Wendy's Not Through At 32!

September 29, 2007


It's Wendy's 32nd birthday, and her birthday catch-phrase this year is "Wendy's Not Through At 32!". That's for sure.

We started Wendy's birthday with a four hour frisbee practice, hooray! It was sunny and warm on Stanford campus, and we slogged through the badly-disguised sprint drills and scrimmages. After practice, we rolled over to Antonio's Nut House for some post-practice beers and mexican food.

As Stephen is preparing to move to Australia this fall (boo!), he felt that a very nice birthday present for Wendy would be his roasting pan:
We headed to Redwood City around 5 pm to Malibu Grand Prix, to meet up with a group of folks for some good big kiddie fun with turbo race carts, mini-golfing, and games. Yay!

The plan was for everyone to wear fun t-shirts and goof off all night for Wendy's birthday. Sandy wanted to borrow a t-shirt, so I figured that this shirt was the best choice for a vegetarian:



Check out my California Highway Patrol turbo cart:

















We each took 5 laps of the race course and they gave us a little summary of our race times after we were done. I got faster each lap, but was still pretty average (see below). Will kicked our butts with the fastest average time (56 sec?).
From the race course, we headed to mini-golf...(we're missing Heather in this pic for some reason...):








After the 18 holes of fantastically-bad putting but good times, our stomachs were craving some nutritious fast food and light beer.
It's quite sad how excited we all were to play the games and compete with the little kids. Skee-ball, basketball, etc. etc.


We managed to pool all our tickets (~500) from the games to get Wendy a Dora The Explorer bag. Apparently, we suck at those games. We just needed 2500 more tickets to get her a skateboard. Oh well.
When we were done with the Malibu Grand Prix activities, we all headed back to the city for drinkies in the Mission at Bruno's. It took us longer to get there, as I had forgotten that it was LoveParade! in the city on Saturday, so we couldn't compete with all the fancy outfits to hail a cab.





Happy 32nd birthday, Wendy!

Friday HH @ Bacar

September 28, 2007

Friday rolled around and I sent out a last-minute cry for happy hour at 3 pm. I was craving some oysters and a raspberry gimlet, so I left work and headed to Bacar around 5:15 pm. I met up with Will, Key, Patrick, Bridgette and McT, apparently the only folks who were available to heed my happy hour plea.

Bacar has new owners, a new chef, and a new website. But thankfully, they didn't get rid of one of my favorite happy hours in SF ($1 oysters, half-priced cocktails, $5 wine, $2 draft beers). In fact, in addition to the Friday 2:30-6:30 happy hour, they've added the Monday-Thursday 4:30-6:30 happy hour. Sweet!

I heart oysters and raspberry gimlets.

Papa Town

September 27, 2007

Our good friend, Charles (a.k.a. Chucktown), invited us for dinner on Thursday night and to hang out with his father, also Charles (a.k.a. PapaTown), who was in town visiting.

We met up at Suppenkuche in Hayes Valley, yet another little joint that I've wanted to try and never made it to. Very bloggable.

Suppenkuche (pretend that there's two dots over the "u") looks like a German drinking hall that serves up great German fare. Oh, that's because it is. Right. The room was bustling, full of many young and hip individuals.

Charles Kindred III (left) with Charles Kindred II (right). Chucktown has the same laugh as PapaTown...aww....
I started with a cup of the butternut squash soup, which was awesome and made me wish I had ordered the bowl-sized portion. Surprisingly light, it hit the spot.

For dinner, I had the "Sauerbraten mit Preiselbeerkonfitüre, serviert mit Rotkohl und Spätzle"(Translation: marinated and braised beef with cranberries served with red cabbage and spätzle). This was delicious, the beef was tender and the spätzle was delicious (this may be the first time I've had authentic spätzle). The red cabbage had just the nice balance of vinegar to it.

It was great to meet PapaTown and try some great German dishes at the same time. Now I know what Wiener Schnitzel really is. Boy, was I confused!

It's All In Who You Know

September 24, 2007

FRIDAY

It has been insanely hectic at work lately, so I was very much looking forward to the weekend. It was nice to get a call from my sister on Friday afternoon letting me know that she got a position within Bank of America (sweet!) and that she had extra tickets to the BofA luxury suite at AT&T Park for the Giants vs. Reds game (super sweet!). I convinced Wendy to come with me (which wasn't hard) and we headed down on Muni. There was some entertaining Muni mishaps (ask me next time you see me or Wendy) and we met up with my sister and her co-workers.

I had been in a box suite with Genentech co-workers once a few years ago, but it's always nice to be pampered on the corporate dime. It was a chilly night too (typical) so it was great to have the indoor seating. And all the food. And all the drinkies.



The Giants were leading most of the game but ended up losing 9-8 in the end due to some major choking action in the 8th inning. Oh well, I can't complain, it's nice to have a sister who gets luxury suite tickets.

SATURDAY/SUNDAY

After a little sleep-in and home-made brekkie, Will and I packed all our frizzer gear in the car and headed up to Sonoma county to meet up with our frisbee team for a weekend of practice and fun.

The weather was a little dismal and we had a 4-hour practice in the gloomy and off-on rain. But after the practice, we all headed to a the Sonoma home that was recently constructed by the family of our teammate, Alicia. This house was pretty amazing, beautiful hard wood, amazing kitchen, fantastic fixtures, and a killer projection movie room. Insane!

View from the open doors of the main room:



The house comfortably fit most of our team and as usual, the team put on an amazing dinner.

A bunch of us crammed into the movie room to watch "300", which was a pretty good film, lots of action and Gerard Butler's abs.

On Sunday morning, we had a phenomenal team breakfast, and then had another practice. It was a gorgeous day, so it was much more enjoyable than the day before.

We headed home and we did not much else for the rest of the evening (couch was so comfy!).

Thanks to Alicia and her family for hosting the team in their beautiful new house!