Miscellany

OK, first things first. Chrissy, Scarlett, and Curiosity Killer have all decided that I’m a Rockin’ Girl Blogger! Tres cool! I think that I am now supposed to pick 5 rockin’ girl bloggers, and nominate them myself. Or award them, to be more precise with my language skills. But here’s the rub…how do I decide, from my many female blogging friends, which ones are rockin’ girl bloggers? How do I say to some, ‘hey, you’re a rockin’ girl blogger’, and not others, who are equally rockin’ in my book? So I’m breaking the rules. No paying this one forward. I suck like that. But you know what? If you are reading this, and you WANT to be a rockin’ girl blogger? Consider yourself awarded the title. Heck, even if you’re a rockin’ boy blogger, and you want to proclaim it to the world, go for it.

Next…on Tuesday, we went to Rivoli for our anniversary dinner. Wow, was it yummy. I started with the Bellwether farm ricotta and pecorino gnocchi with grilled black mission figs, brown butter, toasted walnuts and balsamic syrup ~ YUMMY. I’ve never had figs before, believe it or not, but they were very yummy in this dish. The gnocci were big and fluffy, not at all like the small ones you put together with two forks or buy in the freezer section of your store. They were SO good. Ted started with the Heirloom tomato and toasted pita salad with romaine, feta, mint, scallions and lemon vinaigrette ~ which was not what he was expecting, but he enjoyed it. We sometimes go to a local place, A & Noi, that has a tomato & mozzarella salad that we both LOVE, and I think he was expecting something like that. What he got was a salad that happened to have heirloom tomatoes in it. From there, we moved on to our main course. I had the Grilled salmon with white corn pudding, braised peppers and onions, avocado and cucumber salad and basil vinaigrette ~ um…YUM! The tastes in this dish went SO well together, and the corn pudding was yummy yummy yummy, as was the salmon. Mmmm. Ted had the Grilled leg of lamb with rosemary and garlic with stuffed tomatoes Provençal, blue lake beans, olive relish and aïoli ~ Equally awesome. The combination of the aïoli and the lamb was wonderful. The beans were crisp tender, and very yummy. Overall, it was a two-thumbs up kind of meal, our only sadness that we were too full to order dessert. Sigh. It was a wonderful dinner, and no one tried to steal our reservation this time. BONUS!

By the way, guess who had the whole week off from work? YAY ME! With Tuesday being our anniversary, and Wednesday being the 4th and all, I decided it was stupid to go to work for Monday and then take two days off…so I asked for Monday and Tuesday off, and planned a lovely 5 day weekend for myself. Cool, huh? Then, on Sunday, I received an email from the CEO of our small company, saying that as everyone has been working very hard lately, and we’ve got more projects to gear up for, so we’ll be working hard again, we should all stop and breathe for a minute…so they shut down the company for Thursday and Friday! YAY! So, for the price of TWO vacation days, I got 9 days off of work. LOVE IT. Had time with the whole family, time with friends, time with just Ted, time with just Maya…nice nice nice. Strange to be off of work for 9 days and not go on a vacation somewhere, but kind of relaxing, too. And nice to not be traveling when the roads are crazy busy like a holiday weekend.

While off of work, sleeping in every day, enjoying myself, we have gotten caught up on our Netflix picks. We’ve had a few in the house for awhile now, and just pretty much ignoring them. So, we TRIED to watch Planet Earth, but the disc was damaged, so we had to send it back. (No worries, the replacement arrived yesterday). We watched the newest James Bond movie, which was OK. I’m not a huge Bond fan, but they can be fun. Ted tried to watch Borat, but after the first 1/2 hour and not one laugh, he gave up. We watched the first two episodes of Big Love, which I’ve been curious about, and I liked it, so I’m glad we’ll be getting more soon. Yay Netflix!

To add to the sitting on our butts letting others entertain us, we saw not one, but TWO movies in the theater this week. Maya was at her Ma’s house for a couple of days, so we took the opportunity to catch some PG-13 films. First, we saw Knocked Up, which was pretty funny, full of stupid gags and sweet moments and some actual drama as well. I recommend it. Second, we saw the new Die Hard flik, which was again pretty darned good. Lots of action, Bruce looking old but still badass, and plenty of quips to go around. I ate popcorn with Knocked Up (Yay, popcorn!), but two days in a row would have been too much for me, so none with Die Hard. Maya and her Ma went to see Ratatouille, which they both enjoyed, and I wasn’t really excited about seeing, so that was perfect.

On the 4th, we had family over for some frikkin AWESOME bbq, which we got from Kinder’s Meat in Pleasant Hill. Cherry and Eric had their wedding catered by Kinder’s Meat, and I was thinking about those ribs for days afterwards, so we needed to get some. They rubbed them with a tequila lime rub, and then we baked them in the oven and served them with their signature bbq sauce. Mmmm. We also had the yummy chicken, with the same rub. Very yummy. Oh, speaking of Cherry and Eric, they came over for dinner on Monday, and we had some really yummy pasta with lamb sauce, which maybe I’ll post the recipe for tomorrow or Monday. What was awesome about that was that I packed the cookbook the recipe was in, so I had to work from memory…and it still came out really yummy. 🙂 Yay!

Thursday and Friday, I woke up and went swimming, figuring that the pool would be too hot later in the day. Yay for morning swims! Yay for condos, with pools that are safely fenced in, and I do nothing to help manage! I wonder if I could keep that up all summer, or if blogging and work and walking the dog stuff would get in my way? (Mostly work, sadly…)

Happy Weekend! Now you’re all caught up. Who knows if I’ll have anything left to tell you next week.