History-Infused Vacation

Son of the American Revolution

For the past couple of weeks, Chris and I have been relaxing at his parents' house in Maryland. While chatting with Great Uncle Ray one cozy evening, I learned something pretty cool. He (and by extension, Chris) is a descendant of the Wing Family, which according to the records, arrived at Massachusetts Bay Colony on June 5, 1632. The Wing Family House, which Stephen Wing purchased in 1646, is "the oldest house in New England owned and occupied continuously by the same family for over three centuries."

American history is fascinating stuff, but I never particularly considered it MY history, since my parents are such recent immigrants. So the fact that my kids will actually be Sons and Daughters of the American Revolution seems seriously crazy cool to me. If we make it to the Harvard 5th Reunion, I'd love to go look at the house. There's even a Wing Family Reunion in Oregon this summer, which is potentially convenient because Jessica lives in Portland now.

We also celebrated Uncle Ray and Aunt Bert's 50th anniversary on December 27. Fifty years is a long time. We learned that as of the 2002 census, only "5 percent of [currently married couples] had reached at least their golden anniversary (50 years)". Congratulations again to them -- our 2.5 years certainly seems wimpy by comparison!

National Museum of Natural History

A couple days ago, we ventured into DC to see the Museum of Natural History. They had an impressive Ocean Hall with fossils and skeletons of various ocean creatures. By sheer crowd size, I would say that the fish tank with the "Nemo and Dory fish" was the most popular exhibit, which is sad because even SFO has one of those, haha.

Before we went to the museum, I had just explained to everyone why I think museums are somewhat useless as a learning tool, because they basically go for pure "wow" factor, and kids end up with a bunch of dead facts, instead of an understanding about what science actually is -- the process of asking questions and discovering/creating brand new knowledge about the world around us.

Of course, I also conceded that maybe I went to museums in the wrong frame of mind for all those school field trips, so this visit, I tried really hard to learn something at the museum. Between the two of us, we remembered two meaningful things:

• Whales didn't evolve straight from fish. They're mammals (most closely related to hippos), so they started out on land and went back into the ocean.
• About 2.x billions years ago, the Great Oxidation Event happened and plants suddenly started to do photosynthesis, which started pumping oxygen into our atmosphere (which was then full of methane, carbon dioxide, and nitrogen).

I suppose we also learned something about the history of the Hope Diamond, but I don't really count that as science.

So it was a nice afternoon of ooo-ing and ahh-ing, but I found it surprisingly and frustratingly unengaging, despite knowing that a lot of the subjects covered in the museum (geology, space, evolution, zoology) are amazing and fascinating when one studies them in more depth. But then again, maybe I'm just weird that way.

Historic Moment...Three Weeks Early

Speaking of hope, after we finished with the museum, we took a stroll (okay a miserable, freezing, hurried jog-walk) through the National Mall, so we could try to imagine what the Obama's inauguration might look like in a few weeks.

Apparently it's going to be so crazy that Chris's parents think they can sublet some of the rooms in their house for $3000-4000!

Miscellaneous Fun with the Family

Inspired by Jen Jen's fantastic Thanksgiving feast, Chris and I made several batches of yummy yummy sangria (which Jenn had way too much of, which made for an entirely loopy game of Taboo with the family).

At Grammy and Grampy's house, we learned how to play a game called Crokinole. Grampy totally schooled us all.

Lastly, Andrew bought the first season of Battlestar Galactica for Chris's Christmas present. We are completely and totally addicted. I think I've found a new favorite TV show to replace The Office.

That's it for now. Happy 2009 to everyone! Our official New Year's Resolution this year is to "have more fun" so hopefully we'll see more of our friends and family soon!

P.S. More pictures if you're interested:

http://picasaweb.google.com/jenn.c.taylor/MarylandHolidays2008

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.

Couch Potatoes: Enabled

Well, we had a fun-filled, action-packed couple of weeks.

First, we visited the Google NYC office for a week, and we got some fantastic food while we were in the city. Two weeks later, I'm still salivating over the "surf" part of the "Surf and Turf" at Morimoto (yes Iron Chef Morimoto). Fabulous hamachi strips mixed with fresh cherry tomatoes and avocado in a soy/citrus sauce, *mmmmmm*. The appetizers were also amazing, especially the beef carpaccio and the rock shrimp tempura. This may be one of my favorite meals at a restaurant, ever. The sake was certainly the best I'd ever had (but I guess this alone is not an impressive statement, given that the only sake we tried before came from a dollar store and had been through two years of college storage before we finally got around to opening it).

The day after we flew back from New York, we went to Candlestick Park to watch the Patriots crush the 49ers. The backstory to this outing is that Chris bought completely overpriced tickets for this game, the day before Tom Brady's gruesome knee injury. But happily, they still won, and Chris was ecstatic that he got to see the "air show" (Cassell's 66-yard touchdown pass to Moss). Now, we didn't have Patriots garb, so we showed up in Red Sox shirts. We got a couple "Red Sox?! Are you kidding me?!" reactions, but otherwise we blended in with the hordes of 49ers fans also wearing red (oops).

Amusingly, we did end up hearing more chants of "Let's go Red Sox!" than we did chants for the Pats. Even better was listening to the Sox beat the Angels on XM Radio as we sat in traffic on the way home from the game. And even better than that was watching the Sox win the ALDS series a few games later. Sweet sweet victory.

Of course, this weekend is different. The Sox lost in extra innings to the Rays last night, and the Pats were dominated by the Chargers.

On the bright side:

• Our couch (from Customs House) got delivered! It's a glorious L-shaped sectional that both Chris and I can stretch out on it without intersecting AND it seems to be indestructible by cats (so far). Looooove it love it.
• Speaking of cats, we finally cleaned up enough of our condo so that we could let them out of the second bedroom. Freedom! It's hilarious how they fishtail and make scrabbling noises in place as they try to make sharp turns on the hardwood floors. Silly cartoon cats.

So, after our exciting travels and plenty of hard work, we are now blissfully enjoying our couch-potatohood for a few weeks.

Katy and Stav's Wedding in Sedona

Last weekend, we had the pleasure of seeing Katy and Stav tie the knot in the gorgeous Sedona, AZ.  Before our trip, I had never heard of Sedona, but we can see now why John McCain chose to buy a house here.  Armed with multiple warnings about how to deter timeshare sharks, we managed to eventually leave without buying any property, but I must say that we were tempted. Big sky, red rocks, good friends, and awesome mojitos. Why come home to failing banks and performance reviews!?

We took a fantastic Pink Jeep tour and went off-roading among the beautiful cliffs and buttes (Broken Arrow tour, highly recommend it).  Pink Jeep was apparently made famous by its Sedona outfit, and our tour guide drove us up and down lots of steep rocky hills, through some fantastic scenery.

The most interesting part of the ride, however, was when Chris started chatting with another guy in our jeep, who turned out to be the press secretary for U.S. Representative Lynn Westmoreland, the congressman who was made nationally famous by the Colbert Report.  Here's a video of Colbert's interview with Lynn Westmoreland in case you didn't see it.  He had some interesting backstage stories about that taping, and talked about how he thought he would be fired after scheduling that particular appearance.  All I can say is wow, I can't imagine having his job...but on the bright side for him, at least the Bulldogs won!

Here's a picture that our tour guide took for us:

We also got a chance to visit Montezuma's Well and Montezuma's Castle, and we hiked around Bell Rock and Courthouse Rock.  The hiking trail was supposed to have one of those mystical "vortexes," but our hunt basically consisted of pointing to suggestive-looking rocks and chortling, so the vortex spirits never revealed themselves.  (Ugh...that was terrible.)

More pictures of our trip and the wedding are here:

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