when I was renewing my passport I had gone to get new pictures taken at The Picture People, a kids' portrait shop at the mall. My old passport still had my maiden name (with an official ammendment in the back that I was tired of having to tell people to turn to) and my photo wasn't even flattering at the time (and weight) it was taken. LN, who I worked with at the store, had used to work for them and she had talked about having to take passport photos and all the rules surrounding them. I figured I stood a better chance of taking a good photo if I went somewhere with proper lighting and camera lenses. It didn't cost too much but the smallest set they sold was 4 photos. I was annoyed to have to buy twice as many as I needed but went with it anyway. The result is now that I have a passport with a photo that gets compliments, I used a third photo to apply for my visa, and upon arriving in Zürich I found a need for the final photo, I turned it in for my tram pass. Nice!

Then we hopped on a tram and rode back up our hill and went to the immigration office to get me registered. I couldn't help but giggle a little bit when they confirmed my "family name." They know how to pronounce it here! That's not even my name anymore but somehow this made me feel like a little bit more of an insider. We even made it over to the bank before they closed. CF had opened a bank account and we wanted to add my name to it. This went a bit lost in translation and we filled out all new paperwork before we all realized that the banker hadn't understood that he wanted to add me to the account he already had. Hopefully we got this straightened out, I'm currently waiting for my cards.

With all of our errands done before 6pm we decided to catch a tram down to the river and walk down to the lake. When we got off the tram I felt the sun beating down on my mostly bare shoulders and scolded myself a bit for not putting on my sunscreen. But in the time that it took to walk to the lake the weather had already started to turn. My arms went cold as the breeze picked up but it also started to feel a bit muggy. I tried to shake it off (as our travel saying goes, but then, I'm not really traveling) and agreed to sit down to some dinner at a fun looking place near the water that CF had been to in July.

Suddenly the clouds all rushed forward, the water went immediately choppy, and the umbrella shielding the man at the restaurant's outdoor grill from falling leaves toppled over onto a customer! This California girl's eye went wide, I have never seen such an extreme change in the weather. We scrambled with our fellow diners into the restaurant. Where no one had been selecting to sit just a minute earlier, all the tables were now full. It worked out quite nicely though, one table for two for us, one long row of tables for the large group, and several four-tops for the families. Everyone went about their business while the staff collected anything from the outside tables that could blow away (which appeared to be everything).

I recalled the moment back at the apartment when I was deciding what to carry with me and CF had said I wouldn't need my umbrella but had then remarked, "Of course, now that I've said that you will." And I had pretended that he hadn't said any of it, a sleepy moment of bad decision making. We enjoyed a salad and pizza while the rain started to come down all around the tiny restaurant. We ordered another round of drinks, hoping to give the rain some time to come up with a break. We took what we could get and scurried off in a drizzle. We caught one tram to Bellevue, the hub of trams that we stayed near last year. The next tram we'd take would basically get us home. So we thought it wouldn't hurt to run into Coop for a little dessert. Just before we entered the store the rain picked back up, drat. Inside we picked out a Lindt chocolate bar filled with caramel and fig (are they selling this in the States?) and I decided to pick out a decent looking bottle of port (I was itching to try some more). We also got some of the official garbage bags that you have to use to put out your trash, CF had bought the wrong ones on his first try. We ran back out to the tram stop and luckily didn't have to wait too long for our ride.

It wouldn't be long before I'd be soaking in a hot bath with the lavendar salts I'd picked up after reading Holly's travel tips on Haus Maus followed by curling up on the huge Italian black leather sofa listening to moody Cat Power music, sipping port and nibbling on cheese, fruit and chocolate. Basically from the moment I found out we'd be coming here, this is what I had been picturing. The only thing standing between me and that perfect scenario was the short distance from the tram stop to our apartment. Months of preparation along with hours of airplane travel and sleep deprevation came down to this. The pouring rain soaked through my sandals, capris and sleeveless top as I ran and a little voice inside my head said: "Welcome to Zürich, always carry an umbrella, dumbass."

The Journey "Home."

2008-09-09T11:41:00.000+02:00

Can I really have been here so many days already?

My last hours spent in the States weren't great. I found myself slightly under prepared and scrambling to get packed. The short time I slept the night before I left was with my suitcase opened on the bed next to me as I hadn't quite got it packed right. I figured I'd head into my flight a bit weary but that would help me get some sleep. I was feeling a bit lonely and nervous as I arrived at the airport, but I perked up a bit when I was reminded at the check-in counter that I could try out their lounge since I was flying business class. The Red Carpet Club wasn't as impressive as I would have hoped, but it was MUCH better than waiting at the gate. I chatted online with a few people and that made me feel a little less alone. I heard the first boarding call for my flight and decided to just go for it. I felt weird, very spoiled, as I boarded without waiting in line. My seat was rear-facing, but I had selected it as one of the last options on an aisle. Not nearly as comfy as I would have expected a business class seat to be! But the amount of space that I had to myself and the fact that the seat went all the way flat made me extremely happy. Thank you, thank you, CF for thinking to put me there.

I spent a good chunk of the flight with my feet up, watching movies and drinking plenty of water. All right, I'll admit to one vodka tonic before dinner and port with dessert. Turns out I love a good port, by the way. I decided to try to catch up on that sleep I so badly needed, but it wouldn't quite happen for me. The flight crew kept bustling by, I wondered if the aisle seat was such a good idea. Oh well, I was extremely comfortable and if no deep sleep came I at least got some good rest. We did hit some turbulence that night, and I am happy to report it bothered me very little. I think I was comfortable enough to stay relaxed. While laying flat in my rear-facing seat I was basically flying head first. I had headphones and a sleep mask on and decided to "pretend" to be sound asleep. Pretend to who, you ask? Ummm, I guess myself!

We landed in Frankfurt a bit early so I had most of three hours to wait for my half-hour flight to Zürich. I managed to find the lounge there and put their espresso machine to work. It was morning now and it was time to stay awake. Eventually it was time to board my second flight, this one was staffed with pretty German blondes and the passengers were mainly businessmen in suits. A rather odd place to find myself! The flight was so short, I was amazed they found time to serve a snack. They pretty much collected our trays as the plane landed. I was in the third row so I was off the plane quickly. A quick peek was taken at my passport, I don't think they even looked at my visa which makes me elligable for temporary residency. I suppose since you don't need a visa to visit they didn't care. I called CF and told him I was in Swizterland, and after about 5 minutes the luggage carousel started to turn. My two suitcases were magically some of the first ones off the plane, I popped them onto a luggage cart and wheeled my way outside to get a taxi. One was waiting right outside the door and he knew our street (it is a large one) so off we went! I was at my front door so quickly that CF hadn't even made it home from the office yet. I found a seat and waited not-so-patiently.

Finally I saw him walking up and jumped up to give him a hug. He showed me inside and I pieced back together the vague memories I had of the building from our visit here last year. Who would have thought I'd be moving in less than a year later? I got a shower and then we had a snack, just as he had promised: fresh croissants and Nutella. I was home.

Here it comes, here I go...

2008-09-02T07:20:00.000+02:00

I am sorry for the silence. There has been so much I could say in the past couple days that I somehow didn't manage to post a thing. Words can't really describe everything going on in my warped little mind right now.

Thank you for a beautiful summer, I set out hoping to spend quality time with the people I love and I am so grateful to be able to say I think I really accomplished that. It seems like forever ago that I left my job but really, I had important business to take care of this summer! Hopefully in the next couple of days I can blog a little about what I've been up, visiting family and prepping for expat life. I will be continuing this blog and considering how much more I write while traveling the content should at least increase in quantity, and hopefully also quality. Please keep in touch, please comment and let me know what you're up to.

Now it's time to drag my sorry behind out of bed, I've only been here for about four hours. I found it hard to feel like sleeping much last night but now I'm hurting. Hopefully it will help me sleep on the plane. I've got to repack my large clothing filled suitcase once again, I managed to move some pieces to my smaller "stuff suitcase" that will hopefully make it not such a tight fit. I'm surprised I didn't have nightmares about my hard-shell suitcase swinging open during travel. I also have a very few things left to do here with the house... things that really I suppose could be done by my family who are staying in my house just a few days from now. But I'll see what I can do.

I'm so excited to see my Classy Fellow again. The past two and a half weeks have flown by, and I don't even miss him that much thanks to the wonders of Skype. But it will be great to see him in person. Last night he said to me, "M, come HOME!"

So here I go... into the adventure, into who-knows-what... I'm ready to jump.

Playing along with The Omnivore's Hundred

2008-08-18T07:42:00.000+02:00

I saw this on Chocolate and Zucchini today, and Clotilde got it from Very Good Taste. The Omnivore's Hundred is Andrew Wheeler's list of foods he thinks every omnivore should try at least once. He made up a little game to go with it: copy and paste the list, bold the items you've tried and cross out the items you would never eat.

My guess was that I'd be right around half and I was right, I think I counted 56 out of 100. There's a number of things I can't remember if I've maybe had, and quite a few things I'm not interested in or would rather not eat but I wouldn't refuse to try. Really the only things I don't think I could handle would be insanely hot pepper, whole insects and roadkill. I'm not sure what I'm more disturbed by with its appearance on the list; roadkill or the Big Mac Meal. And I'd cross off the Big Mac if I really thought I could deny ever having tried it, but that was a long time ago.

Here we go... what's your number?

1. Venison
2. Nettle tea
3. Huevos rancheros
4. Steak tartare
5. Crocodile
6. Black pudding
7. Cheese fondue (last year in Zurich in the apartment I'm about to move into!)
8. Carp (Not sure, but I can't remember!)
9. Borscht
10. Baba ghanoush
11. Calamari (I like it grilled better than the usual fried, chewy dish.)
12. Pho
13. PB&J sandwich
14. Aloo gobi
15. Hot dog from a street cart (Can't say that I remember doing so!)
16. Epoisses
17. Black truffle
18. Fruit wine made from something other than grapes
19. Steamed pork buns
20. Pistachio ice cream
21. Heirloom tomatoes
22. Fresh wild berries
23. Foie gras
24. Rice and beans
25. Brawn, or head cheese (I'd really rather not, but I guess I won't cross it out.)
26. ~~Raw Scotch Bonnet pepper~~ (Not just gross, this would hurt.)
27. Dulce de leche
28. Oysters
29. Baklava
30. Bagna cauda
31. Wasabi peas
32. Clam chowder in a sourdough bowl
33. Salted lassi
34. Sauerkraut
35. Root beer float
36. Cognac with a fat cigar
37. Clotted cream tea
38. Vodka jelly/Jell-O
39. Gumbo
40. Oxtail
41. Curried goat
42. ~~Whole insects~~ (I really doubt I could make myself do it.)
43. Phaal
44. Goat’s milk (Does cheese count?)
45. Malt whisky from a bottle worth £60/$120 or more (I'd love to try some!)
46. Fugu
47. Chicken tikka masala
48. Eel
49. Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut
50. Sea urchin
51. Prickly pear
52. Umeboshi
53. Abalone
54. Paneer
55. McDonald’s Big Mac Meal (Why is this on the list? Weird.)
56. Spaetzle (Also in Zurich)
57. Dirty gin martini
58. Beer above 8% ABV (Hooray for the Belgians!)
59. Poutine
60. Carob chips
61. S’mores
62. Sweetbreads (I'd rather not.)
63. Kaolin
64. Currywurst
65. Durian
66. Frogs’ legs
67. Beignets, churros, elephant ears or funnel cake
68. Haggis (Not interested but I'd try it.)
69. Fried plantain
70. Chitterlings, or andouillette
71. Gazpacho
72. Caviar and blini
73. Louche absinthe
74. Gjetost, or brunost
75. ~~Roadkill~~ (No way, José!)
76. Baijiu
77. Hostess Fruit Pie
78. Snail
79. Lapsang souchong
80. Bellini
81. Tom yum
82. Eggs Benedict
83. Pocky
84. Tasting menu at a three-Michelin-star restaurant. (French Laundry, baby!)
85. Kobe beef
86. Hare
87. Goulash
88. Flowers
89. Horse
90. Criollo chocolate
91. Spam
92. Soft shell crab (Mmmmm, so good!)
93. Rose harissa
94. Catfish
95. Mole poblano
96. Bagel and lox
97. Lobster Thermidor
98. Polenta
99. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee
100. Snake

(A different kind of) Ladies who lunch.

2008-08-06T17:38:00.000+02:00

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!

To flash or not to flash...

2008-07-23T20:09:00.000+02:00

Purchasing certain things after moving to Switzerland would be much more costly than getting them here. Okay, actually purchasing MOST things after the move will cost more. I'm actually starting to brainstorm a "stock up" shopping list for a trip to Target soon, hoping to bring with us little household items and medicines that will be hard to find there. But the big ticket items weighing on my mind right now are a telephoto zoom lens... I believe I have selected which one I'd like to buy, I just would like to find someone who has it in stock so I can try it before buying. And I'm considering two other things that I'm not sure I need: an add-on flash for my Rebel, and a camcorder. I hate flash photography so I generally shoot without it, bless the heart of whoever came up with image stabilization! But I know deep down that it also depends on having the right kind of flash and knowing how to use it. Should I go prepared or maybe just get it later (November) if I decide I need it? The camcorder isn't quite my style but I was thinking it might be fun for more selfish capturing of memories (rather than taking the pretty shots I usually try to entertain everyone with) and might convey even more of the experience to family and friends back at home. However I could just shoot little videos with my point and shoot digital camera. Like the great video of the street band in Lucca... such an easy thing to shoot but it's a precious memory captured perfectly.

If I buy the telephoto lens I have my eye on I will have room in my budget for both these things. But I'm just not sure I need to go there. Any thoughts? Maybe wait and get them when we're back in November if I feel they're needed?

The storm is brewing...

2008-07-23T03:13:00.000+02:00

The other night we made a lovely meal of veggies with a few chili flakes and shredded Parmesan, along with cannellini beans cooked up with some turkey bacon, sun-dried tomatoes and fresh parsley. Delicious and simply, only made better by opening a bottle of the Prime Cabernet that our friend TH made!

I suppose you could call this the calm before the storm. It's not exactly calm but it probably could be considered such compared to the way things will soon be. CF talked to the relocation company today and it sounds like someone will be out on Friday to start to make a plan for our stuff and our shipping container might be packed in as little as a week from now! Yikes! Right now I am itching to throw all our kitchen stuff in there to save room/weight in the air freight for clothes so I don't have to take a bunch of checked luggage with me and have to get it from the airport to the city when arriving. But then we'd have to live here for a month without kitchen stuff. Hmmmm...

I'm too distracted to be too disappointed but there's just about zero television shows I am watching right now. We have a new one though, No Reservations with Anthony Bourdain. I had thought it was a show about eating crazy stuff, and yeah, he does brave a number of things I don't know if I'd be able to stomach. But please note, this is a show on the Travel Channel, not the Food Network. It's about the travel, it's about the place. Watching many episodes so closely together (they're rerunning past seasons as the new one begins) it is easy to notice his repeated themes. One of them I just love, that the quickest way to the heart of a place is in its markets. Yeah, baby! I highly recommend his Paris episode which features some amusing editing while he fights of an absinthe trip in the hotel room where Oscar Wilde died. I was also amused when he pinned a sign over his head while he took a little power nap on an Italian airport floor that read: "Be a traveler, not a tourist." Naive little me, I thought I had improvised the distinction when I protested to KZ somewhere in last fall's adventure that I didn't want to do touristy things. "But you ARE a tourist!" "No... I'm a... traveler!" Oh well, I guess I'm not as brilliant as I thought.

I've made a decision that I will leave the country weighing less than 200 pounds. I've been hanging out just above for far too long. So I'm focusing on portion control and stepping up the running. I ran 5.5mph for my whole half an hour today! That's my best speed yet and I hadn't even managed to do a full 5.3mph before this. Last Friday when I bought jeans at Nordstrom's huge Anniversary Sale I got them from the regular sizes... sure they're 16's and a generously cut brand, and stretch... but hey, it's a mission accomplished. Earlier that day I dropped my platinum engagement ring to finally be resized by a jeweler recommended by Ms. KS. I was shocked to hear I had lost another ring size since resizing my white gold band last year. My ring is going from a 9.25 to a 7.

Jeans were the first purchase I made that day, but it sure wasn't the last. I proceeded to lose my mind at this damn sale. I bought the shoppingsmycardio.com recommended 8ft of cashmere for $65, the black crystal necklace that goes with the earrings I bought at the end of last year, tights, a sweater, a raincoat and a gorgeous handbag. I'd say it's my first respectable purse, but Ms. SMC would probably disagree, but she' d do it nicely. Still, it's nice, soft leather and the perfect size for schlepping an understandable amount of stuff around the city, including my camera when I want to make it disappear more discreetly than a camera case can be. Plus it has nice handles that can go over an arm or shoulder AND a nice long strap for looping around a whole shoulder. Love it. I bought all this thinking I'd take some of it back once the buyer's remorse set in. But it didn't happen. I can't argue against any of this stuff and CF agrees. Thank goodness for relocation bonuses! I ended up getting yet another coat this weekend when we went to another store and CF was taking advantage of the sale in the men's department. This one is wool and super cute. Hopefully this California girl is set to become a Swiss Miss now!

The list.

2008-07-15T18:16:00.000+02:00

Lately our days have been all about "the list." This crazy to-do list we have going as a shared Google document that gets added to about as often as we get to take things off. Our lives have almost completed the shift to being remotely-accessible. Online banking, automatic bill-pay, a spiffy mail service that will scan things back here in the states for us to see over in Zurich, a Skype phone number from our home area code that can ring through to our cellphones... you get the picture.

Right now the two big things facing me are researching and purchasing camera equipment, and finally getting my engagement ring re-sized.

I love my DSLR, and I'm more than happy with the lens I have for it already, but I'd like to get a faster, fixed length lens for indoors/low-light shooting without a flash (oh, but that reminds me, I probably should buy a flash before we go, the built in flash pretty much blows). I'm also hoping to get a telephoto with image stablizition, but I have to decide just how much I'm willing to spend. Another thing to consider is a video camera. I have to imagine there will be times I'd like to capture some video footage in the next year. But considering that this isn't exactly my area of focus... maybe the video function on my little PowerShot is enough? What do you think? Looks like we could spend anywhere from $350 to $650 on a beginner level camcorder. Hmmmm. I have to decide on this stuff now, it'll be much more expensive to buy it there. I suppose I can correct any mistakes in November though if I decide I should have brought more.

And the ring... funny how I was thrilled when it no longer fit. As CF and I lost weight our rings traveled across our hands to larger fingers and then finally we went ringless for a while. It was a sign of our achievements. But now I miss the gorgeous thing that used to adorn my hand. We've both had our white gold bands from India resized, mine's been redone several times, you can see seams aplenty. However, my engagement ring, which was actually the one he put on my hand at our ceremony because I intended to wear it alone, is platinum and I was advised not to resize it until I was done losing weight. Well, I hope I'm not done but I've gone much too long without it. So I'll have them take the size and a half or so that I've lost already off of it and hope for the best if it becomes so loose again that I have to revisit this later.

If anyone reading has a good recommendation for where to have my ring resized, please let me know!

Another follow up.

2008-07-11T19:03:00.001+02:00

Thought I would follow up my other recent post with a few things about Where the Hell is Matt?, aka my sudden obsession. I'm pleased to say that after a half dozen viewings or so I seem to be able to watch it without tearing up. Not so pleased to say that I fulfilled my destiny as a Facebook stalker (CF accused me of being one because I connected with a few of his coworkers there), and in looking for a fan page for the video I ended up finding Matt's girlfriend (there were too many people with his name so I tried hers, she's a credited creator with him, I remembered her name because we have the same first name, stop looking at me like that, what?!?!) and happened to notice she belongs to a certain corporate network there which CF could join, but I can't. Small world, but not surprising. The beautiful song from the video is for sale on iTunes and AmazonMP3 (I plan to add it to my running mix, so I hope I'm over the crying bit). And I was so right about Amsterdam. His website has his journal and the only mention I could find of where they filmed in Amsterdam was a statue. Now, look at this photo I took near our apartment last fall: statue! So then I looked at the little photos from his blog and compared the buildings and it's totally the same place. Oh, I am such a goober.

CF is over in Zurich right now for the week. I showed him the video after he had come in from a night out drinking with his new team. Maybe it was the beer and pizza talking but he seemed darn excited about the video, you know, for CF and anything YouTube and/or internet related.

For your viewing pleasure, here is the fun outtakes video (love the notes that he's added) and also an interview.

The dress.

2008-07-11T17:31:00.001+02:00

No, not a wedding dress. Well, it's a different kind of wedding dress. This is a different kind of post for me, but since let's give it a try.

To answer Meagan's question... because I get asked about that dress a LOT. I wish I could tell it was bought somewhere special for a ridiculous amount of money, but the dress is by Suzi Chin and I got it at Nordstrom last fall. And you're welcome to raid my closet, but it won't be thrilling for too long. It's quite empty. I haven't been able to look at clothes as an investment for the past couple years since it is hard to know how much wear I might get out of something before I get too small for it. So I try to limit purchases to the fantastic. And I've been told I have done pretty well. This dress sure turned out to be a smart purchase, for sure!

I bought two dresses at the time because this one was a bubble skirt and I didn't know if my larger lower half could handle it. But my desire to wear something more interesting won out so I kept this one and the decision has done me well. I first wore it to a high school friend's wedding. One of my friend's wives asked me if it was vintage and the object of my tween years crush complimented it... twice. KS (who was KM at the time) asked to borrow it and wore it to a wedding a week or two later since we're twins and all.

I actually wore that dress to both weddings in June. I enjoy it so much and the guest list overlap was limited to just the two of us. That poor dress got dry cleaned 3 times in 3 weeks! I had never taken it in before and it needed freshening up so it went in before J&M's, and well, it was hot that day so it went back the very next week, and then half a tray of champagne was spilled in my lap at K&R's, so bam, dry cleaning #3. At least since I was already smelling strongly of bubbly I decided I could get away with drinking as much of it as I liked! Oh, and it even threw off K's mom when I was waiting for the ceremony to begin. I saw her looking at me from a distance. I waved and called out, "It's who it always is when you think it's her!" "Oh! Hi there!"

Nordstrom still has it on their web site, but there's only a size 4 left. Anyone? Anyone? I saw the same dress in different fabric at Macy's a few weeks ago. The print was not nearly as cute though, I thought it was a knock-off. It was actually the same brand. I was there helping Ms. TDP pick out a dress, I made her try on the one I would have wanted if I needed a new dress and it turned out to be lovely and flattering when tried on. With all the summer sales going on I don't know if you'll be able to find it in stores still. By the way, we had T in this dress in about 20 or 30 minutes of shopping, she left, I sent a text message to LT at the gym who had asked me to keep an eye out for a dress for her and it turned out she was on her way over right then. So I did a little shopping and came back to the Macy's dress department and had HER in a dress to wear to a wedding in about another 20 minutes. I felt like quite the bad ass personal shopper.

There's a lot of really cute dresses out there right now. You just have to open your mind a bit, and try stuff on before you judge it. Fit is important so you can't judge it on the hanger. But I say the feel is important too. If a dress makes you feel special and spectacular, you will exude the confidence that makes people line up to ask, "Ummm, do you mind if I ask where you got that?"

Bliss

2008-07-10T02:46:00.000+02:00

Last month we went to two very different, but both very exciting and wonderful weddings.

The first was our friends J&M's. Last year when I learned of their engagement I offered to do invitations for them, and I ended up doing place cards and table numbers for them. It was nice to be a part of such a cool wedding. Our circle of friends went through a couple of years with so many weddings I think we got tired of them, it was awful sneaky of these guys to hold out until we were starved for the occasion! Even I, who had claimed to be "so over weddings" after years of wedding design and working with brides, was looking forward to this event for weeks.

Everyone showed up looking so good, even in the heat. The ceremony set the tone for what was a really fun, happy wedding. CF and I sat near the back, a friend of the groom's was playing 80's love songs on piano up front. Three things happened all at once, I couldn't decide what made me more happy between them all, I was overwhelmed with joy. I turned around and saw J&M starting down the aisle together, arm and arm. How appropriate for our favorite long time daters who have already made such a wonderful life together. And she was looking absolutely radiant in a wedding dress of vibrant red satin. Then the piano started pounding out the introduction to Just Like Heaven. I was beaming brighter than I probably ever managed at my own wedding. It was perfection. Sorry to gush.

A moment of eye contact with the bride made me remember where I was, and I think I probably tried to snap a photo with my silly point-and-shoot digital (which I now regretted bringing in place of my baby, the Rebel). The couple arrived at the front of the room and stood there for a long silent moment. Each of them had one honor attendant who scurried over to them, they whispered to each other for a while, apparently I missed the best man's cellphone ringing, and suddenly the bride cried, "WHAT?!?!"

The groom turned to the crowd and simply said, "No officiant!" We all gasped. People had suspected they might pull something like this. Either they were actually already married or they weren't really going to do it... they just wanted the party. Those sitting near me started smiling at each other knowingly. "We've been dating a long time, and would really like to get married today! Soooo... can anyone here do it?"

Long. Pause.

Mr. PZ raises his hand and stands up. It had actually been planned all along, he was legally deputized for the day just as RS was when he married S&SB. Sneaky! P performed a short but sweet ceremony and then it was on to the reception. We all filed out of the small room we had been packed into and people immediately accused me of being in on the surprise! "Ummm no, I just made the place cards, although this explains why they didn't want to do any ceremony programs!" A few people were sure I would have known. Then KZ walked up exclaiming, "Oh my god!" She didn't even know! So there. Someone later declared that if we learned one thing it was that PZ can keep a secret. True.

The next weekend we attended the wedding of my former coworker and sometimes twin, KM... who is now KS! I had been getting rather concerned about her family's involvement with the wedding. Her divorced parents were footing more of the bill than her so she was having a hard time laying down the law when it came to making decisions and compromises. She vented to me over instant messaging frequently and I gave her the best advice I could. I told her to concentrate on what the day was going to mean to her and her husband-to-be. That weddings have the unfortunate habit of bringing out the worst in people and the best thing she could do for people who were letting insecurities get the best of them was to let it go because they were only going to feel bad about it later. And they WILL feel bad about it later. So do them the favor now of just not taking it seriously, if at all possible. I hope I gave her something to focus on. I like to think I helped in some way other than just designing her invitation.

I have to give her major credit. It was gorgeous wedding. A very cool, affordable outdoors venue that had lots of nice visual touches. Plus they added so much to it with K's impeccable planning and execution. It was a more traditional wedding than what we saw the weekend before, but this girl got through all the family drama and had a dream wedding day. I would not presume that my words were what got her through, but watching her smile that day I felt like I had at least been justified.

Both these brides dazzled me with their incredible naturalness. When I spoke to both of them on their respective days, it was amazing to me how they were just themselves. Not distracted, not a bit insincere, and anything but awkward. Thinking about it now I'm still not sure how they did it but I think it has a lot to do with knowing who you are, what you want and what's important. They just dripped happiness and I soaked it up.

The grooms were cool too. But that's more of a given with guys like J and R. ;)

I've learned a lot about weddings in the years since I got hitched to CF. I can't complain too much, but I have to say, there is a lot I would do differently if I were doing it now. I think it's less of a shame that I had to get married in a size 26 (or was it 28?) gown then it is how uncomfortable I was in my own skin. CF and I have grown and changed together of the years... what really counts is that we're happy, healthy and comfortable now. But it's sort of sad that neither of us care much for our rather expensive wedding photos and I cringe at just the memory of video footage of me that day. If we ever have the opportunity for a do-over, I'm taking what I've learned from all the weddings we've been to since and all the confidence and clarity that have come to me in the years since and you will just have to wait and see what happens!

Suddenly obsessed with Where the Hell is Matt?

2008-07-09T19:36:00.000+02:00

You might have heard of this video, I had, but I just watched it for the first time today when a blog I just subscribed to mentioned they found themselves strangely moved by it. This was a theater and dance blog, not a travel blog! So I decided to see what it was all about. The editing is great, the set up is perfect: handing the camera to someone else, we're not sure if it's a stranger or a friend (if I read up a bit I bet I would find out but I'm going with gut reactions here). The dancing is goofy, yes, but a moment later when the setting changes I pretty much stopped even thinking about the goofiness. The transition is great, Matt stays in pretty much the same spot but he's gone from India to Bhutan. You think you've pretty much got the video all figured out at this point? Just keep watching. There's so much more. Plus, I notice something new every time I watch it. Like just now I noticed the dog dancing with him in Kuwait! Matt gets some company just before the one minute mark and there are flashes of several recognizable locations (San Francisco! Paris! Chicago! These were the easy ones for me.) that are given their front and center moment throughout the rest of the video but it gives the viewer a little jolt. I told you there's more to it. Now is when a few themes start to present themselves: Happy huge crowds, jubilant children, a few strangers that may have just been in the right place at the right time. Dublin! I bet that's Saint Stephen's Green... see the little ankle height "fence" to keep you off the grass? I love the kids in the Solomon Islands, who out-dance Matt. Hey, Munich! I'm going there! Cool. My absolute favorite moment is when Matt joins the choreography of the scene around the 2:35 mark. This is when I started to get chills. I love the transition from Bethesda Terrace in NYC to a very similar yet oh-so different structure in Tokyo. Lemur Island, hilarious!!! Remind me to look up where that was in Amsterdam, it looks like the bridge on the Singel canal near our apartment, but who knows? Brussels into San Francisco... I am such a goober, I started to tear up. The world is such a huge and small place. I love how you get see a vibe from a place from the way the people there danced. Cologne in front of the Dom into one of the few sights I got to see in Singapore... *sigh* totally starting to cry and it's so silly. Space-Monkey--you better make it to the 3:52 mark!

I've watched this video a couple of times this morning and the effect is the same every time. I don't know what it all means but I've been looking for meaning in what I'm about to set off into the world to do... and I can tell this relates.

I just wanted to share... I hope you enjoy it. (If you go to the actual YouTube page there is higher quality viewing available with a click at the lower right corner of the picture.)

The Countdown Begins!

2008-07-03T17:15:00.000+02:00

Yesterday was the two month mark, I have a ticket booked for Zurich on September 2. We've done a lot of preparation already, but there is still an amazing amount of work to be done. I'm so grateful to be unemployed right now so I can work on all this stuff now instead of scrambling at the last minute. I have also been spending lots of time with friends and I'm having a blast. It will make it all the harder to say goodbye in 8 weeks, but lots of great memories have been forming.

I had finally decided to stay behind in the states after CF heads to Switzerland on August 16. My sister had been planning on visiting with her family at the beginning of September since before all this Europe adventure stuff came along and I wanted to be here for them. Plus the first couple weeks are going to be crazy as CF gets settled in at work and takes over for HK before he heads to Sydney. Originally my sister had asked me about our brother's birthday weekend... but somewhere along the way I had started to think we had discussed Labor Day weekend. You see, the two are usually the same. CF was itching to get airfare booked so I decided I would leave the day after Labor Day itself. He did the sweetest thing for me. Remember how I am super scared of flying? Well, at least of turbulence? The biggest drawback for me to fly to Europe after him was the thought of riding out a storm alone. I should mention, part of me deciding to stay behind two weeks was me wanting to do something that scares me. Just to see what will happen. Well, even if I'm scared to tears I will be crying much more comfortably because CF went and booked me a business class ticket. I am actually looking forward to the experience now because of that!

Ah, but here is where the "whoops!" comes in. My sister and her family were coming to stay with me because her husband bought tickets to all three concerts Dave Matthews Band is doing in Berkeley that weekend. That weekend that is my brother's birthday... NOT Labor Day weekend. I'm booked to fly out a couple of days before they will be arriving. This was so frustrating! I felt ridiculous for going and buying a ticket without confirming the plan with anyone, CF was already a little bit antsy about being alone in Europe so long and he did not want me showing up any later than already planned, but I didn't want to leave my sister hanging and miss out on a visit, and besides if I wasn't going to be here for their visit than the whole point of me staying behind was lost. ARRRRRRRGGGHHHHHH!!!

Well, I've calmed down a bit now and remembered that with "opportunities of a lifetime" you have to make compromises. Moving my ticket would cost a good chunk of extra money, plus CF started suggesting that I couldn't live without him for longer than 2.5 weeks (I think he means he can't live without me, but whatever). So right now the plan is to leave that plane ticket alone and I'll go down to San Diego and visit the Life Breaking In crew after CF departs for Europe. The plan isn't perfect, but I think it will do. And yes, DS, I will give you a key and you can use the house for your Berkeley weekend. How funny to think it will be occupied so soon after I leave!

This weekend CF is actually heading over to Zurich for a week to start getting things ready. I'll be heading up to the North Bay for Mr. PZ's birthday party and then I'll drive to Davis for a little more time in my hometown, for what could be the last time for quite some time. Also in upcoming plans, a visit from my parents and grandparents (we're hoping to get out to Half Moon Bay for a visit to Sam's Chowder House), dinner at Chez Panisse with CF's side of the family (the upstairs cafe this time which did indeed look much more inviting than the downstairs restaurant turned out to be, we should have listened to the advice), CF's finally taking his scuba lessons (the last weekend of this will include a trip to Monterey so I'm going along so we can visit expecting mommy and daddy SL and BL, and also DH and family), then we're having a big going away bash for ourselves... like we needed an excuse to plan one last party before we go! So it's going to be crazy times from here on out. Hope we can keep our heads on straight.

Besides all these fabulous plans we also have to continue with our efforts to make our lives more transportable. We're in the middle of switching to an online bank and we've taken out a credit card with no foreign transaction fee and a good conversion rate. I've renewed my driver's license most of a year early as it would have expired while we were gone. My reward for being so proactive was having to take half the written test with no warning! Turns out the test is much more ridiculous than I remember and includes such passive aggressive notes as:

"Q: Driving slowly in front of traffic in the far left (fast) lane on any freeway... A: Can frustrate other drivers and make them angry."

I got 100% on the test, got to take a new photo so at least it will look more like my current self, and I got to give them a whole new lie about my weight (what it current says used to be a lie because I weighed more but for quite some time now I've weighed a good deal less than what it says).

I was about to send my passport in for early renewal as well, had new pictures taken and everything, but CF is applying for our visa/s today and doesn't know if they will be attaching something into my current book or not. I'm hoping not so I can use my new photos and get a passport that actually says my current last name, not just as an amendment on the very last page. So much paper work! Photos here, signatures there... again, so glad to have the availability to be doing this now instead of scrambling for the time and cutting it close just before we go.

I spent most of yesterday updating accounts with credit cards and other billers. Giving everyone the credit card number we'd like them to bill from now on, giving our PO box mailing address (a swell service CF signed us up for that will scan the outside of envelopes we received and make that available to us online and then we can tell them if we'd like them to open it and scan the contents for us or not, fancy!), and updating our telephone number to the only one we have right now that will be staying with us: our Skype phone number! Our cellphones and home phone will soon be getting canceled. This number we can answer on a computer or forward to our new mobiles or home line. It's a US number too so it's cheaper for friends to call us this way.

If you have a web cam and microphone though I'd like to suggest signing up for a free Skype account and we'll get connected. Video conferencing is here and now, folks! My parents marveled as CF and I sat on the couch and had a chat... with him on our couch at home and me on my parents' couch in Davis a couple weeks ago. The world is getting smaller and smaller!

So anyway, as you can see we're getting through it all but there is a lot to be done before we take off. I remain excited but the whole thing seems much more real now and the responsibility of it all, all the organization and what not, is a pretty big burden. But I'm not complaining... it's just part of taking an opportunity of a lifetime!

Antoinette Perry Awards...

2008-06-10T01:46:00.000+02:00

Better known as the Tony's. They're happening this weekend, which is always fun, but even more fun is the new tradition that Mr. MP and I have developed over the past couple years. Step one, go up the hill to Hola and drink one or two of their large (and delicious) margaritas. Step two, get home safely and then proceed to watch the highlights of the award ceremony. Brilliant!

The show to look out for this year is Passing Strange. I'm wildly jealous that MP saw it while in NYC this year. He was my plus one when I got free tickets to see it in Berkeley, where it started two years ago. We drove up to Berkeley and had delicious momos at Cafe Tibet on University, then walked around the block to Berkeley Rep and found we were the first to arrive. It was a Yelp Elite event and they were just getting going, so we got the first set of free tickets. Then we spent a little time at the wine reception they had set up just for us Yelpers and got to hear a little bit about the production. Basically they were concerned that the Berkeley Rep audience was well, a little old for this show. They wanted the younger crowd so they plied us with free tickets so we'd go home and talk about the show to all our friends.

Turns out getting there first paid off, best I could tell we got this random set of amazing second row practically center seats while most of the Yelp crowd sat off to the side and towards the back. We had Stew, the writer, star and narrator of the show, right in our faces. We rocked out for the next couple hours. It was a great show but we agreed the second act was a bit long and needed a little more point. So I was pleased to hear it did well Off-Broadway last year, and I was so curious how the show might have changed. It opened on Broadway this year and while it's been well reviewed, I have heard mixed things about how well it's selling. Though Mr. P says it was full when he was there. He also reported the show was tightened up and his non-theater going friend who went with him loved it as well. Hooray!

It just might be Best New Musical... which would put MP and I on a good track record considering we saw Spring Awakening before it really hit big last year.

(Sorry this wasn't here when this post first went up!) Here's a medley from The View... hopefully there will be some better footage soon.

By the way, MP was spending the night at our house in Belmont after the show since we had driven together and it would chop his commute down the next morning. In the toll plaza on the Bay Bridge at almost exactly midnight we had a bizarre encounter. The booth attendant asked if we were married and of course we said no. I can't remember if I was wearing a ring at the time, there was a point where I just went without because they didn't fit due to the weight loss. But I also didn't want to proclaim that I was married just not to him... it suddenly seemed scandalous to be passing into the city at midnight with a man who wasn't my husband. The attendant protested and implored for a proposal... and even promised us a son if we'd get married within the year. We laughed our way home and found "our boy" CF at home waiting for us.

Anyways... here's some great clips from past Tony Awards. Selecting the right number must be really hard. I hate when they try to do a medley of half the songs in the show. It just never works!

Here's Kristin Chenoweth doing My New Philosophy, I believe this was the first time I saw her in anything. It should be noted that just after this number she claimed her Tony in an evening gown and long blond hair, she announced, "I've never gotten changed so fast in my life!"

Here's the first part of Rent I ever saw.

Julie Taymore brilliance from The Lion King

*SIGH* The Spring Awakening kids get totally censored. Please note, after Totally Fucked, MP said to me, "Well, that'll be a good one for the Tony's!" Or did I say it to him? I don't know. This isn't my favorite footage from the show but it fits my Tony theme.

I couldn't delete the Tony's from my Tivo for months because of this.

Check out Sara Ramirez hot off her Tony win earlier in the evening.

OK... I'm cutting myself off. There's so many good ones!

Flickr watchers...

2008-06-08T18:50:00.000+02:00

You might notice a change in how I'm displaying photos. I've organized most of my "sets" into Collections: Friends, Family, Travel, Food, etc...

I'm wondering how well it will work when I post a new event (like M&J's upcoming wedding).

Let me know if you hate it.

By the way, there's new scans from the archives.

My own worst enemy...

2008-06-05T17:51:00.000+02:00

Am I the only one who immediately thought of scrumptious sweets from Paris when seeing this book cover? Please tell me I'm not the only one!

Recently while struggling through one of my assignments for writing class (Who knew I would struggle for content? I though I had such great stories to tell!) I found myself reading through posts from earlier in the year and saw my New Year's resolution: "Be good to yourself." How are we doing on this?

Things were going great until recently. I made it through the two month running program, managed to get brave enough to quit my job and was then rewarded with the opportunity of a lifetime: a year living in Europe. Then the appendicitis got me and I went through a rough patch.

I joked recently when talking at work about quitting and going to Europe for a year that I don't deal with change very well so I like to get it all over with at once. Kind of like the year that I quit my steady job, moved out of my hometown, traveled internationally for the first time and got married (I went to the doctor and told them everything that happened said I was worried that I was depressed, they replied, "I'm impressed you're still standing after doing all that!"). I guess I needed to get a little bit more in this round so, like I said, appendicitis struck and I found myself suddenly unable to do the two things I'd been spending most of my time on: working and working out. I went from an extremely social work setting, I interacted with probably hundreds of people a day, to being stuck at home not wanting to move for a good chunk of a week. At first I was a little bit outraged, I was robbed of my closure! But I'm looking for lessons and signs in life right now. What can I take from the way things played out? The message I hear is, "Get over yourself and move on." I had decided to work a full month after giving notice only to have my body cut it down to the standard two-weeks. It was time to go. I had these grand ideas of somehow passing on some sort of wisdom in the store, but the truth was it probably wasn't going to make a big difference, get over yourself and move on. So my ego had some healing to do along with my body.

At first the plan to go to Europe was exhilarating. Then I was distracted for a while by the quick changes in my present situation. By the time my attention came back around to what the year has in store for us the month of May was pretty much over. After a fantastic camping trip (yes, that's right, I had a good time but hey, it included martini glasses filled with pink cocktails and I got to shower in the middle of it), Ms. D departed for her summer in Alaska. I was sad to see her go, I won't see her again in person until November. The day she actually left I was struck down with thoughts of what it's going to be like to have to say goodbye and leave three months from now. I freaked out, I cried, it was all finally sinking in. I'm scared out of my mind. I still know it's the opportunity of a lifetime. Moving five years ago broke me down for a while, but I came out of it stronger and better. This will likely to do the same and could crush me harder than ever, but will the rewards be that much greater?

I wallowed it in for a few days and then somehow woke up last Saturday knowing that it was time to pick myself up and dust myself off. CF was on the same page with me. We have been tightening down on the diet habits, each of us determined to head to Europe as fit as possible. Some women would be horrified if they got within 15 pounds of their husband's weight, but they'd probably still be lighter. I am the heavier of the two, but I have never in the long fifteen years been so close to his weight. Of course the moment he started paying attention to what he was eating the pounds started falling off of him right and left (men!), I've got my work cut out for me trying to keep up. I eased back into exercise with an hour walk up our hill and then managed to get a little running done at the gym. Tomorrow I have my first appointment with LT since the morning she basically diagnosed my appendicitis and told me to call the doctor. I expect to her to kick my butt back into shape in no time.

Congratulations, if you've made it to this point in the post then you get to help answer an embarrassing, tough question I was asked recently. The life coaching sessions, which I originally purchased to help me find career goals, have become more about being an authentic, complete individual. I agreed to a semi-cheesy visualization exercise that involved visiting myself twenty years from now and led to some surprisingly clear revelations. It was just before Memorial Day so I had friendships on the brain, but before she even asked who else was around when I visited my twenty-years-from-now self I knew certain friends were there. It felt really nice. But then I hit a snag, "What do they call her? If there was a nickname you can hear if she walks back into the room?" "Ugh, knowing my friends it's something about Fabulous." Why ugh? I don't know. I put the word in my own darn subtitle and yet it makes me cringe. I try to laugh it off. I start to wonder what it means... am I superficial, vain, prissy, delusional, shallow? I think it's mostly said as a compliment but I often feel somehow scoffed at or chided and it leaves me wanting to yell, "There's more to me than just that!" But I know there's good stuff behind the label as well. Funny thing is, this is something that's really come out of the last several years. No one called me Fabulous when I was pushing 300 pounds. I know it's related to my self-confidence increasing, and yet it's ahead of where I am now. I don't have the confidence to carry this label with pride yet. So I need help in figuring out what it all means, can I let go of the silly side of it and embrace the truly fabulous? Any advice would be much appreciated. No rush though, I've got twenty years to learn how to "own" it.

Salty Sweet Gal

2008-06-01T01:23:00.000+02:00

Those of you who also keep an eye on my Flickr photostream probably saw this coming...

I believe I discovered the deliciousness of sweet and salty combined in a large bag of kettle korn at the Davis Farmers Market, many years ago. The next big step was the olive oil gelato at Otto in NYC. Drizzled with a little more olive oil and sprinkled with just a touch of sea salt, it was so good that it led me to the awful habit of doing the same with almost any flavor of ice cream at home. But I think the ultimate sweet and salty dessert is the classic French decadence, salted butter caramel. I can't quite remember when I first tried it, but it's a favorite of mine to order at specialty chocolate shops like CocoaBella at the San Francisco Shopping Center, and I tried a number of things with this flavor while in France last fall. I'm not sure if I could pick a favorite between the macaroon at Pierre Hermé and the ice cream Berthillon.

Much like the scones, I've had it in the back of my mind for a while to try to make some caramels of my own. So when I went out for scone ingredients I also picked up caramel supplies, including a candy thermometer. It was actually while searching for caramel recipes that I discovered smittenkitchen.com, my new favorite food blog that also inspired me to take photos while cooking. I decided to try Deb's chocolate salted caramels recipe from her "salty and sublime" post, as well as epicurious.com's more classic fleur de sel caramels. So one night when CF was out late with a friend, I decided to make some candy.

The process was easy enough. Basically you prep the cream in one way or another, either melting and mixing the chocolate into it or just butter and sea salt. Then you get sugar, light corn syrup and a tiny bit of water boiling. The sugar starts to caramelize and turn a deep golden color, and then you add the cream. The reaction of bringing the two together is quite impressive, it bubbles and steams wildly! Then you keep it on the heat until it reaches a certain temperature. Aha, there's the problem. Getting the temp right was very tricky. The tip of the thermometer has to be in the mixture far enough, but not too close to the bottom of the pot. And then you want to be stirring it but the thermometer is in the way. And if you stir too much, the temp will never climb to where you need it to be. Add to this the fact that I had my burner on much lower than I would eventually realize works best, well, the first batch didn't come out so good. I think I was overcompensating for the warnings from Deb at smittenkitchen.com. Her first batch came out too soft because she didn't heat it to high enough a temp. I made sure mine hit the right temperature, but uh oh, was it actually still climbing? Once I got it poured into a pan I figured out pretty quickly that it was solidifying, I managed to cut it up into little pieces, but I ended up with candy that reminded me of those Sees Candy chocolate pops. Boo!

I also burnt my hand on the tip of the candy thermometer when I put it down, oddly enough, metal objects that were in boiling liquids end up very hot! And my response to the burn splashed a little of the hot stick chocolate on my hand as well Ouch! I wasn't quite sure how I felt about candy making at that point. I had wasted the chocolate, but I had supplies to try the other recipe. I reread the recipes and figured out that I had cooked the first batch way too long, and decided to try it at a higher temperature than suggested. This batch went much better! It still went a little on the solid side, but I was feeling all right about my abilities at that point.

CF still wasn't home, and thanks to the wonders of his wireless internet card (it's like a cellphone connection for your laptop) I had a little chat with him while he rode home on BART. I decided with the remaining cream I had I would try one more batch of the plain caramels. I turned up the heat even higher, cooked it all even faster... and they came out just right. Yes!

After a trip to the store to replenish supplies I was able to try the chocolate caramel recipe once again (a day or two later). It's a little trickier than the other recipe still, but I put what I had learned to use and things went rather smoothly. In this recipe the butter and sea salt are added at the last minute. The first time I tried it my hard candies ended up sort of greasy, I thought the butter didn't get incorporated because I had solidified the mixture too much already. But it turns out it's just hard to get it stirred in no matter what. So I stirred that pot with all my might and managed to get it to come together. I think I was a little overanxious on the temp though, I didn't get these quite hot enough, so they're a little soft. The chocolate recipe is extremely decadent. It's sugar, cream, chocolate, butter and salt... so what did I expect? I did heed another one of Deb's warning and did not put the salt on the outside of the caramel. The salt getting added right as the end led to flakes of salt crunching as you eat the caramels. Salt lovers will enjoy it, for some people it might just be too much of a good thing.

Cutting my 8"x8" pans of caramels down into bite sized pieces and wrapping each one individually (otherwise they tried to reattach themselves to one another) took a good amount of time as well. One of the most annoying things was trying to get nice squares of waxed paper off the roll, I'm guessing there are pre-cut wrappers out there somewhere, I'll track those down before I try this again. I ended up taking three batches of salted caramels on our annual camping trip. Thank goodness I had twenty friends or so to help eat all these candies! Thanks guinea pigs!

On to happier things aka: When life gives you lemons...

2008-05-20T19:49:00.000+02:00

...make some limoncello and lemon-blueberry scones!

Here's the limoncello that Ms. D and I started last week just as the appendicitis started to hit. I hope that doesn't somehow make it sluggish! It's just about ready to be bottled and it will be good for drinking all summer. It's tasty by itself but also quite refreshing mixed with sparkling water. I plan to try it muddled with both mint and basil (at different times). Care to join me for a drink?

There are many different recipes out there. I pretty much follow the one I got out of a Giada deLaurentiis cookbook. I steep lemon rinds in vodka for about four days, add simple syrup for another day and then take out the rinds, bottle it up and let the flavors set in the fridge for a week to a month. The longer the better!

Yesterday I made a fantastic discovery. I found myself in the mood to bake or cook, maybe since I'm stuck at home and also because I know I'll be doing a lot of it once we're in Zurich. A recipe search led me to a brilliant food blog. And I am now quite smitten with smittenkitchen.com. Deb's writing is fun and her photography is great. I'd like to think it's the food blog I'd have if I could focus my scatterbrain enough on one topic!

While I did gather one project from reading up on her site, I decided that my baking mood was inspired by the less than stellar store bought ready-to-bake scones we had made that morning. So I decided to surprise CF with fresh baked real scones by the time he got home! I emailed mom (by the way, please check out her fantastic blog here) because I was pretty sure she'd have a favorite recipe. Sure enough she had the perfect simple scone recipe, and it even came with an article explaining the short process of making them. She scanned the two pages and emailed me jpegs. I got slowed down by the fact that I needed to pick up ingredients, so I pulled myself together and headed out for my first post-op solo adventure. It went all right, but my belly was sore once I got home. I was glad I needed to freeze a stick of butter till solid, so I didn't have to start baking right away.

The process was pretty darn easy once everything was ready. Flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, salt mixed in a bowl. I grated the butter (hence the need to freeze it) into this mixture and added the dried fruit I had picked up from the store. I had decided on lemon blueberry since I was on a lemon-roll. So I also zested two lemons into the mixture. Then I wisked a little sour cream with one egg, and that gets folded into the dry mixture. A little working with the hands and the dough comes together. I pressed it flat, sprinkled with a little extra sugar, and cut it into triangles. I lined a baking sheet with parchment paper and popped them in the oven. I cleaned the very few dishes I had dirtied, and then settled into rest in my favorite spot of the week, the chaise.

I just about squealed when CF came home right then. "Ohhh, you are going to love me!" I informed him. "I already do." Awwww. When he saw what I had going in the oven though he asked, "Are they for dinner?" "No." "Well, I *was* going to love you!" Harumph!

Instead we had them for dessert. And they are pretty darn good, if I do say so myself! We also had them for breakfast. I'm tempted to have one now for lunch! Oh dear, the problem with baking is then there are baked goods in the house! Well, it was sure fun and well worth it.

Thanks, mom!

Not what I signed up for... continued.

2008-05-20T16:37:00.000+02:00

Once the ER doctor had declared the need for an appendectomy I became the hospital's problem. I thanked Dr. MacGregor and Caitlin profusely as I tried to fill out paper work (I handed some of it off because the damn IV in my right arm was making me not want to use it). I wonder how many people come through the ER really willing and/or able to thank them. I had felt kind of bad as CF and I sat there giggling while people were rather miserable all around me. This experience was a weird one!

So up and over to the hospital. They wheeled me into the short-stay unit where I met a great little team of nurses. Eileen and Mary were brash and loud and a whole lot of fun. Well, maybe it was just Eileen but she had enough fun to go around. I impressed them all by getting up out of my ER bed to walk over to my new one. CF was given a chair and we were left in a small "room" enclosed by a curtain. Various in-laws called CF's phone. "No mom, you shouldn't come here, we're inside a curtain and besides, you shouldn't ever set foot in a hospital unless totally necessary." (Long story.) My chemist brother-in-law grilled CF on what they had done, what they were doing, and what they planned to do. It seemed rather comical, but just in case I also confirmed with CF that BIL did approve. When twin brother-in-law called CF teased him, "We're sorry, you're the last W to call." "That makes him the winner!" "Oh, I've been informed that you're the winner, congratulations." I can't blame them for reacting more strongly than my family. They've had a lot more experiences with hospitals involved and most of them unhappy ones.

Warning, if you don't want to hear about my underwear than skip this paragraph! I was informed that if I wanted to keep my underwear I'd best not wear them into surgery. By the way, I thought about regretting my choice of polka dots on purple but decided it helped to keep things light and fun since so many people were getting to see them. Mary said she'd take care of me, and brought me a fun pair of white boyshorts. I got the IV hanger with wheels set up so I could walk down to the bathroom. Looking for a place set my own undies as I cautiously got changed I couldn't find a single surface I wanted to use. I looked up and decided to hang them on my new friend, the IV hanger. This is where I discovered the hospital issues underwear resembled white fishnet. Sassy! Then I started to go for the door, but luckily remembered the lovely polka dotted flag I had flying up over head. Hadn't enough people seen them already today without me putting them on display like that? I grabbed them down and headed back to bed. Hmmm, fishnet underwear, not comfy to lay on.

Bless his heart, CF knows how to keep me distracted. He had brought his laptop and wireless internet card. So there we were online in the hospital bed. "Let's change my Facebook status! That'll be hilarious!" And that's when it hit me. Obviously I wouldn't be making it to DD's last spin class the next morning. Damn. CF helped me email him. "Looks like I won't be making it to your last spin class tomorrow morning. Also looks like I had appendicitis in your class yesterday morning. I'll miss you!" I hoped he'd find it amusing. CF had talked to the girls at my store and they had started clearing me off the schedule. He had also emailed a bunch of our friends. The subject of the email was just my name. Later Ms. JH would complain to me that he shouldn't be sending out emails titled as such, she thought I was dead. Not yet, dear!

The anaesthesiologist came in to introduce himself. Now, they had put me on a scale for a second when I came in, so maybe he had looked at my chart and decided to flatter me. Or maybe it's a good thing he checked with me, because he asked if I weighed about 150. "Oh dear, no!" That's what I said! I wish I had taken any drugs at that point that I could blame that sort of language on. I set him straight and he went on his merry way. Eventually the surgeon himself paid me a visit to explain what was going to happen. The surgery would be attempted laparoscopically. Meaning no big incision, just three little ones, one at my belly button and two lower. He went through all the information which led us to the surgery and what my options were. I imagine this is because people have been awful about things after the fact saying they weren't told what was going on. He really did fill me in on everything going on. He told me, they could still be wrong at this point. They could get in there and the appendix could be fine. He was going to take it out anyway since he was already going to be in the area. But then we'd be back to square one with the pain. "You really don't even look like someone with appendicitis, even acute."

"It's so nice to have a healthy patient!" Everyone in the operating room nodded to agree with whoever had just said this. This was the second point in the day that I started to get a bit upset and scared. I hate the moment just before the bad stuff goes down. The anaesthesiologist informed me he'd be giving me three drugs and what each one would make me feel. I got distracted for a second by them putting my arms out to the side and then I turned my head back to him and said, "Are we already on to the second drug?" "I've already given you all three." "Oh good, because wooaaah! I thought for a second..." and that's where I black out, trying to make a joke about being a lightweight.

My eyes opened. The moment seemed a little too familiar. Like waking up after a night of too much drinking. Oh god, what did I do? Oh no, now I'm going to feel like crap. I whimpered a little, finally miserable, it had taken all day. Tina, the Recovery nurse, came to check on me. She asked if I was nauseous or in pain. How was I supposed to know? I could barely see or think straight. I told her maybe a little bit of both just to get her off my case. "Was it appendicitis? Was it infected?" I had suddenly remembered that this was left a bit up in the air. "I can't tell you that, the doctor will come talk to you." Well that sucks. Now I'm miserable and uninformed! She told me just to breathe and wiped the gunk out of my eye (they put stuff in there to keep them from drying out). I concentrated on some long yoga breaths, thinking it might help me relax, I was in hell! A machine started beeping wildly and she told me to breathe faster. Funny, it didn't like my yoga breathing. I don't know how long this went on but every time I slowed down into nice relaxing breaths the machine yelled at me. "Can I move my legs? My back is really uncomfortable." "Yeah, it's great if you can move." I just wanted to make sure I wasn't going to hurt myself, I used my legs to flatten my back out, whatever I was laying on had no give to make room for the booty. "Do you at least feel better now?" she asked me. "Umm, no, I was just a little uncomfortable when I got here this morning and now I'm miserable!" I think I offended her. Sorry Tina.

Eventually they wheeled me out of Recovery and I saw CF. I grilled him and found out that the doctor had indeed said that my appendix looked infected. Whew! I had to wriggle over from the gurney to my hospital bed. It was a struggle but it was well worth it. The sun hadn't even set, the view from my room was actually quite lovely and reminded me that I wasn't too far from home. I have neglected to mention that my legs had been plastic wrapped most of this rather hot day. When in bed they hook the wraps up to a machine that inflates and deflates them, to massage and prevent blood clots. I had been annoyed as they made my legs sweat, but that night they felt really good. CF stayed for a while longer and read me emails from concerned friends. My nurse, Gwen, told me to get some sleep and then try to go for a walk, but I felt bad sleeping while he was there since he was going to go home for the night. He went home around 9. I sent my father a text message thanking him for sleeping upright in a chair the night I was in the hospital at age 12. I was fine being alone tonight though. I watched a little television, but was annoyed with the lack of Tivo features. Finally I went to sleep.

I woke up a little after midnight. I was roasting hot, why had they put this blanket over me? I got rid of the offending extra warmth and wondered if it was too late to go for that walk. I pressed the button to call for a nurse. Micoy was on duty now, he said I didn't have to walk tonight if I just wanted to sleep. I told him I hadn't eaten anything since 7am. "Oh wow! Well, what sounds good? I have jello, pudding, crackers." "Yes." Awful jello and unsalted Saltines have never tasted so good. After a nice little snack I decided just to go back to sleep.

The next morning I decided it was time to walk. Micoy was a little distracted, "Ok, go for it." I was barefoot and my hospital gown was not tied in the back. I decided to just go with it and grabbed the back and held it close. "Oh, you need some socks! Why didn't you get those last night?" "I was hot!" So at least my feet were covered. I made it about one step out the door before he realized I was holding on for dear modesty. "Oh, let's get you another gown for the back!" So now I was on track, and I went for my little walk. Right around the corner was labor and delivery. I didn't want to get in the way, and didn't want to get lost, so I turned around and came back. I didn't know it at the time but I saw my next nurse, Kristin arrive. I did a few little laps and went back to bed. I ate a bland but much appreciated breakfast sitting on the edge of my bed. CF joined me and we waited for the doctor to come give me the green light to go home.

It was a couple of hours and another walk before he came by. "Ready to go home?" You betchya! Kristin gave me some instructions and a vicodin for the road. She sent CF to get the car and together she and I walked out of the hospital. I thanked her, and sent good thoughts of thanks to everyone I had come into contact with in the last 24+ hours. Everyone was so nice, so helpful. I hope they get appreciated enough.

When I got dressed Wednesday morning I didn't say to myself, "I think I'll have me some surgery today, I'd be dress in loose clothing." So I got to ride home in unbuttoned denim capris. I quickly changed into a sundress and planted myself on the futon at home. Thank goodness for plenty of television to catch up with. It was the most miserably hot day the peninsula had seen in a long time, and there I was, stuck at home not wanting to move. CF hid out downstairs where it's about 10 degrees cooler but there was no where to lay down, so I stayed upstairs. Eventually I took a cold shower to get the grime off of me and to cool down. I felt a million times better after that.

The next couple days were also hot but not nearly as bad. CF worked from home Thursday and Friday so we were together for the long weekend. By Saturday morning I realized I could go twice as long as I needed to without taking another vicodin so I figured I'd get off the narcotics and switched to Advil. We even went to the San Mateo Farmers' Market, my bloated belly sticking out under my sundress, I'm sure I looked more pregnant than hurt. My mother-in-law came over to check on us and nearly fell on the floor when she saw me up and about. She was speechless because she has basically never had a procedure done that wasn't followed with every major complication possible. The power of positive thinking, I say. I have a lot to do this summer! I don't have time for this to slow me down for longer than necessary.

I've read up on what Mary (the fun short-stay nurse) had called a "lapy appy." Apparently they inflated my belly with gas to give them more room to see/work. And it appears to take quite some time for the bloating to go away. Here I am, most of a week later and I still look a bit pregnant. I waddled around the grocery store yesterday and by the time I came home I was a bit sore from jiggling around so much. Still, it's better than recovering from a regular appendectomy! I read online that people with certain health problems do not make good laparoscopic candidates. Obese people were on this list, which in a weird sick way makes me so proud to have had my lapy appy.

We're still going camping this weekend. I figure I can just stay put in my chair and I won't shake things up too much. The girl who doesn't even like camping has just become the person most adamant to go. Well, let's not go too far. I can think of a few things that could tear me away. But seeing how we won't be around to camp next year, I am looking forward to spending this time with my friends.

As far as my other group of friends, my coworkers, it looks like I have been torn away from my last days of work. The surgeon said no work for two weeks, and everyone agrees that returning for a few days would be useless. I'd be caught up in time just to be done. I'm feeling a bit sad about this. I didn't get to wrap things up, I didn't get to pass along the lessons I've learned... I'm not sure anyone would have been listening. But it would have been nice to try. So I'm robbed of my closure. It leave the past year feeling a little bittersweet. This job brought me back to the real world, to "real life." And now it's time to shake things up, and move on to what I want life to be.

Now this is not what I signed up for!

2008-05-18T06:42:00.000+02:00

Monday was a long day, my back ached and I felt a little bit off most of the day. I had one god awful night of sleep. I had managed to miss an entire week of early morning spin classes, and it's always hard to get back into the routine. I didn't sleep well, I kept waking up wondering if it was time to get up and get dressed for the gym. Finally my alarm went off, I was sad, it was DD's last week of teaching (except for the ridiculously early Monday morning class). My stomach was upset, I figured it was the lack of good rest and maybe the couple of store bought cookies I mindlessly noshed on at work the day before had disagreed with me. I made myself get up and go to class.

I know I'll still see him, I know he's not really quitting, but it really is the end of an era. DD is a fabulous teacher and is everything exercise needs to be in order to be fun. If more people were like him, maybe I wouldn't know so many people who hate exercise. I made it through class just fine, told him I'd see him Thursday and got home so CF and I could have some breakfast.

Once he was on his way to work I actually dozed off for a minute on the bed, so sleepy! Ms. D was coming over pretty soon though so I knew I had to get a shower. We had a pretty mellow day ahead of us, I figured I'd be fine. She and I ran some errands (including getting a large bottle of vodka so I could start a new batch of limoncello) and then headed to Redwood City for lunch. We decided to try the lunch platters at Red Lantern (the sight of the fabulous Yelp party I was lucky enough to attend a couple months ago). Really I had selected this place for lunch so we could get dessert next door at Pamplemousse. French macaroons!!! We indulged in a nice baker's dozen and took the box to go. At home we picked a ton of lemons and I started to peel them. I use a vegetable peeler and while I get a tiny bit of the bitter, white pith included, it's never hurt my final product! I started standing at the counter, but found myself feeling so weak that I decided to sit down to finish stripping the lemons. We sat around discussing future travel plans of all sorts, her going to Alaska, me going to Zurich, and us going all kinds of places in Europe when she comes over to visit. I was feeling increasingly weighed down and slow. She suggested another round of coffees, I headed to the kitchen and turned on the machine. Woah! I held on tight for a second while a slight dizzy spell hit me. I figured I'd have the caffeine and be fine, maybe I'd need a nap before I finished my writing assignment after D headed back to Davis. I felt bad for being such a bore, it was our last day of hanging out just by ourselves until November at least. I tried to shake it off!

After she left I did indeed pass out for about a half an hour. Then I sat wriggling around in the chaise as I completed my writing homework. I thought if I could just stretch the right muscle, or lean the right way, I might get some relief from the discomfort that was now wearing me out. I thought about the workout I had scheduled for the morning and wondered if it was too late to cancel with LT. I sent her a text message describing how I felt and warned her that I might need to cancel. She said to let her know by 8:30am the next day and she didn't mind the extra time in the morning if I couldn't handle it. It took me a long time to complete the assignment, but I finally got it posted on the class website.

I had a hard time falling asleep. I was restless and uncomfortable. I was extremely irritated when I woke up and still didn't feel right! Ugh! I had no appetite but ate a small piece of toast with CF for breakfast around 7am. Finally a little after 8 I made the call to LT. She asked if the pain was moving lower and to the right, I told her it was low but centered. But I started to wonder. She told me not to come in, that she wouldn't charge me for the session and to call the doctor. So then I call the doctor's office and describe what's happening. I switched away from that awful doctor I had last Fall, but I hadn't been in to meet the new one! I was a bit pleased that I'd be getting the chance. As the advice nurse asked me questions I started to wonder if the pain wasn't actually moving to the right. Oh no. She said I could either make an appointment there or I could go straight to Urgent Care in Palo Alto. I didn't really want to go to Palo Alto so I took the appointment. Then she said the doctor would be coming in to the office soon and she'd call me back sooner if she thought I should do something sooner than coming to my appointment.

I hung up and decided to get a shower. We were supposed to be taking CF's mom out to dinner in San Francisco later that night. We had a reservation at Kokkari, a Greek restaurant I've been wanting to try for quite some time. I thought I might wear a dress so I took the time to shave my legs and everything. But when I got out of the shower I found two voicemails from nurses at the doctor's office telling me to go to the Emergency Room! Ugh! I really had no idea what was going on here, I didn't want to end up unprepared for the rest of the day. So I took a few extra minutes putting myself together, yes, I did my makeup before driving myself to the ER! I called CF and told him where I was going, but said not to bother coming there until we knew it something bad was actually happening. And that was how I ended up walking solo into the Emergency Room door and announcing, "I was told I should come here! What's next?" I went through triage, not much pain, no nausea, I had almost gone to the gym! But that nurse sent me to get registered. That was when they gave me a wrist band. And suddenly I didn't think it was very funny anymore. I updated CF and still told him to wait for more news.

The ER nurse and doctor were very nice. I made jokes about it being the calmest emergency ever, but that the blood test was an awful birthday present. I tried to explain that it didn't hurt much but was responding to movement and was increasingly lower and more tender. I thought it might be some sort of "female" problem and explained how the last several years of weight loss have totally messed with my hormones at times. Finally Dr. MacGregor just said what I had been denying all morning, "It's probably appendicitis." Damn it. I asked to borrow a phone since I had shut down my mobile. I told CF it was time for him to come join me now.

They told me I had to drink some liquid that would dye my insides so the CAT scan would show everything better. The nurse, Caitlin, brought three cups of the stuff, one with a paper umbrella, "Cocktails!" She joked. I was thirsty so it actually wasn't hard to drink it all. But then there was nothing to do but wait two hours for the stuff to work it's way in enough so they could do the scan. I laid there alone and scared, suddenly feeling ridiculously stupid for telling CF to wait. The ER had been empty when I arrived but most of the beds were filling in now. Each one with someone in way worse of a state than me. I wriggled my bare toes around trying to think of some way out of this mess. "Fucking Lost!" I cursed in my head. Caitlin and Dr. MacGregor would reappear from time to time to bring little bits of news, I'd blink away tears and shake my head in acknowledgment. The doctor told me my white blood cell count wasn't elevated like it should be with appendicitis, but that didn't mean that I was off the hook quite yet.

It wasn't too much longer before CF was there and I relaxed a bit. Quite a lot actually. I let him distract me and we made snarky comments about whether we were on Scrubs or Grey's Anatomy. He made a joke about Jack's recent jungle appendectomy on Lost, he offered to hold the mirror so I could watch. I glared at him and asked if he really thought Lost wasn't one of the first things on my mind when this whole thing started going down. He should know me better than that!

Finally it was time for my CAT scan. To my surprise they didn't have me get up and into a wheel chair, let alone just let me walk there, they wheeled me over there in my ER bed! Little did they know the most painful thing I had going on right then was the IV in my right arm. Melody was my no-nonsense x-ray nurse. She made sure I had drank the dye and then explained that they would be injecting me with another dye right before the scan. She said it would feel kind of funny, it makes you feel warm, a lot of people feel it in their throats. She kind of smirked and said, "You might feel like you're wetting your pants, you're not." And then she got me hooked up to the freaky injection machine and the fun began. It started in my shoulders but hit my throat quickly just like she said it would, and yes, sure enough, I would have sworn I had wet my pants. Good times. The machine was very impressive, I was relieved that it wasn't a long skinny tube I had to go inside. More of a giant hoop I was sort of levitating through. And within the giant hoop there was an inner hoop spinning that made a loud rushing sound. "Take a deep breath... hold it," a recorded voice instructed. I slid through the ring. "Breathe!" It was sort of anti-climactic. That was it? Yep, that's it.

They wheeled me back to the ER and I stared up at the ceiling. So weirded out by the situation. The hospital's long hallway somehow made me think of the space in the Veteran's Memorial Theater building behind the stage. It's not entirely unlikely that it's because I was already flashing back to younger days, I hadn't been in the hospital since I was 12. I just don't do the dramatic stuff like this! They slid my bed right back next to the chair that CF was waiting in. He had been making phone calls while I was gone, and now the families had been alerted. I told him that I was done with this, changed my mind, can we go home now? I wondered what the chances were that the doctor would come tell me this was all just a big mistake and I'd be just fine. Really I knew better than that and I wasn't surprised at all when Dr. MacGregor told me that the radiologist was quoted as saying "I don't care!" when he was informed of my white blood cell count. He knew a "hot belly" when he saw one. He said something about a "strong constitution" and "walking around with appendicitis since yesterday." Should I remind him I went to spin class with it? Nah. Surgery was being scheduled for just a few hours from then.

Just what I wanted... continued.

2008-05-17T07:18:00.000+02:00

The day after my birthday turned out to be a much more lively day. Ms. D has been giving bike tours in Napa Valley and a group of us had managed to find a day to hire her for our own entertainment. It was Mother's Day, and even though I knew she'd understand if my mom wasn't included in my plans for the day, I had invited her to come along. It was biking, it was wine, I knew she'd love it. There was at least one other mom that considered coming too, but mine ended up being the group's only mother for the day. I hadn't been on a real bike, riding outdoors, since Ireland. But I got the hang of it again soon enough. We had a great time biking around to different wineries. Our first stop was Baldacci, where we had actually been before when CM worked there and we were on our way to the French Laundry for an anniversary dinner. It was a great first stop, the hostess there treated us extremely well and actually managed to tell this group of UC Davis alumni a few things that they had never heard about wine! Next we biked over to Ragusci and enjoyed some more good wine, as well as their olive oil. We had to fight against the wind to get over to Laird, but our reward was a fab little lunch that D's support driver had laid out for us. The last winery was Hopper Creek, they had us sit out on the patio with the vineyards stretching out all around us. They had some great music playing on the radio (though KZ may disagree with me), they brought us chocolate to pair with the Merlot (I never knew how to do red wine and chocolate together so right), and we enjoyed ourselves thoroughly.

In the midst of all this bliss CF says to me, "Why are we leaving California?" I felt a little sick to my stomach, just for a second. Oh no, we shouldn't be doing this! What were we thinking?!? Then I remembered we're not really leaving, it'll be good for us, it's a chance to try something different without having to commit to the change. And when the year is over we'll come back to California and it will seem all the sweeter! Don't scare me like that, CF!

We returned our bikes to the shop, a few people departed, the rest of us freshened up a bit and we headed to our reservation for dinner at Bistro Jeanty. The restaurant is casual, but the food is amazing! We shared dishes around quite a bit. Their pastry topped tomato soup is famous, but I actually enjoyed the chalkboard written additions even more. I got to try the caramelized onion tart and the fried smelt. You guessed it, CF ordered the fried smelt, I suspect just because it was fun to say. But it was a great pick! For dinner I had mussels in red wine, I usually enjoy them in white wine so this was different, but fantastic. For dessert I ended up splitting a strawberry cream pie with PZ while mom split a lemon tart with Ms. D and CF enjoyed bread pudding of his own. The pie was very tasty! It was topped with a huge mint leaf, which is always nice to finish off a dessert with, the minty freshness stuck with me the rest of the evening.

CF and I headed home and tried to get organized for the week. My week of just being was over, it was time to reel in my behavior and get back to good habits. I got to bed early so I could get up and run before work again. Somehow I thought it would be hard to get through my half hour run, but I was pleased to see I still had it! I used the morning to work on my first assignment for my writing class at the Borders near my store. It sort of made it feel like I was at work all day long, but at least I got the work done and out of the way so I could spend the next day hanging out with Ms. D.

Just what I wanted.

2008-05-17T04:45:00.000+02:00

Life has been nothing if not interesting lately, the initial shock and excitement of our future European adventure has led to tantalizing thoughts but frustration with so much to plan and figure out. I gave notice at work but I think the end of the month feels so far away that nothing too much changed. I felt stuck between the instinct to not take on anything new, and knowing that there was still plenty of time for most projects. I gave myself a week to just sort of "be" without expecting too much from myself.

Oddly enough, this week of just being led right up to my birthday. I have to say, I have never managed to think so little about my birthday. This year though, I was a little distracted. Yet, late last week the birthday wishes started pouring in. Cards, text messages, phone calls, emails, and Facebook wall posts all found their way to me. It was nice to have other people remind me for once. CF and I hadn't had a day at home together in, well, a month or more. So all I wanted for my birthday was to spend a day together, doing as little as possible. Considering it was our one free day together, we had unfortunately planned to work on remodeling our downstairs bathroom, yet due to the fact that I was almost done with my job CF announced that his birthday gift to me was that we didn't have to do that! So we slept in a bit, and then got ready for the Farmers' Market. We decided to get breakfast from our favorite bakery, Brioche, we had always wanted to get more than just our one loaf of wheat bread and now we had the perfect excuse!

This bakery always has a crowd and a wait, so we headed straight there. The line was longer than ever, we were getting there later in the morning and the weather was lovely. As we waited a rather posh looking older woman walked by, presumably heading towards the end of the line. "Ohhh, I don't want to be in this line!" she protested and then turned around and walked away. I waited a second but then said pretty loudly, "Uhh, yeah, you do!" but I don't think she heard me. Brioche is totally worth waiting for, even if it's just for a loaf of wheat bread. Besides, hadn't she ever heard to follow the crowds at farmers markets? They had never let me down. Soon enough it was our turn to order, a slice of quiche and a croissant, please! "Un crossiant?" The man behind the bread asked us. You can tell we've been together a long time because later we both admitted the same snarky thought went through our heads, we thought the man was being snooty with his French pronunciation. But once he counted our change back to us in French we realized that actually we had just purchased a pastry from a real Frenchman. We headed over to the other side of the market, we needed some coffee to complete our breakfast. Along the way I suddenly bubbled over with giddiness: "Think of all the markets we'll go to next year!!!" We had a little bit of trouble finding a good place to eat, we ended up crouching on a curb a little bit out of the way, but it didn't make this birthday breakfast any less perfect. I think that was the best croissant I've ever had in the States. We took home lots of great looking produce. For lunch we had our first caprese salad of the year, and grilled prosciutto wrapped asparagus. Delicious! We did very little else the rest of the day.

Oh, by the way...

2008-05-06T20:39:00.000+02:00

I got accepted into the writing class the following day. I'm not really sure how big of an accomplishment it is, maybe they accept everyone when it's only a week before the class begins and there's still room. Still, I was thrilled to get in to a class intended for professional journalists. Even if I don't find a way to get paid for my travel writing I think I will learn a lot that I can put to use over the next year and into the future. Class starts this Thursday. I will let you know how it goes!

Life turned upside down!

2008-05-05T06:24:00.000+02:00

OK... where do I begin?

It seems like forever ago now, but I think it was actually only a week or two ago that CF and I were chatting online for a minute while he was at work and he said he had a random question for me. He wanted to know what I would say if we had the possibility of spending a year in Zurich for work. Without much thought at all I answered I was interested. And life went on, I tried not to think about it, there was so many other things that would have to get approved before CF would get this assignment. It probably wouldn't happen. A couple of years ago there was the possibility of joining the Dublin team for one year. Which turned out badly for the people who did go, so we've never regretted not doing that. Not too long ago six-months in Australia was brought up. CF turned that down for a number of reasons. I had gotten used to these possibilities coming up and mostly just going away.

I asked myself why I had said yes. I liked the idea of making a big change. I felt relieved that I might have a big excuse to leave my current job (I love it yet I knew it was holding me back at this point). I thought maybe I could figure out what I really want in life if "existing circumstances" and outside influences went away for a while. On the phone with the life coach I've worked with a bit in the past month I realized something... I could easily decide what to do with the second half of my year without knowing where I might be spending it. I realized it was time to leave my job. I would spend the summer exploring options and possibilities and start over in the Fall with new direction and purpose. I decided to give notice last Tuesday.

Tuesday morning I woke up early and went to spin. My favorite spin teacher played a mash-up of moody Snow Patrol guitar with Mary J. Blige proclaiming "My life's just fine!" and I started to feel a little overwhelmed with what the day had in store for me. Then said favorite spin teacher casually mentions that he won't be teaching spin anymore after May 15th except one class a week! My jaw was basically on the floor, or at least dragging on the pedals. I come home and on chat Ms. ShoppingsMyCardio tells me she's moving to Portland... next week. Tuesday was trying to knock me down with all the change! I told CF that with the way the day was already going I needed to have a good cry before going to work or else I would cry when I told them I was leaving.

As part of my summer of exploration I had started looking for classes to make sure I was trying new things. I wasn't quite sure what I was looking for, but when I found the introduction to travel writing I knew right away it was a good idea. I've been wondering about the field since I blogged my way through Europe last Fall. I had decided to sign up for the class and then noticed that a letter of interest was required and you have to be accepted to get in. I tried to banish mental pictures of me sitting at home next Fall with no job and no writing class. I hoped I wasn't rushing into anything. First things first, apply for the class and see what happens. As I worked on writing my application letter CF called me. I wondered what was up, he doesn't usually call me from work. "Whatcha doing?" "Writing my letter of interest for that class I want to take." "Oh, I was just in a long, long meeting." "Oh yeah? Ummm, great dear." "I'm happy to report, we're going to Zurich."

Oh. My. God.

What are the chances that the news would come on the very day that I was already planning to give notice? How funny that this would happen as I applied for the travel writing class? How much change could happen in one 24 hour period? My goodness. So, let's just say that the good cry was well taken care of before I left for work. At that point there was no denying the need to mourn the sudden death of life as I knew it. I finished my application to the class, pulled myself together as much as possible, and hit the road. As I crossed the street to my shop I felt like my legs were going to fall out from under me. The construction wall around the space two doors down from us is emblazoned with inspirational sayings, it shouted at me: "DO IT NOW, DO IT NOW, DO IT NOW." OK! I'm going in there to quit right now, you don't need to yell! The moment I walked in the door my manager knew something was up. I was in this nervous state, half laughing hysterically and half wanting to pass out or throw up. I asked if she'd come talk to me in her office and she had figured out I was leaving before we even got there. "Oh nooooo!" I heard behind me, just as I had imagined I would. But having the Zurich plan be a reality gave me a solid reason, one that she could really accept and she went straight into being excited for me. She told me a story about her husband being asked to relocate to Paris in less than a month, their kids were young and she didn't speak French, she panicked and he turned down the opportunity. She said they've regretted it ever since. I started to feel a bit less numb as I took the lesson learned to heart, if I don't do this I'd regret it forever!

Poor KM had been left to manage the store while we went and talked. She asked me what was up and I told her I shouldn't talk to her about it on the sales floor. We waited for a lull and I said, "You want to go talk?" And she said, "Yeah, because I think I'm going to throw up if we don't." She had basically figured it out too. Telling KM was a bit more bittersweet because we'll miss each other like crazy. Funny thing is, now that I won't be working for the store in June I can go to her wedding. And we probably stand a better chance of both being available to socialize with one of us not working at the same store. There are 12 working hours of 6 days a week and just a few hours less on the 7th. It's always been hard to do anything together outside of the work place.

Telling people the big news went on from there. It's still not over. Some of you might be hearing the news for the first time in reading this. The one thing that scares me terribly about what this year will be like is missing my friends and family. So please, please, please, send me emails and/or blog comments. I want to see everyone before we go (probably August or September) and I want to hear from you as much as possible. And also... please let me know if travel plans will bring you to Europe. I am counting on visitors! I will continue to work in San Jose till the end of May, and then I'm going to spend the summer taking some classes, remodeling the destroyed bathroom, and spending time with all the people I will miss so much while we're away. After we go I don't think I will find employment there so I need ideas and advice as I build a list of projects and goals to keep me busy. Who knows, maybe I will find some success in freelancing as a travel writer or photographer. I've been practicing for a long time now, as anyone reading this blog would know.

There's so much more I could write about what's going on in my head right now. But I don't want to scare you. Let's just leave it at this for now: Wow, it's going to be amazing!

Memories of one of the me's I barely knew.

2008-04-21T17:20:00.000+02:00

What a lovely Picnic Day weekend that was! I found myself in so much awe of what a great time I was having... but I think it really just comes down to the weather actually behaving.

Last week was rough, CF and I were both working a lot, I was trying to keep up with my workout schedule, and I had my plate more than full of design projects. Friday morning I went off to the gym for one last pre-Picnic Day workout and run. I was finishing week 7 of the running program SW sent me. I had set a goal to be able to run the 25 minutes at 5mph by then, but it didn't quite happen. I ran the first mile at that speed, but the second mile I had to slow down to 4.5mph and I just barely dragged myself through it. I came home absolutely beat, it took me a while to get showered and packed for the weekend. We hit the road around 1pm and decided to head straight to the pub when we arrived in Davis.

Walking onto that patio is like walking into my past. Who can really complain about a large group of people all happy to see you and at least a dozen or so people who are thrilled to see you and want a hug? I often joke that my ego needs that fix at least once or twice a year. Considering we missed Homecoming while adventuring in Europe it had been a while. Add on top of that the ego boost of jaws dropping and "Oh, you look so good!" and I'm flying high.

Picnic Day itself was wonderful as I said. We woke up much earlier than the last couple years and actually made it to campus in time to play at the Alumni Association's pancake breakfast. I found myself a bit nervous but it was a good way to get back into the swing of things... I later figured out that the last time I actually played was probably two Picnic Days ago. The time between the breakfast gig and the parade is always another round of greetings and hugs. LL, my old boss and mentor from my days working on UC Davis Magazine came over from setting up her booth on the quad basically just because she knew it was the one time all day she knew exactly where to find me.

I had loaded myself up with my camera case (which I discovered held my music folder perfectly!) and my sax, I gave people a good laugh as I complained about "neck strap build up," especially when I had the camera out of the case and also around my neck. The parade began and I had to put the camera away... no extra altos showed up to play my horn so I didn't get to photograph it at all, but it was actually quite thrilling. A little tour through good old Downtown Davis! It's fun to see the changes and what remains the same. At one point I somehow made eye contact with a friend from the Bay Area. We screamed! What were the chances of our eyes meeting like that? I stopped to chat with her for a second as the band continued down the street. I went to try to catch up but heard my name again. It was someone I knew from elementary school and hadn't seen in ages. So funny. Such a small world. Well, small Davis anyway. So I missed a chunk of the parade but I caught up eventually. When we settled into playing on the grass on A Street I finally got to take some pictures. Afterwards CF and I went and had some lunch with Ms. D and the W's. We stopped by (a rather trashed) Soga's for a margarita, which really hit the spot. Then it was back to campus for some Battle of the Bands watching. We left when the hour-long rendition of Stanford's Beginnings, well, began, and headed over for some dinner with another group of friends. So many people to see, such little time! We swung by one last hang out stop before hitting the road. I had to work on Sunday, and while we were tempted to stay and make a long, late night of it, good sense got the best of us and I was asleep in my own bed well before midnight.

It's amazing to me that I am stronger and in better shape than ever before and I am still sore in so many different ways than I ever get from working out. High stepping is apparently the best thing to fatigue hamstrings. And holding my horn at my right hip found arm muscles that seem to be slacking off most of the time.

Also amazing to me is that I actually still sort of know how to play. I got out the music for every song I attempted and followed along carefully. There were times when my fingers started to move without me even thinking about it, muscle memory is a very funny thing. I had to stop and smile at times, it was like someone else was controlling my body. It was a little shocking. The fact that I ever joined a marching band when I didn't know the first thing about playing an instrument is the biggest shock to me though, it sometimes seems like it was all just a funny joke. It didn't really happen, did it?

And yet, my joining the band is a key moment in what has brought me to this point in my life. Who can really say if CF and I would have made it through college together if I hadn't jumped into the band with him? I think we're a strong enough team now, but back then? I don't think so! And a good number of the other key players in my life are sort of from being in band, though actually most of them are really from the time that followed. I don't know. Part of me thinks that joining the band was a big act of self-concealment... I went through band insecure and defensive as I struggled to figure out how the hell to play that horn. It's just interesting what I found at the other end.

Please pack your knives and go...

2008-04-10T05:40:00.000+02:00

Falling behind again...

2008-04-03T17:45:00.000+02:00

This always happens. I keep meaning to post about certain things and then they all back up on me. Last week we had a lovely anniversary. I meant to post some distant memories of meeting CF half a lifetime ago. I also meant to tell you about the days we spent hiding from real life. Kind of fun to just escape to the nearest city. On Easter, after scanning all those photos, we decided to fly to Southern California for my grandfather's birthday party after all. I've known about it for months, little did I know it was going to be a huge affair so I'm glad we were able to get on board at the last minute. It was nice to see family, and I got a bonus visit with the niece, who I will see again in just a few weeks when we celebrate her first birthday. Speaking of first birthdays and anniversaries, it's about that time at work. What a long, strange and wild ride it's been. I'm not really sure where it's going but I'm a patient woman. I've had several friends visit me at work recently so I can help them with wedding related design projects, so I'm quite busy with those right now. It's a lot of work but a lot of fun. We're still trying to get our bathroom remodel/rebuild project going. But as you can see, our attention has been taken elsewhere.

So there's a lot going on. And I keep meaning to write about it all. But this will have to do for now.

Fun with the new scanner...

2008-03-23T00:55:00.001+01:00

Check it out:

Think again...

2008-03-21T07:20:00.000+01:00

Lately I've been trying to second guess myself whenever possible. I'm not going to try to deny that I have it pretty darn good in life, and yet I am totally lacking in ambition and drive. I have to be doing something wrong! I sort of think starting to run was my first bit of an affair with second guessing myself. I didn't think I should do it, but I did it anyway and it's paying off very nicely.

I had a friend ask me over GoogleTalk what was keeping me from getting a job that I am passionate about. She meant what was standing between me and these jobs. But my answer was a very honest: "Lack of passion!" She asked if I had ever talked to a life/career coach, and I did sort of once. They told me a lot of things I already know about the kind of job I should probably end up with. She did nothing to get me excited about getting of these jobs, and I didn't really know which one I wanted to do, because without passion I didn't really want to do any of them. Anyway, so the recent conversation leads to a new coach recommendation. This friend is well connected and very smart, so I take her recommendation seriously. But the coaches website looks a little cheesy so I hold off. However I just asked myself, "what's something you can do about the situation NOW?" And well, "find a coach," was the first thing that came to mind so I decided to second guess myself and set up an appointment to speak to this coach over the phone on Monday. Stay tuned.

When a new restocking form at work made my brain melt and made me want to cry I tried to suck it up and not complain, just tried to get through it. But guess what? I decided to talk to my manager after all, she asked on the big conference call how other people were handling this form, other stores were doing it the same way, but then the people at the home office who made the form chime in and inform everyone that basically everyone has been doing it wrong! Oh my goodness, I just saved myself a lot of heartache!

I had some wacky ideas for what to do with my Thursday. I had half a mind to drive to Berkeley because I'd been dying to check out Herringbone, which carried CB I Hate Perfume, it's the only place around these parts to get it actually. CF was considering working in the city even though he also went last Thursday and usually goes every other week. If he was working in the city I sort of wanted to go have dinner somewhere great with him. I had wanted to spend some time with Ms. shoppingsmycardio but the silly girl has gone back to work and was busy. Boo! Also on my list of people to connect with was AV, an old, old, friend of mine who Facebook had sort of put me back in contact with. I went to elementary school with him and hadn't seen him since high school grad night. For some reason he was one of the people from my past that I sometimes wondered about. It's always amazing when you finally catch up with someone like this. When I wrote on his Facebook wall last summer, "How the hell are you?" we exchanged messages for a bit and then promised to call each other if we were ever in each other's neighborhoods. Calling him wasn't exactly second guessing myself, but driving all the way to Berkeley just to put together this collection of half-baked ideas was a little crazy, normally I'd end up finding an excuse to back out. But oh no, I went.

AV and I sat in the back corner of our senior year American Government class. We were just about the only two people not from the largely yuppie, trendy, annoying clique that seemed to mostly come out of El Macero or West Davis. Two East Davis kids found themselves in need of some sane company. The teacher knew how it was for us too, he had AV do the roll, I answered every question he asked the class. If we were late, or if AV wasn't there at all, it was all OK with him, we understood each other. AV was the bad boy, drugs were involved (which happily aren't part of his life anymore), and he ditched more classes in a day than I did, ever. Still, he seemed to always come to this class and we had a good time. He wrote in my yearbook how we had known each other so long and how I hadn't changed at all while he... well, he had. So it was crazy to be meeting back up again at age 30 in Berkeley. I really didn't know what to expect.

Turns out he's an undergrad, over the age where they can take parent income in to account when offering financial aid so he's barely paying anything, and he's lived enough of life already to know what he's totally and absolutely thrilled to be studying. He was so excited as he tried to explain the bacteria and cultures he studies in the lab he works in, it blew my mind! I heard more science than I had since high school. I'm so happy for him, and envious beyond words. He was so sure of what he was doing, even if he had just come from a German class where they thought he was translating incorrectly when he said "I am 30 years old."

We compared out situations. The good girl and the bad boy at age 30 working in retail and finally getting a bachelors... but which one of us is happiest? Hard to say for sure. But the circumstances we find ourselves in are incredible to compare. There were funny moments of silence. The situation of sitting there together just boggling our minds.

He had to get back to work and I had to run up the street to the store with the perfume (though I was too proud to admit this). I made it in the door of Herringbone with less than 10 minutes to shop. But I found exactly what I was looking for, sniffed a few scents, tried a few on and started chatting with the very cool girl working there. Now, when I'm working I despise people who come in the door right before I close. I know they won't leave on time, and more than half of them aren't going to buy anything anyway. This girl was so nice to me even though I was disgusting myself with my late arrival. She listened as I said I had read up on the brands and how perfume gives me headaches so I was really curious about Christopher Brosius. Usually when considering a perfume purchase I have to try it on and see how it "wears" on me and if it's going to give me a headache. I trusted that this one wasn't. Still, I couldn't imagine making such a large purchase in such a hurry. I started to excuse myself saying I hoped I'd be back in the neighborhood soon. I don't know if it came from being wound up by the mini-high school reunion I had just had or what, but I suddenly thought about it again and decided to just do it. I know you think I love to shop, but the truth is, I am embarrassingly cheap. So this was a huge accomplishment for me... being so frivolous. I purchased a bottle of Russian Caravan Tea, and I have to say, I smell delicious! I hope they get Mrs. Peel when that scent is released, but I'd really love to go see CB's studio/shop in Brooklyn someday.

I took my new little treasure back to the car (I'd parked across the street from the Berkeley Rep, not surprisingly one of the only places I could remember had a parking garage with reasonable enough rates) and eventually met up with CF who took BART over from the city. We walked back up the street to where I had just been shopping, I sure got my walking in for the day. We decided we were too hungry to wait in line for Cheeseboard Collective pizza slices so we settled on a charming little place called Gregoire. It's a tiny little building just off Shattuck, with an open kitchen, 3 or 4 bar type seats watching the action, and a u-shaped picnic table outside. We ordered a salad, an order of highly recommend potato puffs, and one order of lamp chops. As we sat outside the Berkeley residents walked past us in every direction. Many of them were stopping by for takeout. CF was enthralled with watching the food prep going on in the kitchen. I knew that was what he was going to love about this place! They does most of their business in takeout. So much so that they don't even have serving trays or baskets, our food was just handed to us in cardboard containers that weren't closed and bagged up. The salad was great, the potato puffs were these fried little scoops of buttery mashed potatoes rolled in salty bread crumbs (our lips dried out after eating these), and the lamb chops were wonderful. As I ate I saw the huge moon start to rise over the hill behind CF's shoulder. What a great dinner experience!

Even though we were already a bit cold we took the opportunity to try one of the several gelaterias I'd been hoping to get to in Berkeley. Gelateria Naia was close to where I had parked the car. I had a small cone of Cioccolat Mortale and Guiness flavors, so scrumptious together! CF sampled several others and had a nice little espresso to go with his dessert. We drove home very happy and content. We live in a wonderful place, we're very lucky.

We had a lot to do when we got home to get ready to go out of town for the weekend. We were up late and I worried about how little sleep I was going to get. I knew I wouldn't really exercise all weekend so I thought I should get one last spin class in or something. But I thought about how tired I felt already as I went to set my alarm clock, and I second guessed myself yet again, and gave myself permission to just get up in time to carpool to work and not go to 5:45am spin.

Smug continued...

2008-03-21T06:57:00.000+01:00

Last Saturday was brilliant. I found myself without cash in hand or in my checking account so I thought the farmer's market wasn't going to happen for me. But I remembered these American Express gift cheques CF had been given at work and he had handed off to me for some reason that had been floating around in my bag ever since. A friendly banker inside the credit union helped me out and cashed them for me, $75 and a big day planned!

I hit the farmers' market a bit later than I meant to, decided to go straight to the gym, figuring the produce could take a little extra time in the car. While on the treadmill I realized I was really cutting in close with my plans to meet up with Mr. MP before my haircut. So I rushed home, had a quick shower and jump back in the car heading for the Millbrae BART station. It was only then that I remembered the precious goods in the trunk of my car! Drat! I decided to chance it and parked in the shady, somewhat refrigerated garage and if I had to toss a few things it would be OK (in the end everything survived!). I had to run a bit, my heavy Danskos making me regret my choice of footwear, especially after running, but I made one train earlier than I had hoped for! Score!

MP picked me up near the Embarcadero station and we headed over to brunch at Canteen, one of our favorites. Delicious! We thought we had an hour before my appointment so we decided to drive over to his favorite coffee place to buy beans for each of us to take home. The post-parade (St. Patrick's Day) traffic got the better of us though, I was going to be late. The salon understood and Thomas assured me everything was fine when I finally rushed in. I got a great haircut and left feeling like a million bucks. I needed a little afternoon pick-me-up and grabbed two fleur de sel caramel chocolates before heading back down to BART. When I went to pay the $3 for them I realized I was handing over the last of my cash (FM shopping, brunch, coffee beans, tip for Thomas, it all adds up), but I just loved that it was like surprise bonus money, the whole day was a gift! I got back to my car in Millbrae and all the food looked fine, I swung past Whole Foods for the very few other things I needed for the week. Whew! What a day! I must say, I've gotten very good at Saturdays lately.

European Adventures Redux

2008-03-15T15:50:00.000+01:00

I'm coming at you from the the end of one of the weirdest nights of sleep I've had in a while. I got home around 5:30 yesterday, watched some TV and started to feel awfully sleepy. The last couple days were all long days, I decided to lay down for a while before I started in on the little to-do list I had written myself. And well, next thing I know it's 6am on Saturday and I've slept all night curled up on CF's side of the bed (he's gone to Texas, that's a whole other story) with the light on. So much for cooking myself a good veggie dinner and watching Netflix! Maybe tonight.

So Tuesday night I closed the store, and was there a bit late due a little error made the night before by someone else that I had to straighten out. Wednesday morning I opened, so I was gone less than 12 hours. Actually much less because I needed CF to drop me off and he had a 9am meeting. I was an hour early for work. Yuck. But it was a short day, in a way, at 4pm a coworker and I carpooled up to one of the store in the city for a bookbinding workshop. That was fun! I have been hesitant to answer many questions about bookbinding in the store because I hadn't ever done it myself. So I am now fully trained, finally, a year later! And my wonderful coworker even dropped me off at home, still it was a long day. Thursday started a bit early as well, CF woke up early to go get a train into San Francisco, he was going to the office there for the day. I tried to sleep in a bit but it didn't happen. Eventually I headed out for some errands and the gym (the running is going well, thanks SW!). That afternoon I visited Bombshell in San Mateo for an eyebrow shaping. This shop is too cool, I had to stick with them. I wish I was one of their sisters so I could work there too! I'm so happy for them. After one last trip home I then set out for the Millbrae BART station to ride into the city for a great night out.

CF met me at the 16th and Mission station. I have to say, it's much easier to find someone at a BART station than a NYC subway station! I just came up the stairs and as I got out my phone I saw him leaning on a wall near the exit waiting for me. We walked over to Little Star Pizza, I had been to their other location a couple year ago and was thrilled to finally be back for more! The champagne cocktails are on the menu at this location too, even if they might have been able to get a full bar license. They decided to stick with what they do best. I ordered the Movie Star, which includes ginger ale and ginger beer and a fizzing pieces of candied ginger at the bottom of the glass. Yum! We split a salad and a small flat crust pizza (even if they are know for their deep dish, we're just stubborn like that). There were only a few people there when we got in, but by the time we left it was clear that this location is doing just as well as the on on Divisadero.

We now dive into the European part of the night. A visit to the Monk's Kettle, part of the up and coming Belgian beer trend in San Francisco, which unfortunately probably means it is also soon be overly crowded and annoying. So I'm glad we went now, and we got there just in time, we snagged the last two seats at the bar and just minutes later people were filling in, standing behind us. The beer menu was incredible, we saw many "old friends." I decided if I was going to indulge it had better be something I knew I'd love so I ordered my favorite, the Rochefort 8. CF ordered a beer he had never had and was excited to try. The bartender looked at least slightly impressed with our selections but came back a minute later, they were out of CF's order. He suggested a replacement, something he was very excited about and they had just got in. The bartender said he'd have to join CF in drinking it, and they'd be the first two people to get to enjoy it. So CF got a glass of Monk's Cask and so did the bartender. We all clinked glasses and the noise level in the bar started to pick up. As I sipped the dark ale I felt like I was back in Belgium. CF was pleased with the beverage he ended up with. It was slightly fruity, but tart, much like Ms. D's favorite, the Saison DuPont, but even a little less sweet. We squeezed in another round and wobbled our way back to the BART station for the evening's main event.

The Z's were waiting out front of the Warfield with our tickets. Gogol Bordello, our gypsy punk band we saw in Paris, was back in town! The place was packed, noisy, and smoky. We could hear the opening band from the lobby as we indulged in yet another round of drinks (oh my, how it all adds up, I'd better finish up this post and get to the gym!). People started pouring out of the auditorium and we knew the opening band was done. We were ready to find our seats so we took the chance to get inside. There was a DJ on stage spinning some extremely loud Bhangra. KZ and I did a tiny bit of shoulder dancing and laughed. I was suddenly very sorry I hadn't brought earplugs, but right then PZ handed me the earplugs he had lent me in Paris. Awesome! We shuffled up to our seats and took in the crazy atmosphere around us. I don't know if I had ever seen such a wild vibe in the Warfield! And it only picked up from there when Gogol Bordello hit the stage. Although I was thankful for my seat, my own little reserved space, I was wondering what it was going to be like to sit down for the group I couldn't stop moving during before. But two songs in everyone was on their feet so that didn't matter anyway. It wasn't quite like seeing them in the smaller venue in Paris, but I'm so happy we went again.

After the concert we grabbed a bottle of water, said goodbye to the Z's as they headed back to Davis, and descended into a BART station full of concert attendees. Everyone was still pumped up, newly purchased t-shirts were pulled over various outfits right and left... my ears were ringing like crazy. Ouch. Before not too long our train arrived and we were on our way home. We mellowed out and the late hour finally sank in. CF graciously shared an earbud with me and we listened to his iPod until we got back to Millbrae and drove the rest of the way home. The night wasn't over yet though. He had to do laundry so he could pack for his trip! We meant to get it through the wash and into the dryer, but not surprisingly we didn't last that long.

So the next morning we got the clothes in the dryer and had breakfast home so he could pack afterwards. I dropped him off at work and said goodbye until Sunday. I was a bit of a zombie during my fortunately short day at work. Left around 4:30, had to fight my way home without use of the carpool lane, and well, you know the rest of the story (this is where this post began). What a week!!!

I've got a haircut scheduled in San Francisco (that's right, back for a third time in four days) this afternoon and also plan on hitting the gym, the farmer's market and brunch with Mr. MP along the way. At least I've rested up!

Shout out to my youngest reader/viewer!

2008-03-12T17:48:00.001+01:00

TF (figure THAT one out!) is keeping up with all the nonsense I post here, and even watches all the youtube videos. Thanks for stopping by!

-MW

Smug.

2008-03-08T22:03:00.000+01:00

Today we got up and ate breakfast, got dressed, and scurried off to the San Mateo Farmer's Market. We've frequented the Belmont one on Sunday mornings (now year round!) but never had made it to the larger San Mateo market on Saturdays. Now, it didn't compare to dear old Davis but it was very impressive. CF cursed the fact that we had already had breakfast when he start spotting the bakeries (little did he know I had orchestrated it this way on purpose, duh). We rounded up some asparagus, apples (from Apple Hill, ahh, memories), yummy cheese, gorgeous eggplants and red peppers, had a sample of this and that, waited in line for a very impressive looking bakery stand, and CF got an second dose of espresso for the morning. We are going to eat good this week! We headed straight to Whole Foods from there and bought the few things remaining on our list after such a success (turkey bacon and eggs have yet to be offered at our FM).

We came home and unloaded all the goodies from our various reusable shopping bags, had a little bite of yogurt and granola, and then we hit the hill. I finally got to take CF to see the lovely view I had found weeks ago. And now that I wasn't alone we adventured down the sloping dirt path and finally found our way into this big park we had seen on Google Maps and had only sort of found part of once. Brilliant! We came out in the part of the park that we had actually found before and saw how we had missed the path, though it wasn't obvious at all. We trekked home from there, still a ways away. The first part of our walk was straight up the hill, the work out part of our walk, the second part was adventuring in the park, and the third part, was the endurance part. Just trying to get home! Now we've just lunched on delicious sandwiches made from the whole wheat rolls we got this morning from the bakery (they say to follow the crowds at FM's, and they are right). I am basically on cloud nine.

Yesterday I told LT of my intentions to run/jog now. I mentioned my concerns about the impact and my knees and bendy joints. She said to stick to the treadmill for now, which is just fine with me. I did my intervals just like Ms. SW's program suggested. It wasn't all glorious this time around, I found myself obsessing over my chubby cheeks bouncing up and down my face as I ran, and twice the stupid emergency stop button was triggered on my first treadmill. I moved over but my concentration was pretty much shot. Even so, this girl now comes with real jogging action!

Feeling pretty darn healthy, happy, and smug. Not bad for someone who has no idea what they're doing with their life, eh?

One of the me's you don't know.

2008-03-04T21:11:00.001+01:00

Sometimes I feel like I lead several different lives. One of these lives is the me I am at the gym. I have never had a workout buddy so no one I know from other parts of my life really knows this part of me. Yesterday I got out of bed at 5:15 and put on gym clothes, went to a spin class, came home and left the house again with CF to carpool to work (and breakfast!) before I ever really woke up. Thinking back on the spin class later in the day it almost seemed like it was all a dream. And this is frequently the case with these classes. I like it much better than having to go to the gym at the end of the day, dreading it and just wanting to go home and put my feet up instead.

The gym is a little world of it's own. I'm guessing it's a lot like your gym, but what I mean is that people can have very different identities there than they do in the outside world. LT was telling me earlier today that she has a reputation for having a recognizable clientele. "What the heck does that mean?" I asked and she wouldn't really answer. I guess we're all a bit loud, a bit smart-mouthed. LT seems very serious when you first meet her but the sass comes out very quickly. I had to learn to hold my ground with her. One day she wanted me to do the squat machine that always, always, always makes little blood vessels in my shoulders red. I hate it. I whined to her, "Nooooo, please can I do that leg press instead? I like that one." "Don't you want your booty to look good?" "Noooo!" She was so surprised to hear any woman say that she caved and let me do my leg press. One day I tattled something silly she said to OT (no relation except they got certified together) and she was so mad at me she insisted I was going to do these single armed shoulder/lat pull downs until she got tired of watching me do them. "Well, you'll never get tired of looking at this!" I said as I pulled down the arm on her side and gave her the look that she always accuses of being "sultry." She threw her head back and laughed. Who says getting exercise isn't fun? She also told me once that people ask her what she has me do in the way of flexibility training. "Ummmm, nothing," she has to tell them. But apparently the other trainers like to tell people I've worked hard at becoming so bendy. Some people would kill to be as flexible as I seem to be destined to be all my life naturally. "You're the envy of the gym," she tells me. Me? The envy of meat-head central? Go figure!

And then there's the little part of me that's even more secret. But these are things about me that seem to be disappearing slowly, like the weight. I didn't used to have the guts to use the weight room, I still don't particularly like working out alone but it is something I have conquered. Basically since high school I have never changed in the dressing room part of the locker room. I do what I can to get dressed for the gym at home, and I always shower at home. If I was stuck getting changed into gym clothes there I did it in a stall of the restroom. I saw women of all shapes and sizes changing out in the dressing room but I still felt too gross to do so myself. Well, I did it quickly and there was hardly anyone even in the place but I conquered that fear as well last week. It's just stupid that something as simple as just using a dressing room like everyone else can remind me to appreciate how far I've come.

And just earlier today I accomplished something that I didn't think I'd ever really do. Now, I do spin classes, and go for long periods of time on the elliptical trainers, and walk up and down this crazy hill in my neighborhood. But I had not run since high school as well, not even a slow jog. I knew I was getting fitter and lighter but my knees are still a bit weak from years of carrying most of 300 pounds around. I didn't think I could... no, I didn't think I should run. I don't know where the urge came from but today I found myself cranking up the speed on my treadmill. I couldn't get away with a fast paced walking stance, and I found myself shifting into a runner's stance. This was at a speed that my husband could probably still walk with those long crazy legs of his, but there I was, basically jogging. I tried to ignore the awful feeling of my backside not enjoying the higher impact activity, and it was easy once I really looked myself in the mirror. I loved the sight, it made me want to keep going! Instead I slowed back down after one minute, and took two minutes of my usual pace before cranking it back up again. I didn't want to over do it. Again I did a minute like that and then slowed back down. But after not quite two minutes at the slower pace I realized that I had been in the gym for over an hour and a half and these were the last couple minutes of my workout. What was I holding back for? So I spent the last two and a half minutes jogging and I enjoyed every second of it. I take a lot of happiness from these small victories in life.

Do you appreciate your accomplishments? Will you conquer your fears? I know you can.

Tee hee

2008-02-29T17:30:00.000+01:00

A little typography giggle.
http://www.ironicsans.com/2008/02/idea_a_new_typography_term.html

Waiting for Mrs. Peel (a long ride on the perfume and whiskey train of thought).

2008-02-29T08:13:00.000+01:00

Where to begin with this story? Four years ago in India I spent $1.50 on a small bottle of scented oil. Something made me decide to wear it on my wedding day, but I didn't really wear it regularly till the first time I went to NYC. Suddenly "Kashmiri oil" only makes me think of Manhattan. Kind of funny. This bottle is dangerously close to be finished and I've been wondering for a while now if there's anything I can do to try to match it. I've looked up places specializing in scented oils and also custom perfume blenders. Nothing that I have managed to actually give a good effort to has paid off yet though. I had first read about CB I Hate Perfume while looking for customer blenders. This guy's studio is in Brooklyn. I wondered if I could make it out there last January, but it didn't happen.

What did happen in Brooklyn last January was the night on the town that would eventually result in the infamous hangover at a certain jewelry story on Fifth Avenue. The first round was a fabulous champagne cocktail at Dressler in Williamsburg. I absolutely adored the metalwork interior. CF and I have an agreement that someday we will have a date there. This cocktail was apparently the bartender's specialty. I can't remember the minor ingredients but it was mostly made up of champagne and whiskey! Delicious.

I had acquired the taste for whiskey during our month in Ireland. While visiting a distillery the options for sampling at the end of the tour were straight or mixed with cranberry juice, or ginger ale. I decided to go with the ginger ale... and while many of the ladies on the trip were handing their glasses over to certain eager-to-help-out fellows, I found myself a new favorite drink! I drank whiskey and ginger ales a good chunk of the rest of the trip. And it was our last round on the last night.

Somehow, I recently started thinking about the whiskey and champagne cocktail (please note, there are two different drinks we are talking about here), wondering if anyone online had ever talked about the delicious concoction. I did a Google search for "dressler whiskey" and the only special result I found was my own Yelp review of the place. But I did find an interesting tangent. The personal journal of CB, of CB I Hate Perfume, the very perfumer I had meant to go see a year ago!

this is a very casual perfume based on a cocktail i seem to have invented over the summer. i was sitting at the bar at "dressler" back in june waiting for some friends. when the barman asked me if i'd like a drink, i knew that i did but couldn't begin to figure out what. i'm not a huge cocktail fan, don't much care for basic wine and vodka seemed a little boring...

so after 10 minutes of hard thought, i thought i'd try a bit of whiskey, some gingerale and a slice of cucumber...

What's this? A perfume based on whiskey and ginger ale? Yes, please! His journal is quite a fun read. He talks about lots of different things but it always manages to relate back to scents. I suggest checking it out!
http://www.cbihateperfume.com/CBjournal.html

Today I tried to find a new perfume to help me get over the Kashmiri oil that will likely never be refilled. Aveda's new high end perfume that I've talked about before? I tried some on so I could see how I liked it on me over time. Turns out I just feel like I stink like a hippie when I wear it. Very earthy, not the fancy pick-me-up I was hoping fore. I'm sure it's great on some people. But not on me. I tried on a bunch of scents at Anthropologie as well, nothing was quite right either. So my failed perfume shopping experience made me wonder about CB and his cocktail scent.

I read up on what I could fine out online. He talks about this in the very next entry...

still i have been able to make some progress. i decided on what to call my cocktail scent. i'm going to name it after one of my very favorite women of all time. she fascinated me as a child and i always imagined i'd marry her when i grew up. i still wouldn't mind...

she's a woman i've always admired - smart, charming, beautiful and a snappy dresser. she knows exactly what to do in every possible situation & is also very adept at getting herself out of some pretty serious jams.

although she drinks largely champagne, i can still imagine that every now and then after a particularly trying day, she might curl up on her sofa & sip a bit of whiskey, gingerale with a slice of cucumber.

so in honor of her, i've decided to call my cocktail - Mrs Peel.

I love the champagne mention. Sort of ties this long train of thought all together. Looks like it was about to be released in the fall but now he's holding it until spring because it's a better scent to wear in warmer weather. There's a shop in Berkeley called Herringbone that sells his scents, I hope when the time comes I can find Mrs. Peel there. Nothing to do but wait and see.

Horrified and fascinated!

2008-02-28T07:25:00.000+01:00

Oh no, they didn't!
I love it and hate it so!

On a less horrified note, I can't wait to see Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day! Who's going with me?

Last weekend's wedding event was a smashing success! I got to show the head of invitations (for the whole company) my stuff, and juggled a million and a half brides. The Oscar party was also loads of fun. I wish I had orchestrated things just a bit better so we could have played some trivia before the show instead of watching too close to the start time and ending up having to watch commercials! Someone host a game night soon! Or maybe I will. Mr. PdP took home the Juno soundtrack for predicting the most winners and Mr. MP took home the soundtrack to Once for predicting the most answers to our Bonus Questions. I'm not sure he's enjoying it. I'd love to hear it so maybe I'll get it back from him and get him something else! Hollywood glamor let down a little, nothing I could Oooo or Ahhhh over, really. But overall the ladies looked lovely. Considering they didn't have much notice... things could have been worse.

We're cooking up anniversary plans... half a lifetime together! I can't believe it. CF is "threatening" to book tickets to NYC if I don't commit to a plan soon. Does he think I'm going to make any decisions now? Other ideas I've kicked around include hiring someone to clean our house before the four days I have off from work, hiring a personal chef for dinner the night of our anniversary (the first of the four days) and maybe having someone come over for massages (we always seem to get massages on our anniversary). Or maybe going a little further like a night out in the city. Domino magazine just did a feature on some great shops in Savannah, and suddenly I wondered what the weather is like there in March. We got married on a beautiful March 27th but ALL of our anniversaries have featured rain. Anyways, whatever we do, I will just be overwhelmed with the fact that I have been with this guy for half my life. Sometimes I wonder if I can function without him around. Yes, I know I can. But I'm better when I'm backed up by my other half. I used to resent the fact that about 99% of the people we know never knew me before he was around and seem to know him singly and then us as a couple. What about me?!?! Well, I've tried to become a better singular me, and also a better member of the team over the past couple years. Isn't it funny that both things can be true?

Over-rejected.

2008-02-22T23:31:00.000+01:00

Some of you may have known that I applied again for a job that I interviewed for in 2006. Last time I was turned down although I was told my feedback was extremely positive I just didn't have the level of customer service experience that they were looking for. So when I noticed this job was posted again I thought I might as well try sending in my resume (after all, I have exactly what I was missing last time) and see if it got me anywhere. Well, it did not. Which should have made me more excited about the fact that within the year we will probably be opening another store closer to home and I will most certainly be going there because, well, the drive is getting old, plus I'd bring some new-store experience with me. But actually, getting rejected somehow made me like my job less. It suddenly feels so permanent, I don't even know what I would want to do next, let alone what I'll even have the opportunity for. Is it so much to ask for in life to have a goal? To just want something? So here I am, utterly lost as ever.

About two weeks ago now the floor of our downstairs bathroom started to be really wet after a shower. At first I thought I had somehow pointed the showerhead just right at the door so water got out, or somehow my hair dripped more than usual after I got out. Nope. We soon figured out that the tile was starting to get soggy, as was the carpet on either side of the bathroom walls! We got our home owner's insurance involved and they set us up with a crew of water damage cleaners. They ripped out all the tile and then we could see quite plainly that more water was still running out of the walls, into the floor. So today some plumbers came to the house and ripped out our sink and shower. Yikes. They managed to find the leak though. Teeny tiny hole, big problem. He handed me the wayward pipe so I could show it to the insurance adjuster. This little pipe as totally wiped out our downstairs bathroom. It's sort of hilarious though. We were just getting started on planning a mostly cosmetic remodel for our upstairs bathroom, wishing we could just put in a cool shower instead of a shower/tub combo, but there was no tub downstairs so we felt obligated to put a tub in this bathroom. Well, now we've got one destroyed bathroom and one ugly pink bathroom... perhaps we'll get what we want after all. I just could have done without getting it this way! Last weekend I started to freak out a little that I was hanging out with my family for most of Saturday, had to go to work on Sunday, was planning on going wedding dress shopping with KM on Tuesday, and was planning on going to see Ms. shoppingsmycardio on Friday. I might be social and talkative but I need my days at home too. Well, I had to cancels plans on both of my days off because I had to be here while people were working on tearing apart that little room. Be careful what you wish for!

Tomorrow is a big event at the store. Let's hope the weather doesn't keep too many people away. At least there might be fewer people just wandering through, I like being able to focus my attentions on the people with real interest and projects going on. I don't mean to be a snob! Then Sunday we're having the return of our Oscars viewing party. We drag the television out of its hiding spot in the extra bedroom we have disguised as a den. I've got the ballot just about ready to print. And I believe we've settled on a party menu, hopefully people will understand if it's a bit simpler than usual. Neither of us have the brain power to be completely brilliant right now.

Speaking of brilliant... Company finally aired on PBS this week. I saw it last January on Broadway, it ran till July and I read that two of the final performances were filmed. I know I'm a horrible nerd, but I have never been so excited to watch Great Performances. It's shameful though. I didn't manage to get to 6am spin the next morning because I had stayed up too late watching PBS! Aren't I just awful?

Chance in hell...

2008-02-12T19:47:00.001+01:00

I was thinking about my recent non-blogging and how every time I thought of something to write I would think, "Oh, but I have to write about [blank] first..." and then it snowballed so much that I can't even remember everything I was going to write about! Let's just jump in with what's going on right now.

In the past month I've been doing a damn good job of getting more exercise than I was basically any time since starting my job last spring. Mostly I do two or three morning spin classes a week (who knew I could learn to get up for a 6am class?) and work out with Ms. LT twice a week. The past week has really kicked my butt. I did upper body strength Wednesday evening, got up early for spin Thursday morning, and then did a killer all over strength training session on Friday, and THEN went and walked up the hill for over an hour. I was sore on Saturday but it felt great, I haven't been sore like that in a long time. Waking the hill is really cool right now, the sun is shining but it's not hot by any means, people are working in their gardens, and everyone is smiling. I try to take at least one block that I've never seen before each time and I've ended up discovering some amazing views up there. It's fantastic.

January was a slow month at work, the weather sucked so no one wanted to shop in our lovely LA style shopping center. February rolled around, the clouds broke, the sun came out, wedding season is coming and BAM! Suddenly we're several days ahead in sales goals. We're scrambling to cover the days with the hours we're allotted after last months less than stellar sales... it's crazy! A lease is either signed or will be signed soon that will lead to a store opening up much closer to home, so the potential to switch to that store is very exciting. It's got all kinds of thoughts swirling in my head.

Ms. KM has lost her mind and has decided to have her wedding this year. Actually she's made an amazing decision to scale down the party plans and put most of their wedding budget towards a down payment instead. Can you believe someone was actually strong enough to make that decision? So we've got to find a dress as soon as possible, and most likely off the rack. She has been kind enough to let me assist. I have been something of a good luck charm to at least two other brides in the past, and since she and I look so similar now and I would kill to be able to inject the me I am now into the wonderful wedding I had four years ago... well, I'm shopping vicariously with her. The heartbreaking thing is the reality of working in a retail environment, she wishes everyone could attend the wedding but the sad truth is that the store needs a staff. I'm not sure what's going to happen with this one. It's sort of an all-or-nothing kind of thing, it's possible she won't be able to invite anyone from work to the wedding. Isn't that awful?

There's so much else going on but I won't try to cover it all right now. I heard the writer's strike might be over. I still haven't seen confirmation that the Oscars are a go, but it would seem the big show will actually go on! I've been enjoying some new tunes, some of them I've already shared here. More soon!

Well you know I love this...

2008-01-25T22:24:00.000+01:00

Click here to see Vanessa Carlton face her legacy while making a really fun video.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=2T7YZI5e8q8

Just business...

2008-01-25T07:43:00.001+01:00

This is one of my new musical discoveries, Jesca Hoop, isn't she fun?

Those of you who know me, which I think is most everyone reading, know that I look for personal connections with just about everyone I meet. Lately this has come back to haunt me in several ways.

Soon after our store opened I helped a nice gal who seemed about my age and enjoyed the store very much. As I was ringing up her purchase I noticed the shopping bag she was carrying had the logo of a store across the street at the mall that I had just had a really pleasant visit to. I asked what she had bought and she told me she was the manager! And we've basically carried on something of a friendship ever since. A week ago (a Friday evening) she came in and coyly told me she and her fellow were there to look at wedding invitations! How exciting! It was so nice to work with someone I was really happy for. It turns out her wedding is quite soon and I was concerned about the turn around time on letterpressed cards for her. But she insisted that everyone already knew about the wedding, they knew who was coming, it was merely a formality because she wanted them. I encouraged her to get her order finalized by Sunday evening, a few nights later, so it would get processed as soon as possible (this would be the next time the invitations department would even be open). I spent at least an hour with her, and went on my lunch break quite a bit later than scheduled, but we settled on a design and I sent her off to work on text before Sunday. She signed off on the terms and conditions, I rung her up, she asked for a hug before leaving (!) and we went on our merry ways. Sunday she emailed in text, and I sent in her order so it was processed first thing Monday morning.

And then she called the store shortly after I left on Monday. She wanted to cancel her order because she had decided that it was too expensive. When informed that this was no longer a possibility she threw me under the bus and apparently accused me of rushing her into it. I was really upset to hear this. I thought I was helping a friend get what she wanted in time for her big day. And instead it looks like our little friendship has fallen apart. I had been considering making a purchase from her store and now I feel uncomfortable with the idea of seeing her there.

Another example: I got a Christmas card from the gal who has been doing my brow waxes. I was very brow-phobic till I went to her, she works at my old hair salon in Palo Alto. It's been a bit of a pain to drive all the way down there just to drive all the way back and hide out at home while I wait for the redness to go away. And she's also expensive. But I liked the awesome work she did and I liked that she remembered so much about me every time I saw her, which was only for about fifteen minutes, every other month! The personal connection really held me. Well, like I said, she sent me a card, so I sent her one of our New Year's cards. A couple days ago I called the salon and made an appointment for the following morning. A couple hours later I got a call on my cellphone (the number I had given the salon for appointment confirmations) from a number I didn't know. She was calling me for a personal favor, did I mind coming in later for my appointment? I was her only scheduled morning appointment and her boyfriend was leaving for the airport and she really wanted to be able to take him. I told her I couldn't come in later because I had to go to work, but that of course we could reschedule!

This is the part where it gets really sticky. I decided to try this more local small-business place, two sisters that run a teeny-tiny "brow bar" with great flare. It's more inexpensive so I could afford to go in more frequently and highly reviewed on Yelp. I went yesterday and I loved it. So now I don't know what to do in the future. It was our personal connection that made her know it was okay to call me... I feel bad leaving her right after that. It isn't like I actually had a problem with her request! And I will miss her (though I loved the sisters too). It's just bad timing. Gah!

And then there's one of my rather expensive habits (the others being travel and chiropractic, though that's covered by insurance now): personal training at the gym. Earlier today I used up my last session with LT and I have to see how many sessions I can buy to get me through the year. I don't want to spend more than I have budgeted, it's her job to get me to buy sessions... it's awkward on a friendship. And we really are friends. I'm checking out my options, training less with her and learning to do more on my own (which I hate, chatting with her distracts me from noticing the weird looks from the meatheads up in the weight room), asking someone I've met through spin class who has become a trainer how much her sessions cost and maybe mixing her in a bit... I don't know how it's going to turn out. But it's personal connection and money butting heads again.

And it's making me tired.

Confessions of a relapse...

2008-01-18T20:14:00.000+01:00

Okay fine, I admit it. The five-ish extra pounds that appeared over the holidays weren't "fluff" pounds as a friend at the gym used to call them. Usually, if I travel a teensy bit in the wrong direction on the scale those pounds are quick to come back off. You sort of lose pounds as fast as you gained them, which is why I don't mind that it's taking several years to get the majority of the weight off, I took many, many years to put it on. But these five pounds? They went on super quick, so why won't they just leave? Frustrating but I know it's not really a huge deal. I just wanted to confess my sins: 2008 is not starting out too great, when it comes to weight. And I used to be able to brag that no matter what, I could at least maintain like a champ. I think I have to give up my title.

However, I feel great. That's what really counts, right? Can someone please get me to totally believe that? I've been shifting back to paying more attention to getting enough veggies during the day, less attention to what to avoid and feel bad about. I try to be not eat anything after 8pm, and I'm getting better at that. Tuesday morning I went to spin at the new Gold's Gym in Redwood City. I pay an extra $3 a month to be able to go to either gym, so worth it! The new spin room is lovely, they have something like 35 bikes instead of 22, and they're not packed together making it impossible for two people to use heart rate monitors next to each other. Next month as I work more in the mornings I think I will become very familiar with those early morning spin classes. I've also enjoyed some great walks recently. Last Sunday CF and I drove across 101 to Redwood Shores and found a lovely part of the Bay trail that we had never walked before. It was very flat so I don't think our heart rates really got pumping, but my legs felt good and tired by the end of our hour and half walk. Yesterday was such a beautiful day I couldn't stand to stay inside the gym for cardio after working out with LT. I came home, put on my Shuffle and headed up our neighborhood hill. I tried to find a totally new route to wander, I was only partially successful, but I did find some gorgeous vistas... I could see San Francisco so clearly from up there! I ended up walking for close to an hour and a half and my walk included some very steep roads. My calves are sore this morning. Unfortunately, so was my knee. So I did skip spin class. I'm trying to allow myself an extra day to rest and not feel bad about skipping the cardio. I'll just focus on eating right instead. Tomorrow I'll work out with LT again, and CF and I are going for a walk. If we go back up the hill I'll bring my camera with me this time so you can play along at home.

So it's give and take, up and down, trying to be good to myself. I wish living healthy and feeling good was enough for me. Damn, I hate those numbers!

No day but today... only until June.

2008-01-16T07:55:00.000+01:00

I'm sort of shocked right now! I just saw the news that Rent is closing on Broadway in June. In retrospect I had begun to regret not seeing it when I was there with mom last August, what was I thinking not going to see Adam and Anthony in the roles they originated? Now I am seriously kicking myself, I never did see it in its home theater, the Nederlander. Drat, drat, drat!!! The story of how this show made it to Broadway is truly amazing and terribly sad. Even though the show has resorted to stunt casting for years now, I'm still surprisingly saddened to hear it will be shutting down. Wow.

This reminds me of a favorite video of mine though. Video of Jonathon Larson singing his song Sunday. Which, if you are a true nerd like me, you will recognize as a spoof. I think only SB will get it, and I'm not sure he actually reads this, maybe my sister?

Okay... I think I'm ready now!

2008-01-15T19:47:00.000+01:00

What do you mean the month is half over? My goodness, how the time does fly!

While our social calendar has been empty I've managed to dig myself out of the hole I was obviously in when I last posted. Coming back from the trip and diving straight into the holiday season was actually crazier than I ever managed to realize while in the middle of it. Recently I started to feel really proud and optimistic of how organized and on top of things I was, but then I realized it's just that I'm not miserably swamped and behind on everything!

Work is interesting, our manager is leaving at the end of the month, yes the one who started in July. I'm happy for her that she's moving into something more important to her personally, but I was left very worried about the time between when she leaves and when a replacement is hired. There's just two ladies who are taking classes to complete their degrees and me to open and close the store 7 days a week. I didn't see how that could possibly go well. Well, it's actually looking pretty good for me! Considering their class schedules I'm left opening the store more often than not, and that means carpooling with CF and getting to come in for fantastic breakfast before heading down to work. Also, they're available more on weekends, so I have almost every weekend day off, except for two Saturdays, one is our inventory day and one is our big wedding planning event, so of course I'm going to be there on those days! So that feels pretty darn good, I'll have a much more "normal" schedule than I've managed since the store opened. What is CF going to do with me around so much on the weekends?

For now things remain a little crazy at work, we're getting ready for inventory, the manager is leaving so her brain is sort of half way out the door, and this is all happening as letterpress orders pick up as we head into wedding planning season. Seeing as I'm the invitations coordinator and held a bit accountable for sales for this service it is very nice to see business picking up, but it can pull me in two directions at once sometimes. Yesterday I opened the store and knew I had to dive into a stack of letterpress and special order questions that had been waiting all weekend for answers from headquarters. But I also found an email explain the top priority was to get all winter clearance merchandise off the sales floor before opening. Ummm, how am I supposed to do that, alone, and in half an hour? So we weren't done before the store opened but I did the best I could and made the phone call requested in that email. KA answered the phone (she gave me the tour when we visited Chicago last September) and wondered why I was calling, I told her it was to give her the update she requested. Later I learned that only two area managers and myself had given their update, everyone else failed to check in. So I was totally on top of what needed to happen but I made our store look pretty good just by making that call. JE was my hero and spent most of her day packing up boxes of Christmas and making lists of the items going in each box, though at one point we ran out of boxes so we had to wait for the day's delivery to be made before we could continue packing. By the time I really got to dive into my stack of important questions everyone in Chicago had gone home for the day so those questions are waiting until I get back to work today. Ah, the pitfalls of urgent versus important!

It's going to be a long day, I just did my second morning in a row of what I call "butt early" spin. Yesterday was 5:30 and this morning was 6:00am. I went last Tuesday and Thursday as well. Tuesday was the first time I had been to a spin class since before we went to Europe! I thought I was going to be really, really hurting afterwards but I did all right. I didn't think I'd manage four classes in the first week after missing three months. But it feels great to be getting so much cardio done! Just wish me luck in staying awake late enough to close the store and drive home tonight!

CF and I took a trip to Expo last Saturday to look at bathroom stuff and now we're realizing how much work we have to do before we can remodel our lovely pink bathroom. I've started to work on some floor plans, but they often just frustrate me because we just don't have the room to do anything the way we'd really like it. I'm sure I'll have plenty more to say on this subject as we get further along in this project.

What else is going on? Well, I've decided to have a party on the afternoon/evening of the Oscars whether there's a ceremony or not. If there's no reason to turn on the TV that's fine, we'll play some Trivial Pursuit, CF will cook, and good friends will get together. Ain't nothing wrong with that. For our anniversary in March we are thinking of just going out for a casual but fun night in the city. We might hit up a fancy restaurant that weekend with D&V though like we did right around their anniversary six months earlier. I am totally enjoying working out with my new iPod Shuffle when I do cardio by myself, it's making me want to listen to more music. I need some new tunes to listen to. Any suggestions? If you're interested, at the end of this month I do believe two Broadway divas will be releasing pop records on the same day, Sarah Brightman (Christine from Phantom) and Idina Menzel (from Rent and Wicked) both think 1/29 is a good day to drop an album. I think I will be willing to check out both.

So! I never did make a list of New Year's resolutions, but I realized that not all of them were important and really it was a to-do list I was writing in my head. So while things like actually buying new gym clothes (my XXL t-shirts are a bit baggy), and getting more picture frames hung on our walls do seem like good ideas, I'm not going to rate my year based on my getting them done. My real resolution comes from my original chiropractor, who moved away suddenly last October. She used to tell me, "Be good to yourself." And it worked for so many occasions! Whether it was just trying to remember to eat right, or if it was me feeling guilty about not enjoying time around certain people in my life. She was telling me to not feel bad about what I ate yesterday, but remember what kind of food actually makes me feel good... all in four little words. And while I was confessing to not being the most patient and understanding person (shocking, I know!) she was telling me to stop beating myself up over it and to think about how those people make me feel anyway. I've carried this saying into other aspects of my life. I can't say I've got it down perfectly yet, but it is still January after all! Like after getting home later than expected last night because CF needed a little extra time at work, and I still watched a whole DVD like I had planned, even though that kept me up till 11 and I was getting up around 5 to go to the gym? That's not being too good to myself, that's what we call self-sabotaging. But at least I recognize it and will try to do better next time. That's the whole point, really. Do what is best/right for you but don't beat yourself up for mistakes, because that's not good for you either, just make sure to do better next time (and then do it!). So my resolution for 2008 is to be good to myself. There you have it.

Okay kids, I've got to head to work. I'm going to buy JE a little gift card at our cafe across the street for being such a badass yesterday when I needed so much help.