Pets and dining

This past Saturday, we finally did something out of our ordinary and drove up to the city to watch the auditions for David Letterman's Stupid Pet Tricks. Unfortunately, lots of the animals were uncooperative that day so it wasn't too exciting. The most interesting pet trick was two duschands playing soccer. There were a lot of cute dogs there though! We visited the sponsor - a dog bakery. A bit ridiculous, but somehow it seemed to fit in the city. Sometimes, people replace children with pets...

Afterwards, we went to see March of the Penguins - very cute and educational. A good way to end the pet day. :)

On another note, for the month of August, many restaurants in Paly are offering a prix fixe menu. Includes the following: Cafe Niebaum-Coppola, Coupa Cafe, MacArthur Park, Blue Chalk Cafe, Lavanda, La Strada, NOLA, Osteria, Soleil at Westin, Spago, Three Seasons, Zibibbo.

Anyone up for prix fixe dining?

Henan Week

Apparently, this week has been declared "Henan Week" in the city of SF. Through a friend, DH and I were able to attend a reception where the Mayor and some political party head of the Henan province would exchange nice speeches and welcome the American-Chinese alliance blah blah.

There was a quintet of musicians that played traditional Chinese instruments in the Rotunda. The speeches took a long time because they had to translate every sentence. The province of Henan gave the Mayor a gift of two fossilized dinosaur eggs found in the province - officially inspected and verified as real dinosaur egg and approved to be removed from the country.

During the hors d'oeuvres reception, there were performance by Chinese acrobats as well as Shaolin monks (they did some kungfu moves!). They had sushi, bread, cheese, and vegetables. They also had a large bamboo steamer full of little shumai. We stayed after the event ended to chat with a woman we met who worked in the Mayor's office. It was pretty funny because she was telling us little tidbits from the inside. We got a glimpse of Willie Brown's old girlfriend...in python print tights! While we were talking, the catering company was removing all of the remaining food (no one touched the smoked salmon and cream cheese for some strange reason) and they removed the top layer of the large bamboo steamer. Underneath the shumai was another large bamboo steamer full of small meat dumplings! So yum! Hehe, so we got in some extra food. And later on, the caterers told us to take the flowers - so got a nice bouquet of mums, freesia, and dahlias.

We ended the evening with a trip to Ghiradelli Square! :P

Jurassic Park?

A few evenings ago, while my DH and I were watching tv in the living room, we heard a few low rumblings. We thought it was some random noise outside and ignored it. But then we started to hear them more frequently...and our windows were rattling to the noise! We opened up the door and realized that our next door neighbor's were watching a movie and had their bass cranked way up! It was hilarious because we have never experienced something like that before. With careful listening, we concluded that the movie was somewhere along the lines of Jurassic Park (think when the dinosaurs walked). :D

On an even better note, I'm down to 120!! I've lost almost 7 pounds in the past 6 weeks. Thanks to Miami for the motivation. :p