Friday's Favorites

A calmer week for me after all the fun we had last week.  We celebrated Mother's Day, as did many of you.
Some of my favorites were:

1.  Kittens!  My daughter went out of town so we cared for these precious babies.  A kitten has a way of always making you happy!

2.  Mother's Day brunch and the leftovers.  We had a French cook in our church kitchen on Mother's day and got to enjoy an extra delicious meal.  A turkey was involved and I got to bring the bones home which made a particularly delicious broth.

3.  Cottage cheese dip.  One of my favorites and oh-so-easy.  2 cups cottage cheese, 1/2 cup yogurt, 1/2 cup bleu cheese, pepper, 3 cloves garlic minced.  Put in all the food processor and you get a delicious, healthy dip!

4.  Lunch with a friend.  My friend just finished school to be a nurse practitioner and does not yet have the date for her exam, so we grabbed this little bit of free time to have lunch out.  Somehow we landed at a place that was serving Pork Lasagna and it was pretty amazing!

5.  Sleeping Cat.  After sleeping all night Lugo cuddles on one of our laps in the morning for a few more minutes dream time.  Cats really have it made. . . . 

Hope your week was calm and that you are enjoying the Spring!

Friday's Favorites

Last weekend we celebrated Mother's Day (early) and my daughter's birthday.  A fun, action packed weekend that started off with:

1.  Spa day and Cinderella.  Rebecca's work rewarded her with a gift certificate to a Spa in San Francisco which she shared with me!  We dressed at the Spa for the San Francisco Ballet premiere of Cinderella.  Being the premiere, many women were dressed in ball gowns.  It was a magical evening.

2.  Mother's Day at Tomales Bay where you can buy and cook freshly harvested oysters.  I prefer them raw but they are delicious on the grill as well.  Eating fresh oysters on the beach.  . . what could be more relaxing and delicious?!

3.  A visit from my son (who I neglected to take a picture of!) and a perfect Mother's Day gift.  I've been wanting one of these FOREVER!  I'm already turning out delicious food from my kitchen with this baby.

4.  Giants Game!  After they swept the Dodgers (sorry SoCal readers), the Giants lost to Philadelphia :(  But a night at the AT&T stadium is a treat no matter who wins :)

5.  Kittens and Cats!  Rebecca and Jon are fostering these cute babies and we got to spend some time with them as well.  Keep looking for more adorable babies. . . .

Celebrating Cinco de Mayo

Soaking up the sun!

Happy Mothers Day to my readers!  Enjoy the day with your families!

Friday's Favorites

No pictures this week as we transitioned into May.  End of the month is always a little hectic for me so we didn't go out much.  Partially because we are saving our strength for an EPIC WEEKEND!  Lots of fun coming up starting today.

Still plenty to be thankful for though, things like:

1.  Doc Martin, we are enjoying watching these on Amazon Prime.  An MD with a mild case of Asbergers giving care in rural England.  Complete with a love triangle and lots of comical misunderstandings.  Its just relaxing to watch.

2.  Homemade Pizza.  Another pastor's wife in the City spontaneously invited us to dinner for some homemade pizza.  Turned out to be a relaxing evening catching up with colleagues.

3.  Warm Weather.  It was 80 degrees in my house yesterday!  For San Francisco that is pretty amazing.  Time to bath the cats and spend some time outdoors.

4. Lunch with a view.  A bag lunch on a hospital roof top with amazing views of the Bay and the city brightened one of my workdays.

5. Competency.  I learned a new skill at work and used it successfully this week.  That is always very satisfying for me!

This weekend I am looking forward to:  A Spa date with my daughter, seeing Cinderella the Ballet, raw oysters at Tamales Bay, a birthday-before-the-big-one for one of my kids.  Come back next week to hear all about it :)

Friday's Favorites

I love the days at this time of year when they start to get long and you know you have a wonderful summer ahead of you.  I just seem to have more energy at this time of year!  Energy to:

1.  Cesar Chavez days in our neighborhood.  Our church participated by having a craft booth for children and making "Peaceful Pinwheels" with sayings from Martin Luther King, Abraham Lincoln, Cesar Chavez and Jesus- all amazing peacemakers.  A local video filmed of the event featured lots of clips from our booths.

"Peaceful Pinwheels"

2. A smart daughter, quoted above in the New York Times on Earth Day for her work on a Clorox campaign for their green brand, Green Works.  So proud!

3.  A shared burrito.  The burritos in our neighborhood are just HUGE!  Sharing is the only way to go.  We share these babies often :)

4. Ridiculous earrings.  I just had to buy a pair.  I'd rather wear these to our Giants Games than a baseball cap.  A little local pride is not a bad thing.

5.  A quick fix.  I have a lot of headaches and they make me sensitive to light.  While I'm loving the long days and sunshine, sometimes I need to block a little out.  I found these easy-install shades at Amazon (Prime) and they have done the job to block the sun when I need a little break from it.  (well, it was easy for me to install because Bob did it, but he said it was easy!)

• We also enjoyed a meal out with old friends at a funky Chinese place called "The 8 Immortals".   The food was delicious and the service classic SF Chinese, aka, borderline rude.  I don't know why we enjoy that so much. . . 
• Several overnight guests.  Considerate people who came and went neatly and politely.  

Hope you are enjoying Spring as well!

Friday's Favorites

I have lots and lots to be thankful for this week.  So many special moments and fun activities.  There is no way it will fit in to five so I'll just give the highlights :)

1.  A play, about an illegal Chinese immigrant stuck in an elevator in NYC for 82 hours.  He was a bicycle deliver person and was afraid to push the emergency button because he thought the police would come and deport him.  The gives the audience imagined conversations he had with himself while in the elevator.

2.  Dinner with my daughter.  I walked to BART to meet her and then we walked out to the little place that serves food from Senegal.  Yummy, interesting flavors.  We walked back to my apartment on a balmy San Francisco evening and spent the rest of the evening playing with the cats :)

3.  Another play, preceded by Chinese food dinner with some good friends.  The play was unexpectedly four hours long, but we enjoyed every minute!

4.  A luncheon in appreciation of all the hard work we did as advice nurses during an extra busy flu season.  Going the extra mile at work during the winter bought us raffle tickets which entered us into a drawing for lots of fun prizes including the ones I won above.

5.  A trip to Vegas!  I won the grand prize!  So Bob and I will get a trip to Las Vegas sometime soon.  I've never been so this will be fun for us.  I'm glad Bob gets something out of this because he was inconvenienced on the days when they called to work early just as we were sitting down to dinner, or in the middle of a movie we were watching or the days I left him to fold all the laundry because they called me to work.  His sacrifice is rewarded :)

Hope your week was great too.

Lugo found the bassinet we were saving for a friend :)

Friday's Favorites

Sometimes I find myself writing up my favorites late Thursday night towards the end of a long work week and I'm tempted to just stop writing these posts.  Then someone will come along and tell me they are still reading my posts and it kind of gives me the motivation to keep writing. . . so here I go!

1.  Surprise!  A birthday party for a dear friend with many long time friends on the invite list.  It was so fun to share the moment with Lisa and to catch up with girl friends I don't get to see very often any more.  Many of us knew each other before we had children.  Life is good!

2.  First Baseball game of the season and a free World Series Parade snow globe!  I buy my tickets through a site where you are not told for sure where your seats will be until the tickets are delivered.  This time our tickets were amazing with a great view of the game, a view of the kayakers in the bay waiting for a home run to be hit in to the water and a view of the Bay Bridge with the light show.  At times I did not know where to look there was so much to see!

3.  Impromptu Breakfast out.  We love Wise Son's Deli but don't really want to wait in line for our food, so if we happen to walk by and there is no line, we'll stop in for a Bialy and that delicious chocolate cake you see there.  

4.  Jersey Boys!  Yes, it was a busy week with a baseball game AND a play.  I buy my tickets way ahead of time so it just ended up this way.  The play was fun, the music fantastic.  Glad we went!

5.  Human to Cat.  Its an app for the iPhone my daughter suggested but it makes Delphina wild.  We tried it once and she beat up on Lugo, boxing his head, hissing and chasing him around.  Poor Lugo was left like this, scared to death.  It took him a few hours to calm down and start to purr again.  Use with caution if you decide to try it.

And on a brighter note,

Sunset Magazine's Best of the West Big Dish Winners of 2013 features 2 places right in my neighborhood!  (the burrito and the taco)

Friday's Favorites

There are SO many favorites from this week I hardly know where to begin.  I have a few pictures, but some of my favorite activities happened without photo documentation :)

1.  Hand pulled Udon noodles.  Bob and I snuck out to eat at this delicious place one day this week.  

2.  Easter!  This is the lovely dessert table.  Lunch was delicious too.  My daughter planned a garden lunch but it started to rain, actually POUR, right at lunch time.  So the men scurried around and brought the food up 3 flights of stairs back to her apartment.  It was all delicious and nothing was soiled by the rain.  We had made special tablecloths for the garden. . . maybe next year! :)

3.  Museum Day.  A friend came to the City and we spent the morning at the DeYoung museum mostly in the Rembrandt and Girl With The Pearl Earring exhibits.  Its nice to have a friend that enjoys doing this!

4.  Book Sale!  Bob and I spent another lunch hour at a HUGE warehouse of used books where we walked away with 2 bag fulls of books.  I kind of struggle with the idea of buying books because I can get almost anything I want for free at the library.  I feel a little better about buying books when the proceeds go towards the library that I use so frequently all through the year :)  (I am really good at rationalizing things!)

5.  Child Art.  I love it when the kids at church bring me art work.  I love that this says, "love is magic", because it is!  Love is such a powerful, magical thing that we should never take for granted.

I also enjoyed,

• Friends who stayed the night and then took us to breakfast at Plow, where I had the Dungenesss Crab Scramble,  YUM!
• Lots of new people at church on Easter Sunday
• Watching the cats play in boxes
• A big wheels race on Easter Sunday held on the actual windiest street in San Francisco which happens to be the street my daughter and I live on.  The windy section is between our homes

Big Wheels race.  The first 2 heats are children, followed by endless heats of crazy adults :)

Every post needs a cat picture :)