40...again

There is a reason I don't plan big events. I tried it once several years ago and learned that it completely stresses me out. I'm not even worth being around because I'm so worried that things will go wildly wrong. But this year, I put all those fears aside to organize a 40th birthday party for my sister...in San Diego. I figured her husband wasn't likely to do it and no one really deserves it more...besides, her birthday is the day after mine and they fell on a Friday and Saturday this year. What better excuse to go spend my birthday with my sister??

So, after months of planning, a friend took me out to breakfast and dropped me at the airport on my birthday. And I hopped a plane to San Diego.
Unfortunately, I hadn't uh, say, read the instruction manual for the new camera lens I've got. I didn't realize you could turn the image stabilization OFF. Who'd want to do that, after all?? Not me. Except it was...until Sunday. So I have a lot of blurry pictures. Whatever.

Leaving my nephews at home with their dad, Karen and I set out for a nice dinner...all.by.our.selves. We had such a good time catching up, drinking pomegranate martinis and ordering too much food. I should drive to San Diego just for dinner once in a while. Well, maybe not really, but it's fun to pretend.

Saturday was party day. On the recommendation from one of Karen's friends, I booked the "back room" at a wine bar in the Hillcrest neighborhood of San Diego. I'd corresponded with the manager via e-mail and talked to him on the phone a couple of times. But gosh, doing things long distance is always so sketchy. I'd ordered a cake the same way. I found a commercial kitchen that made wedding cakes and had a good online reputation. It was near Karen's house, so I ordered a cake from them. I thought I'd ordered a chocolate cake with chocolate frosting and coffee mousse filling, but it didn't quite turn out that way.

O.K., so the frosting's the wrong color, but they wrote the right thing on top and it looks pretty...sorta. The gum paste flowers are lovely, but why are the roses so...uh...white. They're beautiful, but really, really chalky-looking. O.K., now I'm kind of freaking out about something totally ridiculous...and I'm thinking I could have made her a prettier cake (whether that's true or not), so I had Karen drive me to Michael's to buy some "lustre dust" and paintbrushes. I took the roses off the cake and brushed them with color so they weren't so darned pasty.

The first bunch was...well...experimental and reminded me of that children's book The Pinkish Purplish Bluish Egg. Ever read that? No? It's about a mourning dove who finds a funny-colored egg and it hatches into a griffin named Ezekiel. Oh, nevermind.

The second set of roses, I brushed with yellow, decided I liked them and left it at that. I carefully rearranged them all on the cake again and set about resuming my daytime job as a relatively normal person.

I left early to help a couple of Karen's teacher-friends decorate the room at Wine Steals. The room wasn't quite what I'd envisioned, but I think it was probably better that what I'd envisioned. It was a cozy little room in the back of the restaurant. We had our own little private wine bar, food and great company. Karen's friends are a blast.

Who knew elementary school teachers were such fun on the weekends? Well, other elementary school teachers, apparently.

Even our parents, who had also made the trip from the more northerly reaches of California, seemed to enjoy themselves.

If anyone finds this blog while looking for information on Wine Steals, I'd have to say the manager at Hillcrest, Nick, was super nice and easy to work with. I wish I'd caught the name of our wine pourer because she was fantastic. Once I figured out how to get my laptop all hooked up, the stereo system was great, the wine was good, the food was yummy. I don't have a single complaint. We had so much fun!

I'd brought some large truffles as party favors...and I had to take a picture of them because I was so proud of how cute they looked.

And that cake was pretty yummy too, despite the white frosting. I'm certain no one would have looked twice at the pasty white flowers, but at least I was secure in my knowledge that I'd done my part to make the party a little more colorful...well, by coloring the flowers, and drinking three glasses of wine.
Considering I was in a room full of strangers, the party was over far too soon. I'm so glad I put forth a little effort and it turned out so well. I've got an awesome sister. She deserved a great 40th birthday...and then some.

Spencer! Lucas! - San Diego 2012

Early July marked time for us to head down to San Diego for our annual visit to the Westbrook family. Despite their sibling-like squabbles, Smunch and Mam never seem to get enough of their cousins. It's nice to see because I'm never really done spending time with my sister (Aunt Karen!) either.

This year's theme? Water. Then again, given the opportunity. I think my kids would have a water theme every single day of the year. This time, they had to settle for every day of the trip instead. So Monday...

we went to the swimming pool shortly after arriving. Smunch and Mam showed off their comfort in the water.

Although, frankly, they can't compete with Spencer! for pure fearlessness. This kid is only six.

They stayed in the pool so long that Aunt Karen had to take Lucas! home for a nap.

Then there was this, at Santee Lakes:

More of the same at 4S Ranch, where I took no pictures. And this on our last day:

I don't know why the beach always seems to get saved 'til our last day. It's kind of a production to get out there, but I think the kids would be happy to be there all day every day. Somewhere in there, we also visited the Flying Leathernecks Aviation Museum at Miramar. Smunch said he didn't want to go, but wanted to stay the longest. Of course. Mam enjoyed it too, to my surprise.

I don't know why I find it so amusing to be corrected by my 10-year-old. "Do you want to go take a look at the tanks?" I asked. "Mom, those are tactical vehicles," he replied in exasperation. (shrug) Look like tanks to me, but what do I know?

Of course, July 4th was thrown in there too. We opted for a short trip to Poway during the day to check out their Independence Day activities. It was a quaint and fun way to spend a few hours after an awesome pancake breakfast at Aunt Karen's house. The park has an old-timey steam train that was up and running. Every other train ride included a mock gun-fight.

And every hour, they set off a canon, just for fun. There was live music, there were snow cones and watermelon and barbeque. The boys all took a ride on the train with Aunt Karen.

It was a long wait for the train and Mam wasn't up for that, so I took her for some watermelon and a long wait to have her face painted instead.

The trip was a great success. Everyone went back happy with their day, especially after some snow cones.

I'd hoped to get some tickets to watch San Diego's "Big Bay Boom" firework show from the deck of the USS Midway, but by the time we arrived in San Diego, the tickets were sold out. Just as well. San Diego's fireworks show was probably the biggest fiasco it'd ever been. It made national news, it was so catastrophic. At least no one was hurt.

Instead, we took the mellower route of watching fireworks local to Aunt Karen from a nearby elementary school. The kids played with (er, ehm) sparklers:

and played catch while they were waiting. There was plenty of room.

Maybe the show wasn't quite as spectacular as what folks should have seen from the deck of the Midway, but I suspect it was a lot more fun that what they actually saw.

And that made our holiday a success.

Many thanks to Uncle David for taking all four kids for an evening and letting Aunt Karen and me go out for a terrific dinner. We got to enjoy a rare, great conversation and for a change, almost got to feel like grownups!

Butterflies

While we were in San Diego, I noticed that the passion flower vine covering Aunt Karen's fence was home to a considerable crop of caterpillars. We even found a couple of chrysalises (chrysali?) among the leaves. Being the biological sort, I decided to do a little online research to try and figure out what these critters were.

It turns out that there is one butterfly, the Gulf Fritillary butterfly, that lays its eggs only on passion flower vines. And its caterpillars looked suspiciously similar to those we found. I also learned that their range extends to the San Francisco Bay Area and you know what that means.

I asked politely if I could relieve Karen of her fattest caterpillar and a chrysalis. We left with a baggie of passion flower leaves and a jar containing one fat caterpillar and a healthy-looking chrysalis.I never did take a picture of the caterpillar. By the time we'd completed our drive home, our caterpillar was already hanging in a little "J", ready to turn into a chrysalis itself.

Happily, the first butterfly emerged from its chrysalis during Aunt Karen's visit. We spotted it while it was still coming out and watched as its wings dried, enjoyed it taking its first fluttery flight around the "butterfly house" and finally let it go. It sped away so fast that I didn't even get a picture with its wings open.Fortunately, it's pretty on the underside too.

The second butterly emerged a little over a week later and this time I was sure to get a picture before it flew away in the exact same direction as the first...doubtlessly looking for some passion flowers to land on...

Root, root, root for the visiting team...

For the last few years, we've been sure to buy a couple of tickets to a Padres game while we're down in San Diego. Daddy has always taken Smunch to Petco Park for the game while I stayed with Mam, Aunt Karen and SPENCER! This year was special. First of all, I got to go, while Mam stayed with Aunt Karen. Second, however, I got to go wearing this:because for the first time in the history of our visits to San Diego, the Giants were in town. We caught the last game of their four-game series with the Padres.

I admit it felt a little weird to be wearing the orange and black in a foreign stadium...although I'll add that I think Petco is a beautiful stadium. Maybe not as picturesque as AT&T from the outside, but just awesome in the corridors (which are open to the air and draped in vines) and in the park itself...but I was far, FAR from alone. Not only were Smunch and Daddy there, but I'm pretty sure there were at least 10,000 other people dressed similarly. It was a little hard to tell just who the home team was!Matt Cain pitched a great game and the score was tied at 3-3 at the end of the ninth inning. I texted Aunt Karen to let her know we'd be a bit late for dinner. Predictably, Smunch didn't mind the extra baseball time.Finally, in the 11th, the Giants' newest catcher, Chris Stewart, squared up for the perfect suicide squeeze bunt, scoring the runner from third and ensuring that we got to see this guy...Yep, that's Brian "The Beard" Wilson. And in typical fashion, he made the last inning torturous. But it was over. The Giants won and the three of us...and our new 10,000 closest friends, went home happy.

Daddy and Smunch went to visit the USS Midway museum for the third time the next day while Aunt Karen and I hung out waiting for Lucas to nap and finally made it to the poolin time for Daddy and Gavinto join us. And that? That was it. A yummy breakfast, some fond farewells and off we went...home again, just in time for Aunt Karen, SPENCER! and LUCAS! to come visit us!

Beachy

I was feeling far too lazy to organize a trip to the beach the day after our safari adventure. I suggested a day at the pool instead of packing another lunch and trekking out across the sands of Torrey Pines State Reserve. But, Daddy really wanted to go. He loves taking the kids out in the waves. And the beaches up here in the frigid north just aren't that inviting.So, Daddy did it all. He got most of the lunches together and packed for the short trip to the coast. The kids objected. They somehow got their hearts set on the pool. As you can tell from the photo above, they were devastated to see the ocean instead of the poolside.Mam managed to scare the living daylights out of me by zipping a quarter mile down the beach in the moment that my back was turned, but other than that one heart-stopping moment when I thought maybe she'd been dragged under the waves, it was a peaceful, sunny, sandy afternoon. Smunch prided himself on digging a 50-foot trench and then retired to our "cabana". Mam and Spencer spent a lot of time in the water, but also played in the sand. Mam was filthy by the time we left.And Aunt Karen got to relax.But most importantly, Daddy got to play. With his kids. At the beach.

On the Wild Side

If you live in California, you already know it's been an exceptionally cool summer, temperature-wise. That was the case in San Diego as well, so it made for an excellent summer to go to the San Diego Wild Animal Park...which has recently been renamed the San Diego Zoo Safari Park. We decided to give Aunt Karen and break and took SPENCER! with us while she and Uncle David went to a doctor's appointment and hung out at home.

It made for a long, fun day at the park! We started off in the lorikeet enclosure.Then we headed to the tour of the Serengeti, my favorite part of the park and the most Safari-like.Our own little animals were pretty happy and cooperative too.So many things to see and so little time.One of my other favorite parts of the day was when Smunch and I got to spend some time in the aviary while Daddy took Spencer and Mam to try and find a missing baseball hat. Usually, we just walk through the aviary and see a bird or two, but when you really spend some time in there, you get to see how cool the birds actually are.And with my modest background in raptor rehabilitation, I was thrilled to see the little burrowing owlslooking as irritable as ever. And my first glimpse of a California condor in real life. How very cool!Speaking of cool, we didn't leave the park until almost 5:30 and Aunt Karen had dinner all ready to go when we got back. How awesome is that?