Chihuly Time!

Last weekend, Chris and Olivia were kind enough to bring us as their guests to the de Young museum to see the Chihuly exhibit. It was pretty awesome.  Here are some highlights of the exhibit. Here are some big circular things called Persians:

Next is me and a random little girl in front of some basket like things that are different colors inside than outside.  I think these were my favorite. 
Chihuly also made a series he calls "chandeliers".  Apparently the inspiration was his love of chandeliers.  huh. Here's one we decided looks like bug butts.
Next is this huge platform with hundreds of different pieces.  It was extremely impressive, although you get a bit of sensory overload. 
Here's a close up of one of the pieces.
At the end was a screening of "Chihuly in the hot shop", which was extremely interesting.  I think it has been broadcast on PBS if anyone caught it.  In it, Chihuly brings back many of the people he has worked with in order to recreate some of his most famous pieces.  It turns out that Chihuly has not actually blown any glass at all for over 20 years.  He is really just an ideas man, and spent most of the time standing around in his oversized hawaiian shirt and crocs (i don't actually know if he was wearing crocs, but he really looked like the kind of guy who would wear crocs). He also drew some circles with about 20 pencils at once while his "gaffers" were rushing around directing like 30 underlings and blowing tremendous glass structures. Occasionally they would let him help and he would kind of poke the glass with a stick.  He just looked really out of place in his own workshop, which led us to the conclusion that art of this scale probably runs a lot like a big lab. Chihuly probably never really even goes into the workshop much, but the sheer force of his name means that he gets the best glassblowers in the world.  He kind of gives them some guidance and money, they do a bunch of work, and he puts his name on it.

Another entertaining aspect of this movie was that the subtitles were on and were transcribing both the dialog and the lyrics of the background songs.  Reading the subtitles would go something like this:

"I met Dale back in 1974 while he was working on his basket series. Me and my boyfriend like to go to the park."

It was weird.  

After the museum we had an awesome dinner at B Star in the Richmond, which was awesome.  Thanks Chris and Olivia!

Harvest Season

Its been a rough week or so, what with Phelps quest and the Bigfoot travesty. So understandably, blogging has been at a low. I sent the camera to Philadelphia with Casey so that he could take pictures during his ACS trip. All of the zero pictures Casey took should be posted soon. While Casey was gone, I spent some time in San Francisco with some college friends. We had a good time up there and hopefully I will get some pictures from them up on the blog.  

In the meantime, we set out to the Stanford gardens to check on our big fall harvest. As many are aware, Casey has gardened every year of his life. This first summer in California was no different and it even seemed like a great opportunity to try some new crops.  After all, California is nicknamed, "America's salad bowl".  Similarly to UW, Stanford has community gardens with plots one can rent and garden. It isn't as nice as Eagle Heights and the plots are smaller and more expensive, but it is right near work, and one could potentially garden all year long.  Casey just loves it.  Here he is next to his plot, surveying his bumper dirt harvest.

Looks great! Here's where the gophers dug under the tomato cages and the somehow got full grown plants out. Maybe back through the hole they came in through, like in a Bugs Bunny cartoon?
This is the culmination of a long, noble battle Casey fought, and eventually lost (much to the amusement of his boss, who compared him to Bill Murray in "Caddyshack"). At one point Casey even tried feeding them Juicy Fruit because of advice he read on the internet. The people that run the gardens don't seem to be too concerned about their extreme vermin problem.  I have never seen anything like this.  We would have animals eat our produce in Wisconsin, but they never took the whole plant right out of the ground.  Through an elaborate system of chicken wire, Casey did manage to protect one basil plant that we harvested on Saturday and ate on a pizza. yum. 
I guess gardening is over for now. The whole thing is very disheartening.  

obligatory cat pictures

As indicated in the previous post, Elsie really didn't seem to care at all when we got home.  After Casey went to work the next day,however, she had to be touching me at all times and spent most of the day sleeping on my legs.

While I promise that I am going to resist the temptation to just fill this blog with posts of Elsie pictures, I will have to post some, since that seems to be the only thing on my camera.  Part of the problem is that I have a life long goal of getting Elsie on Cuteoverload.com.  I really think that Elsie has what it takes and is way cuter than a lot of the cats on that site.  Still, most pictures of her seem to look more fat than cute. The camera really does seem to add 10 pounds.
Okay, one last one for Casey. I assume he took this, since he thinks it is cute when she sleeps on her head.  Also, Elsie is the only other one that lives with us, and she doesn't know how to use the self timer.

We have actually been in California for about 3 weeks and really have no pictures to post about.  Casey is heading to Philly tomorrow to go to the ACS and see Russ and Rachel, and my friends Katie and Gordon are coming to town on Sunday.  So hopefully, these events will make our life appear more exciting.  I guess I should have posted about Phelps Quest, since that seems to be the only thing that anyone on television can talk about.  I really feel like Michael Phelps is ruining the Olympics and that it totally isn't fair to call him the greatest athlete of all time.  There is no other olympic sport in which a person is even eligible for like 50 gold medals. Why are there so many swimming events?  Its ridiculous.  I saw on the Today show, that he can basically live off of the money he is making from this olympics for the rest of his life.  How is this possible? Who cares? Still, I have basically been enjoying watching the olympics, even though I now feel sorry for all the American gold medal winners who aren't Michael Phelps.

Home!

After leaving Wyoming, we still had two days left in the car.  It was sort of a blur.  I remember that it sucked and it was hot and I was grumpy.  I also got a horrible heat rash across my back.  We pretty much drove straight for the last two days, stopping only for gas and food.  Here we are at a KFC, where I enjoyed a KFC snack pack.

Casey really thought this picture was going to be hilarious.  I'm not sure if it is or not.  I guess it is sort of funny that I might have a huge plate of fried chicken for a snack.  Anyway, the worst part of the drive was entering California over the Sierra Nevadas.  The Corolla was really struggling with the trailer and downgrades were even more terrifying (until I turned off the overdrive and went down in third gear. duh.) I was really afraid that Casey and I would get stuck at Donner Pass and be forced to survive the winter on Wendy's.  That would truly be a nightmare. 
After the Sierra Nevadas, the rest of the trip was smooth sailing.  Before we knew it we were home and enjoying a delicious bottle of California wine! Here we captured the warm reception we received from Elsie, who was eager to get right back to ignoring us.

Wyoming

Wyoming really was pretty awesome.  Here Casey took an informative picture about Wyoming Winds at a rest area, after a discussion with Marta about a windy rest area.  We think this is what she was talking about even though it was, disappointingly, not windy at all that day.

We took a 30 min. detour off I-80 to a town called Saratoga, WY. Casey has been wanting to go to a hot springs since I have met him, and we have always been foiled. Actually, the truth of the matter is that he is always foiled because I veto the plan. We almost stopped in Colorado once, but it was snowing out and I didn't want to drive another 6 hours all wet. When we were in Mexica, we got on an unmarked dirt road to "Agua Caliente" but I vetoed that, too, because I didn't want to die in Mexico. So Casey found Saratoga on a hot springs website and made reservations for us at the hot springs resort in town. The resort was super cute, with about 30 rustic rooms surrounding the hot springs. They had a series of tubs of different heats, and I assume they all drained into this large swimming pool, which was a really comfortable temperature, like a warm bath. Here's Casey enjoying a Busch light:
Then they had some uncovered and some tent-covered smaller hot tubs. Some of these were almost unbearably hot, especially during the day. At evening after dinner, they all filled up fast, especially the covered ones. Most of the people at the resort seemed to be middle aged couples, we think from Colorado. Here's me enjoying the healthful benefits of one of the covered mineral hot springs:

The town also seemed pretty awesome and it seemed like it would really be a nice place to visit longer. There was a big river through town and they offered float trips, fishing, and all sorts of other outdoor adventures. There was also a public hot springs. When we got there, most people were actually in the public swimming pool, which was not free, even though there was a river next to the pool, and draining into the river, was the hot springs. So, if you are a traveling vagrant and don't have enough money for a chlorine pool, they also offered this option:
(The sign says "hobo pool", but the camera strap is in the way.  argh)

As you can see, many wandering homeless people took a break from hopping freight trains to partake in the slightly murky water. It actually did seem like a really nice hot springs.

I would definitely recommend Saratoga to anyone traveling the mighty I-80.

I would also recommend listening to John Hodgeman's book, "The areas of my expertise" on audiobook.  Underbakke turned me on to the audiobook version, and it made the whole trip (and visiting the hobo pool, in particular) much more entertaining.

Nebraska

After making it through the glorious land of Underbakkes, we arrived in the great state of Russes and Rachels. The first (and only) item on the agenda was getting a Runza! Has anyone else (besides Russ and Rachel, of course) been to Nebraska?  There are seriously like 200 Runza restaurants.  They even had Runzas in towns of 300 people. So for dinner, we HAD to stop.

The Runza appears to be similar to many regional food items, in that there is smooshy dough with meat and spices and cabbage inside. They seem to have russian-german roots. 
I guess Russ talked a bit about Runzas and even tried to make some? Anyway, during the Runza experience, Russ seemed to always be on Casey's mind. 
Here we tried to share with you the inside of a Runza, not knowing that the inside of a Runza, much like vampires, cannot be photographed.

Getting Gas

I assume that the trailer also compromised the gas milage, and it did seem like we stopped a lot more often for gas. Luckily, Casey was there to capture these precious moments on film.

I thought we were going to have to spend a lot of money on gas.  I guess we did, but it was less than $400 for 2200 miles.  So, that's better than 22 mpg.  That's not bad.