Close Encownters

As Chris mentioned, we have been venturing off into North Bay to seek out new hiking trails and warmer weather. On Saturday we headed to Point Reyes National Seashore, which is about an hour away from our apt, though on this day was missing the warm part. While there we walked down 308 stairs to visit a lighthouse, hiked cliff-side, and saw elephant seals, elk, deer, shrews andoh so many cows. We actually drove our car through the middle of their pasture. No fences.

After spending a disproportionate amount of time in the car riding from one destination to another, we decided to have dinner at Point Reyes Station before driving home. We ate at an organic restaurant which was pretty good, but it was Chris' last minute decision to order the berry pie and ice cream as dessert that made it awesome!

All in all it was a fun trip, but it will probably be a while before we visit "Point Reyes Cow Adventure" again. Coming up next week we will be visiting Minneapolis, and Duluth(for Chris' cousin's wedding), and the following week Chris' parents will be visiting SF. We hope to make our first trip to Yosemite with them!! Hopefully I can get all my freelance work done(that I have the unfortunate timing of getting now) and I can participate in all the fun events. If not I'll just have to read the hav-wartz blog and pretend I was there. Maybe he can paste me into the pictures, ...or maybe I should stop writing and get to work so I don't have to pretend:)

I think I have poison ivy.

Okay. So March was like... two months ago. I mostly forget what happened then. I switched to the day shift, which is some kind of awesome, and I'm doing more scripting for now, which is interesting. And I'm getting better at it, so fewer people are dying senselessly as a result. Not that many fewer, but still...

We've been getting out a fair amount lately. As Kacey mentioned in her last post, it's been warmer. Not consistently, but there have been a decent number of warm days. Sometimes we seek out the warm weather by going to the north bay (across the Golden Gate Bridge, to the north of the peninsula that is home to San Francisco) or a little south of the city. Where we live is fairly prone to cooler weather, or "f***ing freezing" in Kacey parlance. It has something to do with ocean currents, or wind, or witchcraft, I can't remember. But there are still a few nice trails and trees really close to our apartment, and sometimes I jog for a mile or three along the coast of the bay in the mornings.

Anyways, so we've been doing a little bit of hiking. And walking in sand on beaches. And looking for places to go to the bathroom or get a drink after we've walked for a few miles and scraped up our feet on beach rocks and lost Kacey's phone. The bottom line is that it's awesome how many different places there are to hike/walk/explore, and how close they are to our place. The beach is 5 blocks away, and we haven't driven more than 40 minutes for any of the aforementioned nonsense. I kind of love it. You should come and check it out. But not all at the same time. It's not that big of an apartment.

A fridge full of leftovers.

Nope, no jackets on in this picture. For the last 7 days we've had the pleasure of entertaining Orlandonian Larry. I don't know how he managed to, but he snuck the Florida heat with him on the plane and San Francisco reached a record high of 93 degrees. It was a bit smoldering, but I loved wearing shorts and a tank top for a change. During his trip we went to three different beaches, the Japanese cherry blossom festival, the Zoo, the Exploratorium, Coit Tower, Fisherman's Wharf, and drove over that big orange/red structure that sits in the bay. We hung out with Ed and Ginger, and ate lots of food! Larry had Indian food for the first time, and later in the week I even tried half a piece of sushi! The other half was eaten by this cute little napkin creature.

This morning we woke up super early to eat breakfast at an oceanfront diner before parting ways:( Our one regret is that we were too tired to pick up some late night "In N Out" burgers, but I guess this gives Larry at least one reason to return. We had a ton of fun this week (minus the part where I got two parking tickets in one day), and can't wait for Larry to rack up more vacation time, or just get a job here and move to SF forever and ever. It is true, San Francisco is the new Orlando guys, with the exception of the ground shaking sometimes.

Pictures from Larry's visit, (taken by larry.) More posts to come!

Trois Mois

Hello, April.

It's been almost three months since the last post. I'm not sure how that happened, but the time has just kind of flown by.

In February, Kacey and I celebrated our third anniversary. It was kind of like the parade scene from Aladdin as they enter Agrabah. I can still hear the genie singing.

Lauren visited for a week from Orlando. She and Kacey hypnotized me with TV and abandoned me during the days--wandering aimlessly around different parts of the city, exploring random shops and restaurant bathrooms, and taking lots of pictures of discarded cigarette butts. I eventually managed to break free from their spell, and we went to Muir Beach, the Academy of Science, the SFMOMA, the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park, and probably some other places I forgot. Pictures!

At the end of February, Kacey and I attended a three-day comics/popular arts convention called WonderCon. The convention had panels and talks about art, comics, upcoming movies and tv shows. There was a big exhibition floor full of comic artists and illustrators displaying and selling their art, where you could talk to them about their methods, inspiration, and hangovers from the previous night. We bought a few prints and books, and got several of them signed by the artists/creators along with quick personalized drawings on the inside covers. Oh yeah, and we saw a bunch of people dressed up as transformers, star wars characters, and superheroes/villains. Pictures!

Kacey also wore a few costumes to the convention. She went as a 24-year-old one day, and as a 25-year-old the next two. She still hasn't taken that second costume off. Kat and Ray met us at the convention on her birthday, and we all went to the Cheesecake Factory afterward to celebrate. Mark my words, I will never forgive Ray for his generosity.

Maybe sometime this winter I'll tell you what happened in March!

Hav-Wartz: the bed & breakfast of champions!

There aren't really any major updates ...but I had to write something so that the terrible pig drawing would not reign supreme on the top of the blog anymore.

We have been trying to work fitness back into our schedules. Not long after moving here we found this fantastic fitness trail in Golden Gate Park. If used regularly, it can make us into true champions... the "used regularly" is where I struggle the most. Actually that's not true. The hills on the way back from the park are where I struggle the most.

Along with gradually resolving our varying states of inactivity, we both have been moving forward with our personal blogs. I am working more furiously at getting mine up and running, due to that little thing I call "playtime". . . others call it "unemployment." I am hoping to include works in progress, finished illustrations, sketches, as well as my thoughts and processes of individual works. Chris transferred his old site to his updated one, so you should be able to pick up where you left off:) Anyways we hope that you check them both out sometime, and always feel free to leave comments! Here are the links to my blog and Chris' blog, which can also be found with the rest of the links at the top right of the page.

As Chris talked about in the previous post, we had visitors recently at the lovely Hav-Wartz bed and breakfast. Be sure to book your visit soon because the vacancies are filling up. Your stay will include easy beach access, cable tv, plently of ethnic food, a queen size air mattress or couch depending on preference(Jason highly recommends the couch), and some fun experiences with public transportation! If you come bearing gifts, we can add a continental breakfast to your stay for free... call today!

Further Developments

The big news: Kitzzy and Jason were here this week. Jason is still here for MacWorld. We did some things.

The gory details: read on.

There has been some polarizing in the photography community in our apartment. By which I mean, Kacey takes all the photos, and I don't take any. She is committed to taking at least one photo every day this year and posting the results on flickr. See, I was trying to be punny when I titled the post 'further developments.'

New Year's was uneventful, which was kind of relaxing after scrambling to acquire items from craigslist after Christmas. Our energy level/available time/interest in posted items had hindered even modest furnishing of our apartment since we got here, and we were determined not to pass up this opportunity while I was away from work. We got a couch, a file cabinet, and a small dresser. This may not seem like much, but it was kind of our crowning achievement of the break: there is now somewhere to sit in the living room other than camp chairs, and we finally emptied most of our boxes from the move. This really only leaves two boxes of art supplies, which I'm not sure we really have room for anyways, or much reason to have readily available as we do most of our stuff-making on the computer lately. We also picked up a new rug. The acquisitions, in addition to actually cleaning up the place, meant that when Kitzzy and Jason arrived on Friday night, and Kat and Ray came over to join us all for dinner, we actually felt like human beings capable of having friends over, instead of bewildered creatures clinging together trying to stave off the cold. We didn't happen to get any pictures of any Kat and Ray's chocolate-smeared toddler or Kacey's experimental peach pork that night, but we took some pictures with Kitzzy and Jason over the subsequent days, which of course you can see on Kacey's, Kitzzy's, or Jason's flickr.

Kacey and I decided a month or so back that we would wait for Kitzzy and Jason's trip to do some of the more touristy things here. So in three days, we walked on the Golden Gate Bridge, drove on Lombard Street, took a ferry to Alcatraz, and saw the sea lions at Fisherman's Wharf. And I had a sourdough bread bowl full of clam chowder, which is probably more significant than everything else that happened. Because it was delicious. Kacey went to the Academy of Science with them, which apparently was a good time. But I doubt it can stack up against the chowder.