Irv’s Journal

Just catching up here.

As you may already know, Esther and I were forced to evacuate our house two weekends ago due to the Yorba Linda/Anaheim Hills Fire.  There was much excitement to be had, but we escaped with all three cars and lots of our belongings.  The evacuation was lifted on Sunday, but we didn’t return home till Monday.  Thankfully everything was okay, just as we had left it.  I believe the closest point of the fire was about a mile and a half or so away from the house.

The following weekend I headed out to Germany for a work trip.  While I had never been to Germany (besides the Frankfurt Airport), I wasn’t too excited about this trip.  I ended up having a white Thanksgiving in Germany (snow started early this year), and since the trip ended early, I was home on Black Friday evening.  With temps in the low 30s, i realized yet again that I am seriously lacking in the warm winter coat department.  Yeah, I never really think about it since I live in sunny southern California, but generally when I go on my work trips it can be REALLY COLD!

One of the nice things about being in Germany is the month long Weihnachtsmarkt (Christmas Market) that takes place in most of the cities starting the week of Thanksgiving.  Basically it is a giant fair that pops up in the town squares and people sell crafts and other random stuff.  It’s a place to get your Christmas shopping done.  And to go along with being a fair, there’s tons of fair food to sample, such as rostbratwurst (grilled bratwurst on a roll), kartoffelpuffer (potato pancakes served with apple sauce), giant brezels (pretzels), and of course gluwein (hot spiced red wine).  I managed to try most of the food, which was definitely good.  Tried a non-alcoholic version of the gluwein (hot spiced grape juice) and must say it was pretty tasty as well.

Now I’m back, and just counting down till the holidays!

After our little pumpkin carving fun in Seattle, Esther had the idea of carving pumpkins for our house too.

Sarah, Arnold, Irene, and Jerome came over on Friday night for some jack o’lantern fun.  I managed to find a website for patterns while I was looking for a Super Mario template.  Anyway the pumpkins turned out really nicely, but unfortunately have already pretty much expired.  Oh well! I guess our house won’t be decorated for Halloween afterall!

I’ll edit this post with pictures once I get them.

Just spent a weekender in Seattle at Amy and Sean’s with Esther, Sarah, and Janet.  It was a really fun trip.  Highlights included:

• The Seattle Underground Tour.  I highly recommend this to anyone visiting Seattle for the first time as a tourist.  Who knew that they totally rebuilt seattle after a great fire in 1888 and re-graded the city with fill from the mountains?  Some buildings lost a whole story… the dump was between 8 to 35 ft worth of fill!
• Salmon hatchery tour.  Wow.  I guess I never really thought about how salmon hatcheries worked.  Did you know that salmon fought their way back from the ocean, back up the rivers, just to get back to where they were born so that they could spawn/fertilize eggs and then die?  I didn’t.  This hatchery has a salmon ladder to simulate jumping up creeks and whatnot, it was crazy the amount of fight these fish had at the end of their journeys and how torn up they were.
• Pumpkin Patch.  We had a whole lot of fun going to a nursery with a real live pumpkin patch.  We got to pick and cut our own pumpkins straight off the soil, unlike here where most of the “patches” just have pumpkins sitting out on hay bales.  It was pretty wild as a few of us got competitive and looking for bigger pumpkins.  The biggest one ended up being nearly 33 lbs!!!
• Pumpkin carving.  Believe it or not, this was my first time carving pumpkins.  It was super messy, and I picked the hardest pattern to follow, but in the end it was totally worth it to see my pumpkin lit up!
• Food.  Yeah, how could a trip be completed without food?  Pretty much every place we went to was a plus in my eyes (and mouth).  Duke’s Chowderhouse, 3rd Floor Fish Cafe, and Green Leaf Vietnamese Cuisine were all very tasty.

The only lowlight for me was that Kaila, Amy and Sean’s Alaskan Husky mix, managed to forget who I was again.  I was encouraged that she seemed to accept me upon our arrival on Thursday, but all of a sudden on Friday she was back to her old ways, hiding from me and growling at me.  Oh well, maybe it’s just not meant to be for her and I.  Who knows.

Of course you might be wondering where the heck my pictures are.  Well of course we had a little camera snafu during one of the days, and in general aren’t big camera bugs when it comes to touristy stuff.  Luckily, Sarah definitely is, and she has posted her pictures on flickr.

http://flickr.com/photos/sarahderd/sets/72157608199328563/

I’m not sure if it happens to everyone, but the ‘freshman 15′ that I never gained in college became more of a “newlywed 10″ for me.  I have a pretty good guess as to what happened, but I refuse to lose and am now on a semi-serious mission to get back down to 175 lbs while also converting my bodyfat into muscle mass.

Luckily Esther is really supportive of this decision, and we started going to a trainer together twice a week.  Additionally, I’m still doing basketball on Tuesdays, working out separately on Thursdays, and we’ve gotten back into tennis recently.  We’ve been pretty much alternating between the gym and tennis on Fridays AND Saturdays (I know, pretty crazy).

The results?  I guess I’m seeing results.  My metabolism is way up and my max bench is getting really close to where I was at my best.  I’m feeling much stronger.  But I haven’t been able to shed any weight yet.  Hopefully it’s just getting converted to muscle… hahahahaha

Esther’s good friend Linda held her first USC football party of the season this weekend.

We got there plenty early so I could help with the grilling and ended up fixing up her garage opener as well.

Lots of yummy food ( too bad Esther is still recovering from her wisdom tooth extraction ) and a big USC blowout victory.  All in all a great time.

Thinking about having friends over for a future game.  Seems like it could be doable.

Fight On!

Sunday

Of course, every trip has to have an end.  On Sunday, Craig, Esther and myself were scheduled for a return flight at 3.  This means we had enough time to have a brunch before going off to the airport.

We got up pretty early and wandered over to Farmer Brown.  On the outside, it is a dingy little downtown shop.  On the inside, it is a dingy little downtown shop. Hehe,  actually, the decorations lent themselves to (I think what they intended to be) a more urban type of establishment.

Once the brunch started, everything was on the rise.  Homemade pancakes, fried chicken, biscuits and gravy, cheesy scrambled eggs, yummy!  The food was terrific, if not artery clogging!  I definitely recommend their weekend brunch if you are ever up in San Francisco.  Will try to go back next time I’m in town.

After brunch, we grabbed our bags at the hotel and made our way to the airport.  Bye bye SF!

Saturday

Woke up and went across the street to the 24 Hr Fitness.  Didn’t do too much, just trying to keep the gym progress going (woohoo, I managed to push 175 on the bench!) and burn off some calories in preparation for the chocolate festival.  There was one problem at the gym though… apparently some people don’t think they need to wash their gym clothes.  I mean, WTF we knew it wasn’t BO, but there was seriously some nastiness going on with this one guy.  And no matter where we went, there he was… aiya.

Anyway, we spent a good hour and a half, and then headed back to the hotel and prepped for our afternoon of chocolatey goodness.  Left the hotel at about 12:30, and proceeded to get lost (no thanks to the hotel front desk lady!!! argh) trying to find the bus stop that headed in the direction we wanted to go.  After about 20 minutes of wandering around, we came across a bus depot (yes, handy indeed) and asked a nice bus driver who pointed us in the right direction.

The chocolate festival was… much smaller than it looks on Food Network.  There were probably about 80 “booths” available (most vendors took up either 2 or 4 spots, so there weren’t as many as you would think), all with various chocolate-based samples to try out.  Before gorging on sugar, we all decided it was best if we ate an actual lunch.  Alas most of the restaurants in Ghirardelli Square were packed, so we ended up blowing a bunch of money on ripoff fair food.  In this case it was Asian chicken skewers with either fried rice or chow mein.  Not too shabby for fair food – it was expensive, but they certainly piled on the food.

After lunch, we headed over to the main stage, where the Earthquake (8 scoops of ice cream, three different toppings, and whip cream) eating contest was about to start.  We picked a random older asian guy to root for and started a *clap, clap, clapclapclap* chant, which got a lot of the nearby crowd on his side as well.  It was all for naught though, the returning champ that they showed on last year’s Food Network coverage defended his crown.  Our guy did manage a close second, however.

We started on the journey into the vendor samples.  Ice cream sundaes from Ghirardelli, chocolate jalapeno gelato, chocolate beer, chocolate martinis, and chocolate malts were amongst the choices.  I don’t think anyone managed to spend all the pre-paid samples from their tickets, so most of us went ahead and blew our remaining tickets on Ghirardelli chocolate samples…

Chocolated out, we headed back to the hotel and rested for a while (watching the US Open, mostly) since we were pretty pooped and had to wait for our dinner reservations.  We hit the House of Prime Rib.  Can’t really explain too much except to say that it’s pretty much exactly like Lawry’s.  Except I really like Lawry’s salad better, and enjoyed the Creamed Corn at the House of Prime Rib.

What’s another night out on a Foodie trip without ICE CREAM?  Following dinner we headed to Mitchell’s, which is apparently a filipino-owned ice cream shop.  Holy crap people were parking/double parking like there was no tomorrow.  Double parallel parking with hazard lights on? No Problem!  And police drove by without a care, so I guess it’s a generally accepted practice.  Ice cream wasn’t too bad either.  Lots of asian flavors available, like halo halo and jackfruit, etc.

After dessert we drove up to Coit Tower.  I had told the crew that the city view was really nice at night.  Er, I guess I had an obsolete memory because they had allowed all the bushes surrounding the view points to overgrow!  What’s the point of those pay binocular things if all you are going to see is the bushes?!?!?!

There went another day, already!

So a few of us went up to San Francisco this past weekend.  I would have to say this whole trip was caused by Food Network.  Yep, you guessed it, this weekend was the annual Ghirardelli Square Chocolate Festival!

Friday

Craig, Esther, and I met up at LAX and flew Virgin America to SFO.  I must say that this time around on VA was much more pleasant and ON TIME.  Once there, I took my first trip on BART, then hiked a few blocks to our hotel.

We didn’t have too much time, since we were scheduled for an Alcatraz cruise/tour, so we quickly jumped piled into Eugene’s rental Trailblazer and headed out.  Since the ferry site was near Fisherman’s Wharf, we parked there and ate at Chowder, one of the local clam chowder joints that isn’t named Boudin.  I must say the chowder was pretty tasty, as was my crab sandwich.

Sufficiently filled, we headed for the cruise to Alcatraz.  I have to say I enjoyed touring this place.  The audio tour that takes you through the cell house is definitely interesting.  The view of the city from the island is very scenic.  They do offer night tours, but no way am I spending time in the darkness in a prison.

We topped off the night with dinner at Taylor’s Automatic Refresher, followed by Marco Polo, a chinese gelato shop that has a host of asian flavored gelato to choose from.

So, I just got back from a little two week trip to Chincoteague, VA.  It’s basically a small town near the VA/MD border.  Work was really boring and really so was the town.  It had one main street (the other being the road into town) and one traffic light.

Funny thing, here in California we can drive hours and still be in California.  On the other hand, on one of our free days we took a drive to explore.  In an hour or so of driving, I passed  completely through Maryland and a few miles into Delaware.  I can check those two states off of my “states to visit” list.

During our drive, we passed through what looked like a pretty large vacation spot right near the Delaware and Maryland border, called Ocean City.  Basically it is a large main street with hotels on both sides, right along the coast.  I’m talking about maybe 30+ hotels in a 5 or 6 mile stretch.  And it was pretty empty.  One of the coworkers had been there on the weekend and said it was totally packed, so it must be a weekend getaway type of town.

I was kind of lost, so I fired up the good ol’ Google Maps on the blackberry and look what popped up on the map:

I know these are Native American types of names, but I certainly got a kick out of it.

Anyway, we managed to finish work a few days early so we headed back to Washington DC and did a quick afternoon walking tour of the National Mall and Smithsonian Institute.

Back to the grind…

Out of convenience, and to promote company, we invited the group to spend the night on Friday.  This worked out for Eugene and Joanne, since they were going to see some houses in Corona in the morning.  Craig had other plans, and Darren had to work on Saturday, so they both headed home.

Esther and I had been interested in trying out the lunch buffet at the little Indian restaurant we’ve been going to, and it sounded like a good idea to Eugene and Joanne.  Results – good.  Although they didn’t necessarily have our usual favorites, the choices for lunch were quite good.  Unfortunately, we had a bit too much to eat and had to recover for a while at the house.

Sufficiently rested up, we headed down to the annual beach party/bonfire.  What we didn’t know was that Gin was a bit late to the beach and couldn’t secure a fire pit.  He asked around and found an extra pit next to an extremely large group of people.  In the spirit of the last post, the summary in highlight fashion:

Highlights

• The beach!
• Bonfire
• Roasted Marshmallows
• Hanging out with the friends

Lowlights

• Chemical burgers
• Chemical bonfire
• The Large NA (Read: NARCOTICS ANONYMOUS) meeting next to us
• Inner Fire pit (since the wind blows inland, we were a bit smoked out)

Basically Gin managed to secure us a pit from a bunch of NA members, who, by the looks of it were having a recovery meeting.  But man was the beach packed.  Basically every single pit from the pier all the way as far as I could see was taken.  Anyway, somehow people managed to forget that when you’re using match light charcoal, you’re supposed to let all those chemicals burn off…. hmm yeah my burger tasted extra “smoky” for some reason.

Jennifer managed to get us free firewood from someone at her work.  Unfortunately, it was treated pine, AKA construction 2×4s.  Not sure what the safety precautions on burning chemically treated wood is, but I’m pretty sure it can’t be too good for you.  Not that it stopped most of us from roasting marshmallows anyway.

Since the beach closes so early (at 10pm), and people weren’t hungry, we headed out to Guppy Tea House to enjoy some shaved ice and general Asian drinks.  Funny, though that when we did get there, almost everyone ended up ordering food!  I am proud to say that with 10 people in tow, we FINALLY managed to finish the large shaved ice at Guppy! (It’s listed as serving 4 people!)

On Sunday, we all slept in.  I was telling Darren about this movie I had just bought that had Tony Jaa all over the boxart, even though he was only in the movie for about 5 minutes in a bit part.  To heal the wounds from that debacle, and since we had ordered pizza, I put in The Protector (Tom Yum Goong) to watch a little, but whoops we ended up watching the whole movie.  Afterward, we spent the rest of the afternoon on Elefunk, a cute little puzzle game that I had downloaded from the Playstation Store.

We headed down to the Spectrum for dinner, and just to get out of the house.  Going up the toll road in the xB with a load of people is…quite the adventure.  It definitely brought back the bad memories of trying to get up the hill on the road to Vegas – not fun.  Needless to say, we made it.  The food at Maki Maki was good as usual, albeit pricier than I remembered.

Another weekend gone…