Things I did this summer

Before going back to school (sighhh), I thought it would be a good idea to spend an afternoon remembering the fun (non-work) things I did this summer. That way, when I'm in the trenches thinking about Number Phrases and degree inversion, I can take moment to remember that I actually at some point had a real life.

So here they are.

- Get an awesome new camera and immediately take an obscene amount of cat pictures.

- Drink one too many beers and decide it would be great fun to paint our faces like superheroes with green and red face paint.

- More beers, this time after a girls' day shopping on Third St. Promenade

- Matt goes to San Francisco; Bilo locks himself in the bathroom. I spend four hours trying to figure out how to get him out, calling everyone I know for advice.  Finally I figure out how to pull the drawer out of the holder so that the door can open. My hand is bruised for a week, while Bilo forgets almost instantaneously that anything ever happened.

- Visit Wurstkueche in downtown L.A. and eat delicious bratwurst with curry ketchup and drink delicious German beer. This experience sparks a renewed interest in German food and, especially, curry ketchup. (Also inspires frequent discussion of this restaurant with friends who pronounce its name as "Worst Coochie.")

- Visit one of the more modest mansions on Doheny

- Have a sparkling water taste test after a long-standing argument about whether expensive sparkling water is actually worth the money. To our surprise, Crystal Geyser is the winner, followed by Pellegrino. We discover that sparkling water taste is really mostly about bubble ratio.

- Buy some gorgeous peonies and watch them bloom over a week. Cheese enjoys them too.

- Apartment searching in L.A.: migraine-inducing, yet challenges me to try to make the shitty places in LA look OK in photos.

Baldwin Hills

Culver City

"Mid City"

Miracle Mile

- Visit Griffith Observatory for the first time in the five years we've lived in L.A. We see so many other people there that we end up just wanting to go home and stare at the wall for a few hours.

- Drive up to Moraga to see the family for the weekend; play soccer and playdough with Sophia and Jordan.

- Drive up to Mammoth to see the other family.

- Play Horse in Mammoth; shoot pictures for Matt's "basketball card"

- Out of curiosity, buy some $15 clip-on bangs made of creepy human hair. Matt politely says I look like a movie star; I decide I look like a wig-wearing cancer patient. The bangs are now relegated to the cabinet under my sink, and every time I open the cabinet doors I think there is a dead human head in there.

- Accidentally buy a sports bra so small that it can only fit Cheese.

- Marshmallows: the newest, cheapest cat toy. Bonus: marshmallow goo all over the kitchen floor.

- Make frozen watermelon vodka balls with mint. They taste like vodka popsicles (I'm not actually sure this is a good thing...).

- Celebrate my first anniversary of marriage and future of non-wedding-planning

-Anticipate impending cat wars: Cheese about to whomp Bilo.

- Make replacement alien antennae. Wear them with Rebecca after a long hard day of shopping and my first red lipstick purchase.

- Spend a night in Cambria in an oceanfront room and listen to the waves crash

- Go to elephant seal beach and see what looks to be a herd (pod?) of giant burping sea slugs (Matt's favorite experience of the trip)

Elephant seal love

- See jellyfish (and other sea life) at a safe distance the Monterey Bay Aquarium. 

- Drive the 17-mile-drive from Pacific Grove to Carmel at sunset

- Drive along West Cliff, Santa Cruz at sunset and relive old college memories (in between bouts of oyster-induced food poisoning)

 - Bloomfest 2011 in downtown LA: kind of a bust, except for the frog purse spotting and the cheap pitchers with Gene.

- "3 Wongs Strong" in Las Cruces, NM 

- Drive around eerie looking picnic tables at White Sands, NM 

 - Learn about the Wild West: covered wagons in Ruidoso and home of Billy the Kid (in and around Lincoln NM)

 

 - Chase after Nana's turtle

- Eat hamburgers and french fries in the middle of nowhere (Vaughn), NM 

- Check out chili peppers and trinkets in Albuquerque

- Visit the petrified forest in NM; realize that there is no actual forest.

-  See a former ghost town and copper mine in Jerome, AZ

 - Hike around Sedona at sunset

- Experience, along with hundreds of other people, the sun coming out at the Grand Canyon

- Experience, along with a few people, a rainstorm over the Grand Canyon

- Hike out along a cliff and collect rocks with my mom 

- Meet a wild horny toad

- Find surprising photos, events from 2010 on a disposable camera. This one reminds me of the Deer Hunter. Matt and I joke about what the person in the upper corner of the picture is thinking.

"Hey, wait a second... this doesn't look like the post office." 

- Celebrate the onset of our late twenties by eating sushi, drinking champagne, and welcoming a new grill into our home.

 - Make a cat house with the grill box.

- Discover a stowaway in our garden: