George, being the great foodie that he is, has a tradition of going to the once a month brunch at Lexington House in Los Gatos. We were joined by Andrew and Debby for a great conversation. The food was amazing, and I really enjoyed George sharing some of his favorite food places with Steph and myself.
Steph and I went to a couples massage class in Palo Alto, and we really enjoyed it. We learned a lot of techniques and things to use that would make the massages we give better. The one thing that we have problems with are everything that require the headrest. It was surprising that a lot of the massages required the headrest setup, or something similar, to really work properly. I would imagine most of the people coming through wouldn’t have a massage area with a headrest. We haven’t used this as much as we should, but I’m going to try hard to change that.
Stephanie and I drove up to Sanoma Saturday morning for Leyan and Jamie’s wedding, and it was a pretty good time. We started the trip with a hike along the Sanoma Overlook Trail. It was a nice trail and did have a really good view from the top. It was very hot out so we stopped with just the upper loop and then headed to the air bnb, which was a nice house pretty close to Sonoma City Center. We hung out in the city center for about 2 hours before trying to get a lyft or uber to the wedding. There weren’t many around so we ended up cutting it pretty close on getting there.
The wedding itself was very nice, with lots of people given a chance to be involved or called out. The reception was great, and Stephanie and I got to do some silly pictures, fun dancing, and I lost another bet to Kevin.
The next morning they had an amazing brunch for everyone. The drive back was long and uneventful other than waze taking us on a jaunt through the city.
We had a great dinner last night at Sorrel, a pop up restaurant in SF. Stephanie organized it and I really enjoyed the dinner. The food was really good, not as good or interesting as Coi, but still really good.
Steph and I had a lovely day in SF starting with an Escape the room in Japan town. When we got there a festival was going on, and it made me really happy that we didn’t need to find parking. The room was designed for 11 people, and we only had 7. We ended up doing pretty well given that number difference, but we made one critical mistake and that cost us the round. I had a great time doing it, and was really happy I got to work on the puzzles I did.
Then Steph and I broke off from the rest of the group and went to Beach Blanket Babylon, which I thought of as Non Sequitur, the Musical, with HATS! It was amusing, but I don’t think I’d go again.
We had some time to kill before dinner so naturally we went to eat. We stopped by the Stinking Rose for some garlic bread, garlic ice cream, garlini, and roasted garlic. The roasted garlic spread on the bread was amazing.
Coi was a fantastic experience, and we got some fantastic food. One of the really unique things they had was the tea pairings, which Steph got. I got the California wine pairing and was not disappointed. They had some neat art on the walls that were MRI’s of different foods in cross sections. I was able to guess 3 of the 4 plants, an steph was able to guess the animal.
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress has become one of my favorite books and I really liked being able to talk about it with a group of friends because of all the great philosophical points in it. Heinlein was really ahead of his time, and ahead of now, with all the topics he covers. Some of the tech is obviously dated, but it seems very plausible despite that, and given it was written in the 60’s it is absolutely phenomenal.
Since I took it a little easy over the past two days I had enough time to make soup dumplings. Since soup dumplings are almost always filled with pork, I decided to make some that Steph could have as well. I made it all from scratch, which was a pretty good experience. All in all there were 5 filling types: Pork, Mushroom, Potato, Mushroom + Potato, and Pork + Potato. They were all delicious, but the ones with potato didn’t end up having any soup, since the potato just absorbed it all. The dumplings were a ton of work, and we plan to have others over this weekend to make more. We’ve got a lot of filling left, but no more wrappers.
The one pictured is the most photogenic of the dumplings we made, some weren’t so pretty. We also got better at it as we went along.
Steph and I joined Adam and George for dinner at the Indian Street Cafe, then went over to George’s place to play the game Dead of Winter.
George ended up being the traitor, but when called out he got the reconciling card. He did stab us at a really good moment, and only some quick checks confirmed that it was him who stabbed us.
I ended up getting a really good character that fed off of all the others abilities, and he also picked up a few blueprints so I was raking in the items, and at the same time building up a formidable group of characters. I had 5 characters for a few turns and it was really fun. I also had almost all the weapons, so I was killing tons of zombies, getting tons of items, and winning all sorts of ways. Despite two crisis coming up that required drugs I was able to keep my drug horde and Steph covered for me. Everyone ended up winning, even George.
Adam, Tina, George, and Steph have teamed up as a band of heroes against me, the evil overlord. So far we’ve been really close, with me losing by one goblin in the first quest. I then lost by 1/32 health in the second quest and 1/25 health in the third quest. I’m having a really good time. The hardest part is dealing with Tina getting a lucky drop on the very first quest and that leading to Steph having an insanely overpowered weapon for this early. I’m going to have to focus fire her a lot more.
It's an Exciting World 