Itching to travel

I love San Francisco and am so thankful that this is the city where I live. Maybe it's because I'm just caught up in the routine of work and life, or maybe it's the weather, or maybe it's because Jonny has been gone so much, but I keep thinking about traveling. I've been looking at pictures of getaways, and this Poet's Loft caught my eye. How beautiful is that view?! And it's so close to San Francisco! We'll have to get there one of these days...

A long weekend and a long drive

We planned on spending our Presidents' Day weekend in Tahoe, but due to crazy circumstances, we spent about 4 times more hours in the car than we spent on the slopes.

Jonny's office rented a house for the weekend and we planned to leave work a little early and head up to Tahoe. We actually didn't start heading out of town until 5pm, and it took us an hour sitting in standstill traffic in San Francisco before we got on the interstate. Once we were on the road, though, it was pretty smooth sailing. Until we started to get close to Tahoe, that is. The snow was coming down hard and the roads were getting icier and icier, and all over the place we were seeing warnings that we would need snow chains. We stopped and bought some at a gas station, although neither of us has ever had experience putting on chains before.

When we got to the stopping point where people without 4 wheel drive and snow tires are required to put chains on their cars, and we were going to pay a man to put ours on since we had no clue what we were doing. He looked at our car and said, "You've got an Audi - you don't need chains" and waved us on. You saw a picture of our car - it's an Audi convertible, not exactly a snowmobile. Anyway, we drove on, and the people at the check point said the same thing, "You don't need chains."

We were feeling pretty good about ourselves for a little while, then the roads started getting icier and we started slipping, so we pulled over to the side of the road to try to attach our chains ourselves. We followed the directions that came with the chains and managed to get them attached to both wheels, but as soon as we started driving, one chain fell off. Jonny then decided to park on the side of the road and got out to look for the chain. I sat in the car waiting until a highway patrol officer came up and told me I was in an extremely dangerous spot and needed to either drive on or pull the car completely off the road. I told him that Jonny was out looking for our lost chain, and he started going on and on about how risky that was. And I started to get worried.

Jonny was nowhere in sight, and I sat in the car on the side of the road while other vehicles crawled by us, imagining all of the worst possible things that could have happened to him. Finally, he got back, with no chains, and I was so relieved! We crept on for awhile with one chain on, and we managed to do all right going downhill. Then, we got to a tiny hill and couldn't make it up. We tried reversing and then going forward, getting out and pushing, and laying on the gas, but nothing worked. We started to plan for sleeping there in our car that night when another highway patrol officer came up and gave us a push up the hill. With that momentum, we made it to the next chain check point about a mile up the road. By this point it was about 3:30am.

This chain checkpoint was much stricter, as the next stretch of road was hilly and icy and wind-y (that's wind-y with a long "i", not windy). The man at the checkpoint took a look at our car with our one chain and told us we needed to turn around and drive to the closest town to buy new chains. The nearest town was about 10 miles away, which wouldn't be a problem except that driving that last ten miles had taken us over an hour. We told him we thought we'd be okay and somehow managed to convince him to let us go on our way. By some kind of miracle, we made it through that next stretch of road slowly but surely, and finally crossed over into Nevada. At this point, we were only 3 miles from our house.

We started up the final hill to get to our house, and suddenly the parking brake light came on. We stopped for a second to see if we'd accidentally pulled the brake up by mistake (not an easy accident!). We hadn't. But once we'd stopped, we couldn't get started up the hill again. Finally we decided we'd have to park the car and call someone to come get us. We saw a stoplight in the distance and thought it would be better to find a parking lot to park in rather than abandoning our car on the side of the road, so we eased over in the direction of the light. We found a gas station that was open at 5am and went in to see if we could get anything that might help us make it up the hill. They had snow chains so we bought another pair, thinking that an additional snow chain would help us out.

We got the chains installed and turned the car on again, and... nothing. We couldn't drive forward or reverse. Jonny was about to go angrily try to return the failing snow chains to the poor night attendant at the gas station when he realized that our back wheels were locked. So much snow had built up around our wheels that the wheels had completely locked up, as if we had pulled the parking brake. We put on our gloves and dug and dug, and finally we got all of the snow out and were able to drive on. At that point, our car was driving like a champion and we made it all the way up to the house. It was 5:30am.

Enough writing, except I'll explain the above pictures, starting clockwise from left:

{1} view of sunset from our house; {2} Jonny with crazy post-snowboarding hair; {3} pretty sky on a stretch of road; {4} In-N-Out!; {5} light traffic, but a little picture of our view for most of the weekend; {6} wine exhibit at SF Moma on Monday.

And in other news, our friends Josh and Ashley got engaged a few weeks ago and it's been so fun to get to celebrate with them! We can't wait for Memorial Day weekend... WOOHOO!

(photo taken at our wedding by Rachel Williamson)

P.S. I will be sharing our wedding photos soon... it's just taken me a few months to get around to putting them together. 

Weekend Update

...on a Thursday. I know. This past weekend, we took Jonny's birthday present up to Napa and spent Friday night there. It was perfect convertible weather and we took full advantage. We also took full advantage of a vegetarian restaurant slash yoga studio in Napa. We were both skeptical of the shots of turnip soup we were served, but it was surprisingly delicious. We also watched sheep graze at Robert Sinskey and enjoyed mimosas and breakfast on our roof. 

And it's nice that I'm just posting this now, because I can get excited that there are only two more days until our next extra-long weekend! 

Friendsday Vday

The incredibly fun and talented Caroline Gilligan hosted an "I heart my friends" Valentine's dinner, complete with red cabbage salad, heart glasses, and root beer floats. It was such a fun day to spend Valentine's night! 

In college, we used to have crazy Friendsday Wednesday celebrations (a tradition that I think and hope my sister still carries on at Wake Forest) and I hadn't done it in a while, but this kinda felt like a Friendsday Monday. I think I always want to make Valentine's about lovers and friends, not just lovers. 

My birthday present

So, my friend Eleanor who prodded me to post pictures of our house scolded me after my post went up because I left out our coffee table. This is one of my favorite pieces of furniture in our house, and I love the story behind it.

Eleanor and I were hanging out in Tiburon one day that she was visiting, and we came upon this awesome furniture store. Both Eleanor and I fell in love with this table, but when I called Jonny to tell him about it, he said it sounded way too expensive and he wanted to see it if we were gonna spend that much on a coffee table.

After that, I kind of forgot about it until a delivery man showed up at my birthday dinner with the table! Eleanor had described the table to Jonny, and he had somehow figured out where it was from (which is an impressive feat, because I tried for a good 10 minutes to find a link to the store for this post and couldn't do it.) This table was made with found wood in India, and I l-o-v-e it.

Ignite (Not by Katy Perry)

Tonight Lydia and I went to an event that we knew next to nothing about - Ignite SF. We had heard it was "an indie version of TED Talks" and that did prove to be somewhat true. Basically, the premise was that someone could get up and talk about whatever subject they choose in 5 minutes using 20 slides. 

There were some hits (How I learned to follow my mom on Twitter by Kimra), some misses (Simple steps to a hot body at any age, which was basically just a slide show of one girl's family members and a push to eat Whole Foods), some challenges made (Zero Waste Challenge by Michael LaFemina), and some that were just straight up funny and entertaining while also enlightening (161 Erie Street). 

I'm glad I went and I'd definitely go back. But I need to eat dinner before I go next time. Two beers on an empty stomach meant I was pretty tipsy by the end of it, so I came home and used what little I had in my kitchen to make dinner. (I learned how to poach an egg, too!) All in all a good night!

One Six One

I haven't talked to my best friend Eleanor in probably two weeks, but the only communication I've had from her have been texts and voicemails ordering me to post pictures of our house. So Ele, this is for you. 

I just went through and took a few pictures, so you can get an idea of what it's looking like. I'll try to post better ones and more soon!

Our bed, again:

Our dining room table from a thrift store and chairs that we found at the Alameda antique fair:

Our bathroom wall flowers:

Our entry way, complete with my beloved church pew that we found on Craigslist:

This is my old desk that has been sitting in our living room waiting to be picked up (Lydia!). Thanks to Julie for the beautiful flowers. Also, the painting was done at our wedding by Jill Steenhuis:

Birthday Boy

Happy 28th birthday to my favorite boy in the world! L-o-v-e.