Ode to Inner City Living

I have no need for traffic apps,
with crimson-colored highway maps
I ride the train to take a plane.
I get my weekly dose of rain:
I walk to where I want to play -
I never have to park valet.
I hear the hubbub of the street
from my apartment, warm and sweet.
I must watch out for errant cars,
and crazies hanging near the bars
as I parade to restaurants
and make my way to favorite haunts.
But all in all, it's lots of fun...
and now this poem is all done.

San Francisco Buckets

I've been so many awesome places, but for some reason San Francisco just keeps cropping up. It's probably because I've got some family there, and also there's something about the city that's romantic...I can't figure out if it's because of, or in spite of, all the old houses smashed together, the lack of parking, the crazy hills, or how expensive everything is.

I got in on Friday night and was absolutely starving. I had endured weird BART detours, a smelly man, and a lot of other things, so I was ready to see people I love.

Right: is the food version of American Gothic, courtesy of Patxi's pizza. We got ham and pineapple. Low fat cheese, whole wheat crust. Yum. We had Smitten first to spoil our appetites.

SF Bucket Cross-Off Item: Sausalito!

Then we went to Fred's in Sausalito for breakfast. It had pretty good reviews.

Rating: 4.5/5 stars. Right: I am in adoration over their fresh squeezed (daily) orange and grapefruit juice. It's what was advertised! Yum. You can totally customize your order with any combo imaginable. Millionaire's Bacon (Left: see N eating it with his Serious Bacon Face) took home the Gold Ribbon. Though the open face salmon breakfast sandwich and the citrus French toast were also winners.

 

Left:  Shoe House. The stained glass was cool...it's currently for rent, if you're interested. But don't disturb the current tenants, please.

Right: This is the most ostentatious/flamboyant/most original 'houseboat' we saw in Sausalito. Everything was color-coordinated, from the purple jetski covers to the ink on the sign, which says (in case you can't read it) Private Residence.

Below: View toward land.

 
Right: View from the side. Seriously, as far as you could see, it was just mast after mast after mast. There are at least 1,000 of them parked at Sausalito. Insanity. It was so quiet...there were only a few people out on the piers.

Left: View toward the bay.

Left: Flowers. Pink.

Right: Red plumber brush-ish.

Below: Fuchsia. Probably my (three-way tied for first) favorite picture of the whole trip. And I did it without a DSLR! 

Left: I don't know why they bothered to put up this sign. All the dogs we saw (at least seven) were off-leash. There was one mop-top dog that waddled slowly everywhere up and down the docks followed by its owner. Probably it couldn't see because its bangs were in its eyes.

Right: Underwater Monster (who is miraculously dry). He likes to pop up out of nowhere and roar to scare people on shore.


Left: Art Car. It was kind of cool except the creepy mostly naked doll on top. Apparently someone abandoned it about five years ago and people have been making "additions" ever since.

Then we went to the 1.5-acre to-scale model of the San Francisco Bay. Scientists used it between 1960 and 2000 to do experiments to see what would happen if, say, people decided to put a dam in the bay. (After 2000, they just use software.) They add sediment and see how the water flow changed, etc. 14 minutes = one day, and there's even low and high tide. It was like the world's most expensive sixth grade science fair project - I guess if the government isn't above using clay molding, all the sixth graders are in good company. Of course it is much more complicated than I give it credit for. The government wanted to be able to predict the effects of large-scale changes in the area before they implemented any big ideas because so many people live in the area and most of the water for northern California is concentrated in this large estuary.

Above, Right: The water-monster-turned Godzilla (N) is stomping on Berkeley.  Apparently he calls the estuary "home" as well.

Left: No label required, but I'll label it anyway: The Golden Gate Bridge in the rearview mirror, at 45 miles an hour. The cool part about it is that the picture was a total accident...I was just clicking to click. As I've said before and I'll say again, I heart my camera!

Above: ~~Cue freaky music.~~ Into the one-way tunnel! There's a five minute red light. Apparently bicyclists think they're immune from stoplights--one passed us when there was still about a minute left. It's safe to say I would never do that. Me, alone in a tunnel with nothing but my helmet to defend me? I think not.

Left: View from the Marine Mammal Center. It kind of looks like Big Sur but not. It's close, but no cigar. I so want to go to Monterey!!

Right: Male elephant seals weigh up to 5000 lbs, and are up to 16 feet long. They don't mature until they're five or six, and they get alpha status and harems (if they're big and/or excellent fighters) by the time they're eight or nine, and their prime breeding years are from 9-12, after which they have a hard time and generally live to be about 14. They fight with each other for dominance, and as you can see below, they have very long whiskers. Here you can see a life-size replica of a male elephant seal. N is auditioning for the role of Alpha Elephant as a backup plan in case the role of Godzilla ever stops working out for him. Judging by the photo, I'd say he's a shoo-in for the part. (Wonder how T would feel about that...)

Or maybe he could just get a job quoting "The Raven" by Edgar Allen Poe all day instead. (see left.)

Bet the raven wouldn't try to perch on top of this...(Right: Golden Gate Bridge.) If he did, he would be rebuffed by the zillion tourists.

(I was trying to take a picture from the car and get it exactly as we were going under the bridge supports, while going at said 45 mph. Almost, but not quite.)

Below: View of the city from Marin.

SF Bucket List Cross-off: Golden Gate Bridge.

The above two big pictures are my other two tied-for-first favorites. I made a bunch of bicyclists (what is it with bicyclists?) mad because I laid down on the sidewalk to get the proper angle for this shot. Also, above, see a really really big ship. I was afraid it was going to (a) get stuck under the bridge and (b) that it was going to run over one or more of the windsurfers that were cutting back and forth across the front of it. It dwarfed anything around it; I don't think you can get the perspective of how big it was by this picture. N was like, "what if you ran and tried to take a pic of it as it was going under the bridge?" and I ran and ran but bridges are like conveyor belts - you can run and run and run and you might think you're in the middle but it takes forever to get there. So I sprinted but didn't quite make it, due to the Conveyor Belt Effect. :/ But to see it was really cool.

Items which have no pictures:

A trip to the symphony! Brandenburg Concertos I, II, and IV, along with Water Music, 2nd movement. Winning aural combination. Also, a sickly sweet waitress at Max's Opera, and a very sweet but very yummy dessert - I adore ice cream! :)

Birthdays and Cherries

For my birthday, which was a very weird day but was also very good, I did a couple of things, including crossing something off my Bucket List. Incidentally, earlier in the week a friend had convinced me to get an iphone 4s so now I am in the world of smartypants phones which aren't really smart. But I have to say I adore the talk to text feature. Good thing I have unlimited texting - I think my volume has at least quadrupled since I got The Thing. Anyway, I treated myself to taking pictures on the way to work. Hence why the Japanese maple above, left.

I also chose the restaurant for my birthday lunch...I was treated by my coworkers. It was: Pink Door, in Pike Place Market.
The door really is pink.

Rating: 3.75 stars. Three of us got the Bolognese. It was pretty good. I thought, holy cow, that is a bird-sized portion. And I wished there was a little more sausage. The flavor was not overbearing, or bland...it was...flavorful. The dried cherry on the chocolate sampler we got was my favorite part of the meal though. The dark chocolate cake was good too (ordered for my coworkers, who love chocolate.) There was construction (not their fault) but it was really noisy, and the server took awhile to come to our table to take our order, and again to take the check. The birthday candle was a nice touch though. :)

Here is a hodgepodge of birthday-week photos. The photo bug has really bitten me - apologies for those of you who don't like so many pixels in blog posts.
Here are the aforementioned flowers my coworkers sent me for my birthday. The place they always order them from always puts so many green flowers in their arrangements - it's beautiful, but strikes me as a little odd sometimes. I guess when you arrange flowers all the time you don't want everything to be vibrant all the time.

Anyway, my birthday was excellent in a lot of ways. I gave myself lots of presents and received some presents, too - and the promise of future presents as well, to extend the general holiday feeling for those who weren't quite on time with the mailing process. Awesome. (No sarcasm - I really mean it!) I got off at 3 for Good Friday and went home and cleaned my apartment. It was like I thought I was going to have a party, when in fact by the time I got done with everything I was exhausted and it was late. Two friends who were going to dinner invited me to go and so we went to a teriyaki place on The Ave, which I can't remember the name of otherwise I would rate it. It wasn't the best teriyaki ever but it wasn't the worst I've had either. And then we went to Tango for dessert because M especially adores chocolate. Every once in awhile I just walk into Tango and as soon as we sit down I just say, "We'll have a Diablo. Thanks."

Rating: Tango. 4.5 stars. It's been almost 2 yrs since I had their tapas, so I don't feel qualified, though the bbq pork taco-ish things were really good. What I really love is the Diablo, which is like extra thick supreme mousse with a marshmallow melted lovely thing (it really is lovely and I usually don't even like marshmallows) with almonds dipped in cayenne pepper and a to-die-for tequila caramel sauce. The restaurant is really dark and can get really loud. Also, since it's a popular place sometimes the wait time can be a bit longer than desired.

 Then for Easter Dinner there was ham sauteed with pineapple, asparagus, raw milk and gatorade. And let us not forget Easter Jello, which has kind of a sad background but is a happy thing, as it reminds me of Special Occasions when I was a kid.

Easter Jello is raspberry jello with frozen raspberries and nonfrozen bananas in it with cool whip on the top. My mom's usually turned out as jello soup. I think I honestly like it better that way. Last year the jello turned out perfect but this year there was a slight hiccup. It turned out okay anyway.

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Also on my bucket list is to see the cherry blossoms on UW campus. I had heard they were beautiful and wanted to go see them but didn't know when they would be out. My cousin, D, showed me some pictures on his phone but they a. didn't do it quite justice and b. whetted my appetite.

I have honestly never liked fresh cherries. I used to love it when my grandma would give my mom home-canned jars of cherries for us to eat. My dad really loved them. I loved their sugar-sogged used-to-be-fruit, but I liked even more playing with them in my mouth and then spitting the seeds out. I can still hear the small "ping" of the pit hitting the bowl as I "p-tooeyed" into it. Ah, memory.

Anyway, I wanted words to cleanse your eye palate. Although pineapple ham is moderately interesting in the best of circumstances when it is in picture form and not about to be in your mouth, this is truly eye candy, and I didn't want it to be sullied. I thought about maybe just creating an entirely new post just for these pictures but then decided that it wasn't going to be worth it since I already have so many posts going up anyway.


 Here are more:

The white thing in the air is definitely a frisbee.

 The bottom two are panoramic pics taken with my iphone.

Deception Pass Trip/Bucket List Cross-Off Mania, Part II

Bucket List Cross-off #3.1: La Conner

First glimpse. My friend and colleague, Mary, told me about this place - said it was a little town on the water. She loves the water, and so do I. I love the boats.

Here's what I referred to as the "Rainbow Bridge." I just wondered why they chose orange. Maybe it used to be red, and it's just faded? Anyway, I like the unusual color of it and it makes a very pretty picture from the car window. (We had to do some exploring in the car to get to a spot where I could get this angle.)

For the third time in one day, I walked across a bridge for the sole purpose of taking pictures in the middle.

Left: It was a bit glare-y, but you get the point. More pretty pictures!!!

Right: This is the other side - much better photo opp, in terms of composition.

While we were driving through town, we saw a sign for an art show at the Pickle Barn. Those of you who know me know I could write sonnets about pickles. I'll refrain here, and save it for another post, but we decided to do our road trip thing and just go with the flow and check it out.

But we got sidetracked by our own selves, because we saw this:

 And then we saw signs for the Tulip Route. Curious! Especially since all we could see for what seemed like acres and acres were only daffodils! Curiouser! We decided to investigate...so we never actually made it to the Pickle Barn Art Show, which was probably a good thing, because it would have been closed by the time we got there anyway. We returned to La Conner for dinner to finish Bucket List Item: Eat on the water at sunset in La Conner, but first, I will go into excruciating detail about:

 

 Bucket List Cross-Off #4:
Tulip Festival/  Roozengaarde

 I had heard awesome things about the Tulip Festival, but I had never been and it was on my bucket list. So we went!  It was totally awesome. I loved especially that it was spur of the moment.

Above, right: Here is a windmill. Don't worry, there is no Don Quixote in sight who might accidentally run me through with a lance while jousting. I'm not sure that the windmill has any functional purpose except for to make people feel like they're fakey in Holland, but it would be cool if it actually did what windmills are supposed to.

The Roozengaarde, for your information, has been a family-owned business since 1928 or some long time ago like that. They've not parceled it off or anything - instead they've tried to make the best of what they chose to do. And it's clear they love flowers - the grounds are immaculate, even after several hundred people had trompled through that day.

Above: In fine Holland tradition: TULIPS!!!

Right: And also some non-tulips. These didn't really smell a lot but they were really pretty. Plus I thought the picture was kind of cute. :)



For the next part: numbers go L-R, row by row...)


1. Look at the round buds. I don't think I've ever seen buds so round on a tulip!

2. Residence. Makes it sound like an old large English countryside home in H-----shire.

3. Mm. What a lovely peachy lavendery color. I don't know what the real color is called but it was all by itself, surrounded by cream colored ones...made it seem that much more special.


4. White Lion daffodils. I easily resisted buying these. They do look a bit ferocious, but their 'manes' are so heavy that they droop and you can't see the full effect of their glory/brilliance because their heads are too heavy. Basically, these bulbs need some genetic layering in their haircut before I would buy them. They are kind of cute looking anyway though.

5. Next, Double Price (purple) and Monte Carlo. (yellow). Who could resist buying tulip bulbs with names like that? I did. Mostly because I don't have anywhere to plant them

Impromptu sillier than necessary ditty:

oh, how the glare the sun provides maketh me to squint

reflecting off the water in an intense near-white tint*

I look upon the flowers here, in all their springtime splendor

if plucked and given to a love, they are a good fight mender. 

*I know 'tint' doesn't really go here, but hey, it's poetry. Bad poetry, but poetry nonetheless.

6. For some unknown reason, I like this picture of myself. So I decided to share it with you. The purple color in the second "row" behind me is called Woodstock.


7. I have no idea what kind of bush/tree thing this is, but its flowers were super pretty.

Side note: Wish I had a DSLR for moments like this one!








8. This is the Aladdin, as you can see. I've never seen a tulip that opened like this one. Maybe because I'd never seen a tulip that had spiky petals before. Ridj called them "fire tulips." He likes red and multicolored tulips are his favorite, so these were tied for first place in his Tulip Book.

9. Patch of Aladdins. 






10. Like I said before, Ridj likes multi-colored tulips. He proclaimed these his most favorite, tied with Aladdins.


11. More multi-colored tulips. Zurel by name. I think they have too much white in them.

Also, as a side note, I have never seen a blue tulip. There are plenty of blue flowers - why not tulips?!?



12. Princess Irene. So cute! My coworkers sent me a flower arrangement for my birthday, and there were some blue things that are by the Princesses in the bouquet. A week and a half later, I can tell you they have a beautiful drying pattern.

13. More daffodil fields!

14. Me and Ridj in front of some tulips. Classic coloration. Names not known.

15. The thing I think is so awesome about these is that the stems are reddish. I am not sure it shows up in the actual photo, but they were so lovely and delicate - blushing, almost.

16. Green and purple college! This one's for you, Dad. Also, I didn't know that tulips could be so short and squatty...or have such purple tones to their foliage. 

17. Pheasant Eye. I have never actually been close enough to a pheasant to know if this is what its eye looks like. You know how I feel about birds, so I'm not even sure that I want to even be close enough to a pheasant eye to figure it out. Maybe not even in a picture. (Okay, that's a bit extreme...) I really do like the bright 'pop' of the centre though.

I must admit that I kept half-expecting it (the flower) to start making bird-like eeping and rustling noises. But it's a flower, so it didn't satisfy my brain's overactive desire to integrate flora and fauna on this occasion. Phew.

(It would have been a bit awkward if it had. Maybe that's a great fantasy kid book - the princess pheasant that turns into a flower and has to wait for the prince to look past the thornless roses to appreciate her, but it's hard because her season is early and all the princes in her country start their proverbial princess-hunting late in the season.)




18. If this photograph were in an art show, I would dub it, "Study of Blurry Upside Down Flowers, Blue, #1". It did seem weird that all the flowers were facing ground-ward--a little self-defeating. How would the bees and everything else pollenate? Maybe that job is left to the ants? I don't know of any ants that purposefully pollenate. Please, by all means, fix my ignorance if you know of some ant species that I do not.

Bucket List Cross-off #3.2: La Conner

We decided to go to dinner along the water. We drove down the one main street in La Conner (it really is an uber touristy place, and it was so strange that at six o'clock on a Saturday night there were only two or three places open), and parked, which would be totally uninteresting except there was a helicopter randomly sitting about fifty feet from us. It started up, and you can see that its propeller is definitely in motion.


Here, you can see that the back half thingie is definitely spinning too. Made for  an awesome picture, but also made me think of Indiana Jones. Only the yellow of this helicopter is more friendly than a Nazi twin-prop.

Then it took off. I admit I didn't actually see it leave the ground because it flung dust in my eye (what I thought of in my Sting* blog post earlier) and so I had to squint. So this is as fast as I could react, and it was already winging its way back to Seattle. It was tiny! It fit maybe three people.

This is me with a really really red tree. The color of it was so striking that I asked Ridj to stop so I could have a photo op.

We had dinner on the water. There were a few choices, but most of them were super seafood-y, which Ridj was fine with, but I was not.

Rating: 4 stars. We had dinner at the pub/bar/whatever place--anyone who has been to La Conner knows which one I'm talking about...the one with the pool tables on the right as you walk in. Anyway, the waitress was so nice. We got the clam chowder as an appetizer, and I had lemon chicken.  He got the Saturday Night Specal - ribeye with garlic bread, a salad, and baked potato for $13.99. Everything was flavorful, the salad was real, the dressings were house-made, and it was just all-around yum. It's one of those places that the locals all go and hang out - which makes for interesting people-watching.

(He didn't know he was going to be in the picture - he thought the picture was only going to be the food, which is why he isn't looking and me and smiling his "I'm about to eat!" smile.)

Here I am, smiling my cheesy "I'm really tired and hungry" smile. Complete with half-raised eyebrow. So my style. And with that, you have now come to:

THE END

...of this post.