Beatrice

It is only a few short days until I see my niece again! Suppose it us about time that I shared some of the photos from my last visit in March. She is the most clever and sweet little person in the world.

Birthday Brunch :)

Thirtieth Birthday Breakfast! Look how I am glowing. :) After a wonderful weekend of festivities my actual day of birth, Sunday February 26th, was pretty low-key. Perfect. However, I love brunch and my friend, Fiona, gave me some presents to open on my birthday morning and the colorful plates and napkins were there to surprise me! How Could I resist making a brunch worthy of such Brit-tastic china?

I couldn't. So I made french toast with these two lovely ladies, Eryn and Emily. they were so good and put up with me as I wanted to light candles and tea in my special tea pot from Maddy (as Maddy gave me the tea pot and Fiona the plates, both gals were there in spirit! I am the luckiest) and took pictures of the spread while they sat there... ravenous... though they look pretty happy too. :)

What a great birthday. That evening we went out to Jupiter, where I won the SECOND beer drinking contest of my life. That fact makes it sound much more rowdy than it was and I think the best part was hearing friends from my seminary sing happy birthday. Lutherans, so beautiful! They broke into a four part harmony and I almost teared up. Okay. I teared up. It was great. Then, with a grand total of 2 1/2 pints I was good to go. To round off a pretty great weekend, Emily and I watched the season 2 finale of Downton Abby. It was a nice day.

Wandering through Berkeley

Alright! Birthday adventures continue. On Friday night of the GREAT BIRTHDAY WEEKEND, Brittney and Nicole joined the festivities. I am the luckiest. <--fact. These girls drove from LA and Santa Barbara, after full days of work, to join in the merry making. I hadn't seen Brittney and Nikki for years... way too long. much, much too long! Let me tell you, there was a serious amount of laughter and general frivolity upon the arrival of these two. .. and lots of hugging!

After a rowdy evening of catch up we wet off the next morning to explore Berkeley. I wanted to take them up to College avenue. I bike down college avenue at least once a week on my route to church. However, I never get to stop and meander around all the shops... this was our destination.

I took this picture for my friend, Rob, who lives back in Chester, UK. Rob was born and raised in Somerset and does the finest Somerset farmer accent and drinks cider like a champ. So I thought, how do I honor my friend? Taking a photo with a vague reference to his home town. Here are you Rob. Miss yah! You would have fit right in with ladies weekend (okay, not right in exactly, but you would have laughed a lot and would have been fun.)

One of my birthday wishes was to find a pair of skinny jeans that looked good (see I'm fairly easy to please. I didn't ask for a unicorn or a million dollars.) We were successful! At a store recommended by my friend, Kara, called Slash Denim. Pretty strange place, really. You walk in and say what you want and then they pull out a few pairs of jeans and magically they work. I think it helped that I had a group of gals to give honest feedback and one random stranger's approval. Bought them. done. not looking back.

After lunch, we headed to the donut shop. I love how donut shops smell.

Look how happy this part of the crew is for their donut treats. I don't even recall who purchased donuts (I didn't, they didn't have maple bars or tiger tails and this girl has specific donut tastes) and how many or what happened, but I do remember that they made fun of me for capturing this moment in time. Jokes on you! This photo below is great! I know the ladies in it won't think so, but I do. It is great, because they are great. I know it is not up for any photography contest or anything, but I just love these gals. I will take as many photos as I please. :)

Which apparently for the day was... three. The three that you see above. Shame Nikki didn't make it into this picture, but you get the idea. Friends reunited with nothing to do but enjoy the sunshine, food, wine and each other. That is a recipe for wonderful if I ever knew one.

San Francisco with Eryn and Emily: there will be chocolate.

There will be food in this blog. Day one of birthday weekend 2012 involved adventures with Eryn and Emily in the great city of San Francisco... eating and walking. It is one of my favorite kinds of days. Eryn is a friend since Junior High and Emily and I met during our stint in the English department at California Lutheran University. As luck would have it they both now live in Seattle. Excellent. I really enjoy making space for my groups of friends to connect and overlap... so many lovely people I think that they should know each other.

One of our first stops for food was at Cowgirl Creamery: home of one of the best grilled cheeses you can buy. (I say buy because I make a pretty delicious melted brie with caramelized red onion chutney sandwich... which I think might be the best grilled cheese you can make.) Though, these are pretty good and are the creation of a bread shop and a cheese shop being neighbors and combining their gifts to create grilled cheese sandwiches.

Ah yes, Blue Bottle coffee. Pretty tasty, not going to lie. Though, I was kind of disappointed to learn that they did not sell ground beans. I recently received a stove top espresso maker for Christmas and wanted to use Blue Bottle for my brews! Alas. Good news? There are lots of really great local coffee shops that roast their own beans and one of them is right near my home in Berkeley. WIN!

After a quick trip to the Patagonia store... mostly because we got a little bit lost, or underestimated the distance we needed to walk and certainly underestimated how low we were on collective blood sugar levels... we went to Ghiradelli square. Is a place I have never been.. until now (or then, rather.)

Look how happy we are as we prepare to eat a serious amount of sugar in the form of ice cream and chocolate?

This place reminded me of my old housemate in Leeds, Charlotte. Charlotte is from Brussels and she and I would take study breaks to eat chocolate and drink coffee. It was Charlotte who taught me to dip the chocolate into the coffee so it was a little melty and then eat it bit by bit. SO GOOD.

And while it is not Belgian chocolate, it is still delicious and the sheer quantity is impressive... and so shiny!

We split desserts. I like sweets as much as (let's face it probably more) than the next girl, but this is a ridiculous portion. Hooray America!

Was a bit chilly on our walk back, but boy was it beautiful. Emily was really enthusiastic through the North Beach (Italian) District and pointed out the Italian flags on the poles of the street lamps. I like that bit of San Francisco and think that the flags painted on the poles is a pretty clever way of marking out a district.

One of the places we visited in our wanderings is the City Lights Bookstore. This is another one of my favorite places in San Francisco and it is starting to be a tradition to visit it on my birthday (two years in a row makes a tradition right?) I will probably have to make an exception for next year, being in Slovakia and all, but I am sure I can find some book store in which to celebrate!

Matt comes for work (and we get to kick it in the city!)

This is Matt. Matt and I met when I was studying at the University of Leeds in northern England. His partner, Maddy was my hosuemate and is a good friend. :) In fact, I would hazard to say that Matt and Maddy are my favorite heterosexual British couple with alliterative first names... hands down. When I was in Enlgand in January, I went and stayed at their lovely little flat in London and then just WEEKS later Matt was working outside of San Francisco. Thus, he has the distinct honor of being my first cross-Atlantic-hang-out-within-one-month's-time friend. What an honour! :)

So to celebrate I made Matt walk all the way to the Mission district where we walked passed numerous Mexican restaurants in search of one that I had gone to once last year and it was nice.

Matt was very patient. Here is a picture of our table decorations at our eatery.
And here is Matt super West Coast American smiley about our delicious food. :D

It really was delicious. If I can ever remember the name of this hole in the wall place with 5 vegetarian options... I will dedicate a blog just their burritos.


And where do you take an Englishman after a nice meal? Well to an Irish Pub of course! (double points for those who can spot the flaw in that reasoning) We headed to a pub that is near Powell Street Station in San Francisco and ordered a few pints of Kilkenny. Kilkenny is an Irish cream ale that I tried for the first time in Vancouver, BC upon the suggestion of my traveling companion. It is delicious and has everything I like in a beer: smooth, light and heavy all at once, none of that fizzy lager non sense and room temperature. fantastic. All and all an enjoyable evening. I am looking forward to seeing Matt (and Maddy!) on whatever continent we end up sharing in the future.

Alice comes to visit!

Alice Franze! So this has been a very busy semester of visitors to the bay area and I LOVE IT. Although, side effect... update my blog *slightly* less often than I aught to do. Okay.... depending on who you ask it is amazingly less often. But here you go. Almost May and updating it from a visitor in February! Alice was a particularly patient guest because she booked her tickets months in advance and weeks before her arrival, I found out I would be flying to Chicago for about 20 hours for an interview. Luckily, the interview went well and so did Alice's time while I was gone. perfect. I like people who can role with the waves, I know I can learn from that.

Alice has been living in Seoul, South Korea for the past year or so and is a great keep-in-touch-over-skype friend. She is a great friend in general, but am particularly impressed with her ability to stay in touch from the other side of the world.

So I was thoroughly tickled when she made it to close proximity. It is years since we have seen each other. However, I find myself lucky to know pretty incredible folks and seems we can just pick right up from where we left off. Alice is like that. Since it was a while since she visited, of course the details are a bit blurred and my computer is being particularly slow at uploading pictures. Thus I will write you that we went wine tasting in Sonoma, visited her family in Sacramento, wandered around San Francisco, talked about food, family, life, love, beauty, God, make-up, and sometimes just sat there and read books in opposite sides of the room.

Everyone aught to have a visitor like Alice. Here are a few pictures of us at Muir Woods.

Those redwoods are pretty overwhelming. A bit of a trick is to get to Muir woods around 4 pm (time probably changes throughout the yea) but basically just before closing they don't charge for entrance to the park so you can go for free! Great DEAL! especially when there is a beach nearby where one could (theoretically) spend all day for free and then check out Muir Woods later in the afternoon/early evening. Travel tip for the day. :) Also. take pictures. loads of pictures. That is what I will remember to do next time.

My first pescetarian cooking adventure

It is a new day! I am writing this blog entry on an I phone and have just finished cooking the first non-vegetarian meal of my adult life (not counting bacon obviously) Never saw myself as a smartphone person and those that have seen me try to use a touch screen can attest to my clumsiness... But who knows what this new decade will hold? pretty exciting! Now just to finish that essay and catch up on that essay due on Tuesday...and then write those blog entries from february.