Sing-A-Long Sound Of Music

November 26, 2007


It was awesome waking up on Sunday morning and heading to dim sum at Ton Kiang. Henrik organizes dim sum with the frisbee folks (somewhat quarterly?) and it always seems that we need to do it more often.

From dim sum, I headed back to my neighborhood with Wendy and Kerry Soo to meet up with Heather at the Castro Theatre for "Sing-A-Long Sound of Music"! I'd been wanting to go to this for years but the timing never quite worked out, but alas, this year, I saw the listing and saw that I would be back from SoCal for the last day of the event. I was also excited to find out that in addition to Wendy and I, both Kerry and Heather loved this movie.


There was a pre-show costume contest:
It was super-fun, with lots of interaction and great singing. It was extremely helpful for me to have the words on the screen, as although I knew most of the songs, there were quite a few lyrics that were missing in my head.

If you love this movie (my sister and I watch it every Christmas...), you have to check this out sometime!

Good On Ya, Mate!

November 25, 2007

Will and I flew back on Saturday night from San Diego, just in time to hop over to our favorite strong-drink watering hole, the Latin American Club, to meet up with a bunch of folks who assembled to say goodbye to our favorite Aussie, Stephen. Stephen is moving back to Sydney on Sunday and we're very sad to be losing a teammate and great guy to hang out with. We're also a little worried that Pat will be looking for someone else to wrestle and have punching competitions with. Not it.

And look, it's Abe, isn't he supposed to be in Whistler already?


Turns out Abe is just finishing up some last stuff before taking off to Whistler, so at least we got one more social event out of him.

As for Stephen, Will and I are lucky that we get to see him very soon when we are traveling next month during my sabbatical. We're making a 4-day pit stop in Sydney on the way to New Zealand and will get to hang out with Stephen and Jo in their beautiful city. Can't wait!

Bye boys!

Gobble Gobble

November 24, 2007

I'm currently sitting in San Diego Airport enjoying the free Wi-Fi and waiting for my flight back to San Francisco. Will and I spent most of Thanksgiving week (Mon-Sat) in Ramona (in San Diego County) with his folks, Mike & Susan, on our annual week of golfing (fourth year in a row!)

It was a wonderfully low-key week. I worked remotely for Monday-Wednesday and got in a few rounds of golf at the end of the week at San Vicente Golf Club. This is a great course, very challenging (sometimes too challenging) and never is boring. As usual, the long game is great and the short game is retched. Thankfully, the chipping and putting got better over the days and I didn't break any of my clubs in frustration.

At night, we embarked in many card games (along with Gary and Fran) and it is very apparent that no matter what team I'm on, I'm the ultimate loser at 6-handed Euchre. I just couldn't win with my awful cards. Oh well.

As a treat, we finally had turkey for Thanksgiving. We also went the easier route of buying a pre-stuffed turkey which was super easy and delicious. Best idea ever!

Hope you all had a fantastic turkey day and a nice long weekend!

My Sister's Kids Are A Handful

November 18, 2007

On Sunday afternoon, Will and I headed down to San Jose to see my sister's family before we took off to SoCal for Thanksgiving week.

As soon as we got in the door, Olivia convinced Uncle Will to help her build her princess castle.

















Gosh, those kids are cute.

Key Turns...?

November 18, 2007

Hooray for November birthdays! Right after Robert's birthday was Key's birthday. He refuses to tell people what birthday he's celebrating, but considering he was born the same year I was and I was born in 1976, it's not that hard to figure out.

In contrast to a big night out, we decided to have a big night in. Also, Key and Wendy were taking off to El Salvador for a week on a red-eye on Saturday night, so we made it an early night in as well.

To celebrate, I put in another order for 1.5 lb lobsters at the New England Lobster Co. and we did another lobster fest...oh, it's true, I've been eating really well lately...

We had some roasted carrots, baked potatoes and garlic bread to accompany the lobster-butter gluttony.

For dessert, Katharine made a fantastic poached pear with vanilla ice cream and caramel sauce.

Happy Birthday Key! (And happy surfing in El Salvador!)

Robert Turns...?

November 17, 2007

Leaving the trend of saying goodbye to folks (thank goodness) and moving onto the next trend of....birthdays!

On Friday, we celebrated Robert's big 3-? (fill in your favorite number here) starting with dinner at the wonderful La Ciccia in Noe Valley, and then drinks at Make Out Room.

La Ciccia is this fantastic little Sardinian restaurant that Robert found a little while ago, so he managed to get a reservation for 10 people in this quaint space. Hooray for birthdays!

It was fantastic that there were some take-charge folks who ordered for the whole table and so that we could try a bunch of different dishes.
We sampled the house-cured lamb proscuitto that was delicious.
The bruschetta sampler plate, the most amazing and peculiar varieties that I've ever tasted. I can't recall the exact ingredients, but there were three different types: lemon & mozzarella, rare tuna & capers, lamb.

Seafood salad with lemon oild dressing (sorry, pic is a little washed out...)
Octopus stew in spicy tomato sauce (wow!).
Sardinian fregula served with parmesan, oyster mushrooms. This was amazing. Fregula is kind of like little pasta that looks like cous cous. It was rich, but I would eat this again and again.
A featured pasta dish, I think this was the tagliarini, really fantastic.
Tagliatelle pasta with tomotoes, pork and some crazy other ingredients that I couldn't quite hear (this was a featured dish). Amazing, I would eat this again and again (sound familiar?).

Seared filet of Corvina sea bass with fresh tomatoes, onion and basil. They originally brought the whole fish out to us and then took it back in the kitchen to filet out all the bones. Really nice dish.
For dessert, Robert's lady friend, Suhee (sp?) brought a wonderful cake from DeLessio Market and Bakery, choosing the Malted Vanilla Cake (super-moist deep dark chocolate cake layered with a malted vanilla butter cream, and topped with a white chocolate layer). Seriously, I was in wow with this cake. It really was super moist and usually I don't like butter cream, but this malted vanilla butter cream was to die for.

From La Ciccia, we rolled (literally, that meal was amazing!) to Make Out Room to catch up with everyone else. There were lots of folks out in full force, with good tunes and some good dancing in the house.







Happy Birthday Robert!

And thanks for introducing us to La Ciccia, a really big thumbs up from me to go try and for us to go back (again and again)...