Hello, June

If there’s one thing you can count on, it’s me writing a string a posts and then disappearing for days on end. Dependably sporadic, I suppose.

For the first time in a really long time, we took a 3-day weekend and made it feel like a nice long weekend. Too often, regular weekends seem to fly by and we get to Sunday night wondering what we did that took so much time and feeling sad that we had to go to work the next morning (seriously, retirement can’t come soon enough, in my opinion). For Memorial Day weekend, we took a motorcycle trip to Idyllwild and just stayed for one night. A nice ride up (yes, I was on my own bike), plenty of time to walk around in the gorgeous weather, a nap, and then dinner at Café Aroma. We stayed just a few yards away from Café Aroma, so we went there for breakfast, too. A leisurely ride back home and we still had an extra day for play time! As is par for the course, we ended up with too much food on the grill on Memorial Day (mostly thanks to Cami’s shopping) but it just meant we spent a lazy day eating and drinking with friends.

We did make it to Fish! Facts, the Cooks Confab event on sustainable seafood at Fibonacci’s. I have to admit, we went mainly for the food and then skipped out before the documentary was shown. But it was a birthday celebration, so we couldn’t just sit in a dark room all night! The Fish! tastings were really good, although I was surprised at how many people were there and disappointed that quite a few stations ran out of food before the end of the appetizer hour. I was also a little bummed to find out that they were all set up by 6 pm (the website said it started at 6:30 pm), which meant we kind of “lost” half an hour. I bet we could have made it through all the stations had we been there earlier. I can’t say I learned an awful lot about sustainable fish – with the long lines at each station, I was kind of focused on just getting up to the table and then moving out of the way instead of trying to talk to the people there – but it was nice to realize that every bite I did taste was very good. Tasty fish AND sustainable! It’s also a little disappointing to realize that there will always be people who ignore lines and just step to the front whenever they feel like it. In any case, we all had fun, both there and at our continued partying over at Porter’s Pub, where Cami was delivered a fancy drink and impromptu tres leches cake for her birthday.

I haven’t been in much of a cooking mood lately. When I get home, the house is hot and stuffy and it takes too long to get it cooled off. So, unless I already have dinner planned out, I just wait for Travis to come home and then convince him to go out for dinner. It usually works. We’ve eaten a lot of Thai food lately. When I do cook, it certainly hasn’t been anything noteworthy (leftover chipotle pork burritos, fried rice, salad) so I kind of just eat and move on. No one really wants a post on leftover burritos, right?

There have also been two new additions to our (already-pretty-full) household. I’d like to say we got kittens because Travis realized he just really missed some kitty-loving, but I’m also not too ashamed to admit that I may have stretched some emotional manipulation tactics in order to get kittens now. We’ve had a string of poor pet karma lately and I’ve bounced back and forth between wanting a cat, not wanting a cat, and thinking that if we were meant to have a cat one would sort of land in our laps. I finally decided I do, in fact, want a cat and I got proactive about finding one. It took a while and involved a lot of obsessive webpage refreshing, but we finally found two (all the shelters have signs on how one kitten gets too lonely and it’s not a good idea, although I’m now suspicious it’s just a ploy to make you take home two) and brought them home, and not just because they were cute!  They are awesomely kitten-y, with the squeaky mewing and purring and I feel like the empty space Clair left is getting filled back in a little.  Now I just need to make sure Sadie doesn’t eat them.