Graduation, Great Food, and Games

Wow, time flies! A mere week and a half ago, Chris and I flew to Atlanta to see my cousin Katherine graduate from GeorgiaTech. She graduated with Highest Honors in Polymer Engineering -- you go girl!

I have some nice pictures of the graduates processing in, as well as Katherine sneaking coffee into the ceremony and trying to hoard balloons on her way out:

http://picasaweb.google.com/jenn.c.taylor/Atlanta2008

When I was little, I visited my relatives in Atlanta almost every summer, so we took it easy and didn't do much sightseeing this time. During the week, Chris and I worked from the Google Atlanta office, which is conveniently located by the Midtown MARTA stop.

Slight rant about the MARTA: The cars often smell like pee. The first time I boarded the train and got slammed by the stench of urine, I assumed that it must be emanating from some bum, because the train itself looked so clean. But I didn't spot any clear suspects, and after moving around to lots of different spots, I figured out that the entire train reaked. Nobody on the train even seemed to notice. I've ridden subways or light rail in eight major cities so far, and have never yet encountered a city where people peed on the trains. Seriously, gross.

Other than that, the week went quite smoothly, and I learned a lot about how to set up video conferences!

Great Food

Ecco

One thing never changes about my visits to Atlanta -- pigging out! On Friday, the entire family had a reason to celebrate. It was my aunt and uncle's 25th anniversary, Katherine graduated from college, Kally and Kasandra finished finals, and Chris and I were done with work for the year! So we took everyone out to an excellent European/Greek/Mediterranean restaurant called Ecco (near Midtown). We ordered a ton of food, and it was *all delicious*. I'm sure nobody reading my blog cares about this, but I want to write down what we got, so we remember in case we go back! (The bolded items were particularly excellent.)

• Prosciutto di Parma: farmhouse ham aged for 24 months
  
• Bresaola: house-cured beef eye round
  
• Sopressata: coarse pork salami with clove
  
• Aged Gouda: Holland; cow’s milk; firm
  
• Parmigiano-Reggiano: Italy; cow’s milk; hard
  
• Fried goat cheese, honey and black pepper
  
• Piquillo peppers stuffed with mushrooms, sherry and manchego
  
• Oak-grilled asparagus and marinated tomato salad
  
• Chili-braised pork with garlic and homemade pappardelle
  
• Spolettoni with mushroom ragu
  
• Grilled hanger steak with arugula and tomato
  
• Fried cauliflower with saffron
  

My aunt ordered a "seared petite," which isn't on the menu anymore, but it definitely deserves to be on the list of favorites. None of us knew what "petite" was, but I'm eternally grateful that she asked the waiter. Turns out it's a cut of beef from the cow's shoulder, and it's particularly tender. Yummm. The service was so friendly and warm too -- I'd definitely love to visit again sometime.

Suno

Katherine took us to a fantastic shop called Suno that specializes in shave ice. Chris and I had some good shave ice in Hawaii, but this stuff was way better -- the best I've had outside of Taiwan, actually! We got gigantic plates of shave ice covered with condensed milk, fruit (mango, lychee, strawberry, kiwi) and Oreos. The ice was cut so fine that it stayed soft and fluffy until the last bite. Apparently "Suno" is FOB-ese for "snow" so no wonder it was so awesome. Should have taken pictures.

Other Highlights

• The best Tofu House I have ever been to, anywhere. SO many sides, and everything was so well-spiced.
• Three different varieties of ice cream cakes and pies, since my aunt and uncle have a friend who owns a Bruster's franchise.
• A gigantic church potluck with fifteen families, and someone brought dou-pi (bean curd skin?), which I haven't had since I was a kid, sooo good.
• Chinese-style hot pot.
• Christmas cookies galore!!

I'm getting extremely hungry just writing this post, so maybe I should move on.

Games

Besides eating, we also spent a lot of time playing games. We played tennis whenever the weather allowed (once in 20-degree gusting winds, and once in 60-degree oppressively heavy fog that kept steaming up Chris's glasses), and when it didn't allow, we played Rock Band, Scattergories, and Blokus. And I watched my favorite childhood movie ever, the Sound of Music, with the girls. My relatives even dug up embarassing home videos of me when I was in junior high, for Chris's benefit. My starring moment on film was a monologue about how evil home video cameras are -- man I was smart! There was also the one where I was caught singing "glooo-ry glory Halleluuuuuuuu-jah!" with a hula-hoop. Yeah, definitely evil.

It's nice to feel like a kid again for a week. Never mind that people keep asking me when I'm going to have kids. :-P

To Infinity (Fresno) and Back

My hilarious British high school physics teacher, Mr. Kirby, once taught us that infinity was in Fresno.  We solved so many problems that started with "moving a 1 Coulomb charge to Fresno," that to this day, my classmates and I (including Chris, whom I wasn't dating yet) think that "Fresno" and "infinity" are strong synonyms.

This weekend, we finally made it to infinity, and honestly, the Coulombs can keep it.  Fresno sucks.

The Sunnyvale Tennis Club's 6.5 combo men's doubles team made it to the District Championships, so I went out to watch Chris play.  I thought it would be a fun opportunity to take pictures, but my camera ran out of batteries and I had to use my Blackberry.  Not that it matters.  It was ferociously cold and dreary, and the whole weekend looked basically like this:

After shivering through a day of matches (complete with me jogging around the courts wrapped in an emergency blanket), we woke up this morning to find that our car looked like this:

We stayed at the Piccadilly Inn, supposedly the best hotel in Fresno, to avoid something like this.  But apparently, bandits broke into our car to steal Chris's new remote controlled helicopter that he'd just gotten for his birthday.  We initially though it must have been some drunk kids, because they didn't bother taking our toll money from the glove compartment, or the XM Radio.  They even broke into another car on the lot and didn't take anything.  But later, when we were getting our window replaced, we noticed evidence that they'd used a crowbar.

Luckily, Super-Low Price Auto Glass (yes that's their real name) -- the only auto glass repair place open 7 days a week in Fresno -- was able to fix it in about an hour, and $135 later, we made it to the day's match.

We still don't know how useful it is to make a police report (we called them, and they said they would call back to get the full report, but it's 11 p.m. and they haven't yet), or whether we should push the hotel to help reimburse us...but maybe we'll figure that out later.  A little too tired to care right now.

The good news of the weekend is that the team won just enough sets to make it to the Sectionals in January!  They didn't win the championship, but just managed to win the wild card spot.  I'm happy for them...and even happier that the Sectionals are in Sacramento instead of Fresno.