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.
Stephanie and I went to a few open houses on Saturday and that was interesting because they had the exact same layout (which we didn’t like) and were in the same neighborhood but one was 200K more than the other. It was interesting to see what the differences were. We then kept going North into the city and stopped by the SF MOMA for a few hours. I really liked the sculptures, especially those that were living or moving. I wasn’t a huge fan of the paintings as I couldn’t understand what they were supposed to be doing most of the time, and so much of modern art is about the history behind it.
Steph and I then got a Lyft to one of the best dinner’s we’ve had at Atelier Crenn. We loved the food, but the wine wasn’t our favorite. I was especially amazed by the presentation, and the taste was delightful.
Stephanie and I went to a Survival Class this past weekend, and were joined by Andrew and Debby. I was a little surprised that Andrew came, since the day star is not his thing, but he seemed to like it. He was able to get a fire going. I was able to carve and wood burn a spoon, that I actually used to eat some tom yom. It isn’t a very good spoon, but I might work on it a touch more.
That evening we went over to Debby and Andrew’s place and watched some naked and afraid. It was good and we felt like we knew some of the mistakes people on the show were making.
This was a good discussion, even though it was just three of us. Many of the people that would normally have come to book club were in Vegas at the time. We did decide on an amazing book for next time, Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.
Two good friends of mine, Andrew and Debby, got married a few weekends ago. It was gorgeous in a rose garden and I was officiating. It was a very interesting experience to officiate a wedding, and very nerve wracking. It took a while to come up with something they liked, but we got to a point that they were really happy with it.
The reception was amazing, despite being at an overly packed Chinese banquet restaurant. I really liked that they had karaoke, and it was interesting to see what groups of people would sing songs together. The drinks were tasty and the food was ok. I got stuck at the ‘vegetarian’ table. It wouldn’t have been so bad if they actually served veggie dishes. The best dishes were the last two to come out, and both were shaped like fish. One was mango pudding, and the other was a stuffed pastry with mushroom on the inside. Kevin was at our table as well and kept going to grab some meat, but he was sitting in the location on the table that allowed for that. I lost a bet about how long Haru’s best man speech would be so i’ll be getting a henna tattoo of Kevin’s choosing soon (I had under on 2:40 with it actually being 3:18).
Stephanie planned an amazing weekend in Marin for the 4th of July long weekend. We got up there early evening on Friday, and I was able to work in the car on the way up so we could get going a bit earlier. Traffic was still bad, but I can’t even imagine what it would have been like should we have left later. We got to the inn and it was adorable. She really picked a great place, with a nice owner who cooked us breakfast in the morning.
We dropped off our stuff in the room, then left to get to the kayaking. We got to the launch point and there was only one group there so we assumed incorrectly that we were with them. Turns out there are four or five groups that head out for this bioluminescent kayaking trip every evening, so we found the group we were supposed to be with and it worked out. I didn’t realize it but the skirt on my kayak wasn’t sealing properly so it kept popping off on the first part of the trip, and I got soaking wet pretty quickly. It wasn’t that bad, since I’m naturally pretty warm.
We got to see some harbor seals and a lot of cormorants. There was one cormorant who had gotten the plastic rings from the top of a six pack stuck around its wing or neck and it had gotten another ring stuck on the tree near its nest. It had died and was mangled, hanging from the plastic six pack rings. I had heard about that kind of thing, but had never actually seen it before, it was very disturbing.
We got across Tomales Bay, and landed on a beach for a snack of cookies and hot chocolate. It was nice to get out of the wet kayak, and dry off a bit. After snacks, as it was getting dark, we got back in and I was able to properly seal the skirt. We paddled over to a dark secluded cove and I was surprised by how much bioluminescence there was. There was certainly the most I’ve seen in any one place.
We paddled back across and everyone else had a really hard time keeping up, the wind in the last stretch was strong, so many of them were getting blown down the coast. We made it back to the Inn and got some great sleep after washing all the seawater off.
The next day we had an amazing breakfast prepared by the inn owner, then we headed out to the northern point of Point Reyes. It was a lovely hike where we got to see a ton of elk. We didn’t know this but these were native Californian Elk. We had a nice lunch by a tiny pond there, then headed back to the town.
Stephanie looked up a meadery, and we got some drinks there. It was interesting with all the different types of honey and the different meads that those honeys made. The flavor was distinctly different with all of them. I would really like to try a cyser that was made with orange blossom honey.
Then we went to the Cowgirl Creamery, and got some really amazing goat cheeses. One was a standard goat cheese and the other was a truffle goat cheese, and possibly the best cheese I’ve ever had. They also had some really tasty looking crackers that we got to go with the cheeses.
We headed out to our next place an Airbnb at Mills Valley. It was cute, and pretty basic, but everything we needed and more for the evening. We went into Mills Valley proper and got some pretty tasty food at the nice restaurant there. We then just went back to the room and cuddled while watching some anime on netflix.
The next morning we got up decently early to get to Muir Woods. We were able to get parking, but we still had to park on the street despite getting there at 8:15. We had a really nice hike once we got out of the valley. There were more people on the early trails than Steph and I usually like to deal with, and I could tell she was getting aggravated by it. Luckily once we made it to some of the lesser used trails the crowds abated, leaving some wonderful views for us to observe in private and peace.
On the way back home we decided to look up restaurants along our route, and found an amazing dumpling place in Outer Richmond. They had some of the best soup dumplings I’ve ever had.
All in all Stephanie planned an amazing weekend, and I’ll have to repay her with a similarly amazing weekend soon.
It's an Exciting World 