Summer's end (Redux)

My first "Ode to the end of summer", my last post, was pretty much an ode to my slovenly side, something that really doesn't deserve too much recognition.  Also, I have tried to fully embrace this last day of summer, despite knowing that summer is expiring, sighing its final, dying breath.

So, I give you, in brief, our Summer 2011 wrap-up:

June started out with high hopes of adventure, which we put on hold while this guy dealt with a bladder stone operation:

He recovered before our whirlwind trip to the East Coast.  In two weeks, I bounced between DC, Delaware (of all places, where I learned how to manage people, at least in theory), NYC, Rhode Island and Boston!  We spent lots and lots of time with friends and family, and I suffered the loss/theft of my laptop.

Back in SoCal, we celebrated our 5th year wedding anniversary with an epic hike to "The Bridge To Nowhere".  Soon, however, we were on the road again and in Colorado where we spent time in Allens Park, Boulder and Breckenridge, visiting with more friends and family.  We also played a lot!

We collapsed upon our return to CA, before steeling ourselves for more family and friends - visiting US this time around!  And I capped off the summer with my last feat of physical endurance for a while - the Santa Barbara Triathlon.

In addition to the rather intense activity of coming and going and going and coming, I read a few good books (like this and this series).  It was, obviously, not the most intellectually engaged summer that I've had, but I feel okay about that.
I also spent way more time in the saddle than I ever had before, so I'll chalk that up to success.  My bike and I are almost friends now, although I still don't understand him/her/it!  Along the same vein, I attended many morning spinning classes, most with Rod, who is a total spinning guru.  This morning, I attended my final class given by Rod, at least for a few months, and I wanted to die.  Or to kill him.  Seriously.  How is it possible that I've worked hard all summer and I'm still a lame-ass in the saddle?!  Okay, moving on...
Michael and I also discovered a few new loves.  First of all, there is Umami Burger.  It is, quite simply, amazing.  I think that I could eat there every single week.  That did not happen, and we actually haven't been there since (GASP) July.  Must go back.

While in Boulder, we also fell in love with a few local products.  First of all, there is this granola that is pretty kick-ass:

Source

We particularly like the sweet cranberry pecan flavor.  

Thanks to our bus 'booze cruise', we discovered Avery Beer, and I am now obsessed and buy it whenever I see it in California.  "The Reverend" is one of my favorites, and it has nothing to do with the fact that I feel like a naughty school girl when I drink it!

Source

Finally, there were a few other highlights that added to our summer fun.  I'm a fan of summer sports events, but usually the non-traditionally American sort.  This summer was a bit of downer, considering that a few of my favorites lost (Rafa, the US Women's soccer team), but I *did* enjoy following the Tour, and Cadel Evans is my new boyfriend.  

On the food front, we indulged far too much in pizza and other less-than-healthy choices, but we did add to our own repertoire when we purchased a Weber charcoal grill.  It has revolutionized our cooking/grilling experience, and most of our cooking this summer seemed to involve throwing fish, chicken or an elk/bison burger on the grill.  Great fun, especially because we can look at the sky turn crazy colors as we wait for the food to cook.  Lots of oohs and aahs!

This wasn't a summer in which we explored totally new and exciting places, but familiar stomping grounds were good to visit.  Also, spending time with family and friends and bonding over beer or a Colorado 14-er (like Mt. Lincoln) enriches our lives and serves to remind me of the importance of those relationships.  Finally, Michael and I enjoyed having time together.  This is certainly a gift that we've tried to take advantage of the past few summers, knowing that his schedule may not always be so open.  

So, tonight, while there will be some panic on my part as I freak out about documents and classes and students, we will definitely celebrate summer's last evening!

Celebrating a milestone

So, Michael and I have crossed the five-year threshold of marriage! Exciting, I know! We've definitely had some excellent times in those five years and plenty of perfect days, and we've weathered a few trials with grace, on the whole. Michael now fully understands that he needs to feed me and walk me if I'm in a terribly grumpy mood. See, I'm just like our dogs!

We ditched notion of the romantic presents a few years back, settling a more pragmatic approach - joint presents. The bike rack for our 2nd wedding anniversary marked the beginning of that trend, and in the following years we've bought a tent and also taken a major trip (that was last year!). This year, our major purchase was FAR more exciting:

In case you were wondering what it is, we bought covers for our bikes. We will be taking them out to Colorado, and we thought that it might be nice to cover them for the drive. This way, they won't be completely covered in bugs! I know, isn't very romantic, but we're pretty excited about the 'bike defender', as it's marketed. I also cheated and did buy Mike an actual present - new cycling shorts! He's been wearing these really gross ones and hadn't experienced the wonder of a good biking short. He is now hooked!

In terms of celebration, we returned to our new favorite burger place in Hollywood on Thursday night. For a moment, I worried that it wouldn't have that "OH WOW" factor like we experienced the first time that we ate there. That, however, was not the case - we enjoyed every single morsel of the burgers and fries that we split (2 burgers, 1 order of fries). After dinner, we returned home and then these guys showed up:

If you've seen the musical Avenue Q, then you are familiar with "The Bad Idea Bears". They are little beings that come and fill your brain with bad ideas by making them sound like excellent life choices. They usually attack younger people, adolescents, for example, who decide to throw a huge-ass party while their parents are out of town and they are convinced that their parents will never, ever find out. So, in our own case, we didn't throw a massive party, but we returned home, opened up a bottle of cabernet and proceded to drink almost all of it. That kind of killed all of my motivation when I woke up on Friday, not with a rager of a hangover, but just low-energy enough that I didn't want to do anything all day except nap.

Fortunately, we did recover and bounced up early on Saturday morning - our actual anniversary day! We had a jam-packed schedule - morning hike with work friends and then head south to Corona del Mar to visit family for the evening. At a certain point in the day, I feared that we were trying to be too ambitious, but we managed to hike the 10 miles to the "Bridge to Nowehere", despite numerous river crossings thanks to the (it has been a VERY wet year). The hike took us here, the renowned "Bridge to Nowhere". More on that hike to come...

Source

After the hike, we sped home, showered, changed and headed south. We spent a lovely evening catching up with family whom we hadn't seen in over two years, and then Michael and I slept like the proverbial logs at their place in Corona del Mar. We woke up at a decent hour and headed out for a 25+ mile ride, from Corona del Mar down to Dana Point. Parts of the ride looked like this:

Source
The ride was great with the exception of riding through Laguna Beach - total nightmare on weekends, apparently! We experienced tons of traffic, jerks driving cars that acted as though cyclists shouldn't be in a lane, plus lots of pedestrians and tons of traffic lights. At one point, I actually thought that I was going to not clip out and, therefore, fall to one side because there was a red light and we had to stop on an uphill incline. It sucked! With the exception of Laguna, we enjoyed the ride - lots of nice hills but stretches where you could go pretty fast and a good road to be on. Parts of the PCH (Pacific Coast Highway) even had bike lanes which was a total treat!

Although we didn't have a romantic weekend to commemorate five years of wedded bliss, spending time with friends and family and being so active that our bodies are in full protest mode (my arms hurt from hiking?!) seemed like the perfect way to celebrate this anniversary. The only thing that really could have improved the weekend is if the US Women's team had actually won the f-ing World Cup!

Well, cheers to us, and better luck next time to Team USA!

Out and about in LA: LACMA and Umami

I've decided that this past Thursday marks the *true* beginning of summer, after several false starts. I finished up the "College-essay-writing-workshop" at noon, took my lucrative earnings from the 2-day event and went out on the town! It wasn't the most beautiful evening, but Michael and I enjoyed leaving our small corner of the world to head into "the city". Adventures awaited us!

We had tickets at LACMA (LA County Museum of Art) to see the Tim Burton exhibit. I'm always torn in regards to my feelings towards LACMA. Their Magritte exhibit, a few years ago, was pretty fantastic - maybe one of the better museum exhibits that I've ever seen, which says a lot.

Here is the entrance to the no-longer new addition to the museum - the Broad Contemporary Art Museum.

Before our viewing time (6:00 pm), we wandered around some of the other exhibits and took photos. Here is Michael, admiring the view of the Hollywood Hills.

And we finally entered the exhibit! I felt pretty un-Goth and not very artsy-fartsy. The best part of the exhibit may have been the entrance, as pictured below. The exhibit itself? I would give it a B-; the props from different movies were very cool, especially the glove with the scissors from the movie Edward Scissorshands. I admit that I am not a total Tim Burton fanatic, so that probably influenced my experience because a lot of the drawings/illustrations seemed fairly repetitive. It also annoyed me that there was little to no information regarding specific pieces - just general information about Burton's career that different rooms supposedly showed. You know, 'The early years" and then "Early successes"... Why not give more information about his influences? Very frustrating.

Still, I had fun posing for the camera here, trying to be scary and creepy!

By the time we walked through the Burton exhibit and also stopped by a few other exhibits that also lacked background information, we had built up an appetite. Museuming is hard work! We did have time to stop by the La Brea Tar Pits, where they portray a woolly mammoth perishing while a baby looks on. It is a tragic scene, and I shed a tear or two.

So, dinner...

We tossed around a few ideas - tacos, French bistro, sushi... And then a brilliant idea occurred to us: Umami Burger!

Umami Burger is an LA chain that opened up a few years ago. A friend told us about her experience eating there, and we would occasionally think about eating there, but then another place would take priority. Thursday night, however, seemed to be the perfect opportunity for the Umami experience. We headed to the restaurant on Hollywood, the space that used to be Cobras and Matadors, an old favorite tapas restaurant of ours until they changed their menu and raised all of their prices. It went under, and Umami Burger opened up in that space.

The crowd was typical Silverlake - very young, urban with lots of tats. Again, I felt pretty conservative and boring with my fleece.

We each ordered a burger - Michael got the Umami burger, the signature burger, obviously, and I ordered the port and stilton burger. The restaurant chain has quite the buzz because they make high-end burgers and don't let the customer make ANY substitutions. It's also responsible for making the word/concept "umami" as part of the LA vernacular. I had no idea what umami was before our friend told us about the place. There isn't an easy definition, but generally it means "the fifth taste".

At any rate, the burgers were amazing! Michael took a bite of his burger, looked very serious for a moment, and then proclaimed "This is the best burger I've ever eaten.". I challenged him, so he then backtracked a tad and said that it was ONE of the best burgers he'd ever had. I have to admit that his burger had just a small edge on mine, but they were both excellent. The total experience was pretty blissful, and we are already trying to plan another visit to Umami Burger!