Archive for July, 2008

My Birthday Weekend

July 19, 2008 at 10:53 am · Filed under california, travel

Damn, if I only had a PSP!

For my birthday, K. took me to on a surprise trip to Guerneville, to a lovely new little place there called the Boon Hotel. It was really a wonderful relaxing weekend. We’ve been there before — our honeymoon was in the same area, the Russian River Valley, and the place we stayed then was a vacation rental house in the neighboring town of Monte Rio. And we’ve been back since, taking visitors, since it’s only about an hour and a half away, there’s some good restaurants and wineries on the way. Guerneville is home to Armstrong Woods State Park, which is a great place to see redwoods if you’re not interested in fighting the crowds at Muir Woods.

So, it’s a place we were familiar with, and sometimes it’s really nice to go someplace familiar where there’s less pressure to explore and you feel totally at ease just sitting by the pool. And, although not all the dining options in Guerneville are perfect, we already have some places in there we like to eat, too: Andorno’s, a pizza place that has an great seafood salad and a little French bread pizza thing called a “Garden Loaf;” and Pat’s, a diner where we can get really yummy diner-style sandwiches and soda-fountain treats like this:

Happy Birthday to me!

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Three Fridays

July 10, 2008 at 7:33 am · Filed under bernal_heights, california, san_francisco, weddings and tagged:

Swearing that we’re telling the truth

Last Friday was the Fourth of July, and we climbed up Bernal Hill with a few beers and our folding chairs to see the city fireworks show. It’s supposed to be one of the best places in the city to watch fireworks, according this story from last year, in which our hounds Tex and Haylee were specifically mentioned.

However, this year was not such a great year for watching fireworks from Bernal Hill, because of that famous San Francisco fog. From our vista, we couldn’t even see a faint glow of of the city fireworks show through the fogginess, although the illegal ones spouting up in the Mission were numerous and pretty exciting. We went back home and watched the news to see if the official fireworks show even happened, and saw instead panicked news reports about huge displays of illegal fireworks all over the city.

For those of you reading this back in Texas and Oklahoma, you might enjoy reading about what I wore to our July 4 fireworks viewing: a wool hat, gloves, a scarf, a down vest, a hoodie, a long-sleeved shirt, and, yes, Smartwool long underwear, both the top and bottoms. That kept me pretty comfortable, but I was still a little chilly after an hour or so.

The Friday before, we picked up our marriage license. K.’s mom just happened to be in town, so we thought it would be fun to take her with us on this errand. We didn’t think about the day really at all when we scheduled our appointment, but as it turned out, it was the Friday of Gay Pride weekend, and an extremely popular day to get married. There were 280 weddings in City Hall that day, and then other folks like us just coming in to pick up licenses. The city was ready for an influx and had volunteers from all sorts city offices there to help make the process smooth. And it worked. In fact, we never even waited in a line.

The vibe in City Hall was awesome, celebratory, and fun. Full of love, I’d even say. The volunteers that helped us were beyond friendly — everyone was jubilant and thrilled to be there. Every now and then a huge cheer would go up from across the room, and when I asked what the cheering was about, a woman working there told me it was the table where people could come to get an official copy of their marriage certificate after their ceremony. It was apparently the least exciting part of the process, so the volunteers there had decided to cheer every time they handed a copy over to make it more exciting. It was really sweet. Here are our pictures from this!

This coming Friday — which I guess is tomorrow — is my birthday. It’s the beginning of the end of my 30s, but I hear that 50 is the new 30, so that must make 40 the new 20, and me an angsty teen. I hear there are surprises in store for my birthday. I’ve already gotten some really nice stuff!

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