Birthday Part IV - Sausalito

If you are looking for a lovely place to brunch, try Fred's Coffee Shop. If the lemon ricotta pancakes are on the menu I highly recommend them. They are the diameter of a soccer ball, be forewarned.

 That pink blob in the bottom left is a lone jellyfish.

I'm wishing I had cause to purchase this empty old club, if only for it's carved door.

The building did happen to be for sale.

If you feel like buying me a $4K bike I'd love one of these wood ones.

California is wonderful. The birthday weekend got several things off my list of things to do before I leave. The next week I found out I had passed all my clearances and approvals for the Foreign Service. I missed getting into the July orientation class by only a week. If the clearances had gone one week faster I would have been moving to DC at the beginning of July. Instead, I'll probably be waiting on the list of cleared candidates until January. It was still a very nice gift to have passed everything. Now it's just a matter of time.

Birthday Part III - Giants beat the Dodgers!

I've made a long list of things I want to do before I leave California's sunny shores. Included was to be sure I made it to a Giants game. The Diplomat kindly petitioned on my behalf and obtained two tickets for a Saturday game from his father. With C in tow, carrying more Giants gear than the two of us could actually wear, we headed to the city.

Stop One: The Ferry Building for treats. 

It happened to be one of the most gorgeous days. Which I'm sure was arranged specifically for my birthday.

Stop Two: The Stadium

I will say the game was amazing - beside the fact that I slipped on someone's spilled ketchup and ended up with twisted ankles on my knees in the middle of a hotdog promenade. Ouch. We had been rushing back to our seats after glancing at a TV while C procured some garlic fries and finding that the Dodgers had somehow gained 7 runs in the short time it took us to find the french fry location of her preference. But there was rejoicing in the end, so all ended well.

Warm-ups.

 C & me

I'm sure we grossed out everyone in a five seat radius as we marathon-ed through a mountain of napkins and still ended up with mustard and sauerkraut everywhere.

I also drove C nuts running around the stadium taking snapshots of letters from different signs around the stadium. I'd come up with a thank you for the tickets that I was set on finishing. I probably could have spelled out a novel using only letters from beer ads. It was a perfect font/letter hunt distraction. Except when we would be walking through a crowd and I would suddenly disappear in pursuit of alphabet trophies.

Each picture is only 1" x 1" - it is a mini thank you, hence the blurry photo in bad lighting.

The day couldn't have been better.

Birthday Part II

It's always best when your birthday falls on a Friday, at least for me. I've had so many Sunday birthdays I don't even want to think about it. Promptly after work I headed down to Berkeley to meet C and D&N. We went out for tapas, ice cream - and I may have devoured this entire box of chocolate (what was left of it by the time I took a snapshot) in about 15 min. That's what birthdays are for!

Really, the birthday weekend couldn't have come at a better time - I found out May 1st that I had passed all my clearances for the State Department. I was on high impatience alert waiting to hear back from the final review panel and in deep need of some distractions.

...and the backdating continues (I know it's cheating).

Birthday Part I

On my birthday lovely Z met me on campus for an extended lunch, and brought this perfect treat. If you haven't ever tried the strawberry shortcake cupcake at TreyBCakes you are missing out.