My BIG problem

I have a problem, a huge problem, it is giant.  I don't know what kind of dessert I want to eat tonight.  I have boxes of pudding and jello, I have two kinds of Ben & Jerry's, I even have cookie dough just waiting to be baked!

While I decide I have chosen to partake in a little strawberry lemonade with a shot of vodka and freshly frozen cranberry juice ice cubes.

Who knows, maybe an episode of SATC and the rest of my drink will help me choose!  I am willing to go with that for now.

Intestinal Distress

Since Kris and I moved into the fabulous new apartment, we have been cooking up a storm! From lemon pasta to herb chicken with tortellinis, peach cobbler to chewy nutella cookies, we have been buying, cooking, frying, baking, mixing and sampling our way through the neighborhood grocery stores. 

Berkeley Bowl is my overall favorite, although I would need a full time job, a part time job, and probably a corner of my own if I wanted to buy all my groceries there on a regular basis.  But it is my fruity indulgence so I allow myself to go bananas in their produce section.  Target offers wonderful bang for our (fairly limited) bucks in frozen foods, meats and milk.

There are obviously many other options like Whole Foods (hippies), Andronico's (rich hippies and foodies), and the neighborhood Walgreen's (a place I only buy Ben & Jerry's).  But the one thing they all have in common is their incredible ability to give me a stomach ache.

I have been eating so well I feel like I need to be in one of the pepto commercials.  Nausea not included, I can even do the little dance!  So today I am going plain, I am having cereal, a pb&j sandwich, and hopefully mac n' cheese for dinner.  I have a wonderful kitchen with actual counter space, I could make a cake to look at and make a cake to eat and still have room to make a cake to take to work with me, but I think I need a break from it all to return to my crappy college diet for a little while.  Or just until my stomach calms down a little.

Of course... I'm an elf

Harry Potter 7 premiere last night! Having never attended a midnight showing I asked Kris if he would mind going to this one, his response was to go online and buy tickets immediatly.  So with the knowledge that I was going to be staying up pretty late last night I prepared for the show by attempting to take a nap, this did not work, I was cranky by the time we got into the theater at 10:30.  The fact that it was chock full o' high schoolers only made me more irritable and getting to yell at one of the little brats did not relieve me of any of the tension I was now carrying in my grown up shoulders.

WHUUUUUTEEVER.

The movie was good, the screenplay was definitely loosely based on the book in some areas (why was there a boat house? what was the point there?) but to avoid being a spoiler I will stop there.  I enjoyed the film but think that overall my very favorite is still #3.

So in honor of Harry Potters defeat of the Dark Hollywood Empire Lord, here are some fun pictures I found on the internet

BUT, MOST IMPORTANTLY LOOK AT NEVILLE!!!



He is super studly, WTF.



Ikea - limit 9 per customer

So after finding a place and signing a few checks, we were told that the moving process could start on Friday.  This obviously meant that on Friday at 5pm when I got off work the first stop was Ikea to buy a kitchen cart.  $350 later, we got to our brand new apartment! It is giant! It is magnificent! It makes me want to use words like splendiferous and floobily woobily (not that I don't already).  So we moved all of our swag up the 2.5 flights of stairs and decided to commence building.  This is when we realized that the "kitchen cart" we had grabbed was in fact... wait for it... a chair.  So back to Ikea we went, and when we found the right aisle and bin we realized that there were no kitchen carts in stock, interesting.  We approached a Ikea-helper and he gave us an apologetic smile while saying that he "actually knew why there weren't any in stock, it's because some lady came in earlier in the day and bought nine of them!!!!"

Now, I am a big fan of this kitchen cart:
1) it is solid wood (a big deal for Ikea)
2) it has 2 drawers in it!
3) there are shelves where you can put pans or wine bottles
4) It is just the right height for a giant boyfriend

But I cannot fathom why anyone would need 9 of them, like 2 maybe, but 9!?!? Does she not have any counters in her kitchen? Is she giving them away as Christmas gifts? Who knows.  Kris and I contemplated the mystery woman and her need to own all the carts on our way back home with the knowledge that they were getting more in stock at 10am the next day.

Saturday rolled around and we rolled out of bed, literally rolled, my muscles were already dying from overexertion. We finished building the bookshelf/dining room table we had stupidly started at 10:30pm the night before and headed back to the land of Swedish blue and yellow.  With proper item in hand we thanked the merciful Ikea gods that the crazy lady had not returned to snatch up the fresh crop of carts.  The rest of the weekend was spent making trips to and from the new apartment, the old apartment, and the storage locker.  By the last trip up the stairs on Sunday, my arms were noticeably shaking and I was happy to sit down in my living room and have some peach cobbler!

Fear the Beard

"Why" you may ask, would someone fear a beard?  Perhaps it is dirty and belongs to a hobo? Maybe it looks like the beard of a well known murderer?  No dear friends and family, this beard belonged to Brian Wilson of the San Francisco Giants (a team that my phone has taken to autocorrecting as "Pants")

I pose a question: Are you afraid of this man?

The answer is no, he looks like a mildly douchey version of Adam Levine.

However, are you afraid of this same man... with a beard?

YES!!! This man looks like he will eat your firstborn child for dinner, and your soul for dessert.  See that face he is making? I am fairly positive that's because he has indigestion from a meal too full of human life force.  And that is why the phrase "fear the beard" is completely accurate in this case.



We went to a baseball game at Giants stadium, it was beautiful!  They also have a team member named Panda, what is with this city?

The Yazz Festival, and Freedom Day!

Every year there is a Jazz festival on Fillmore street, so this sunday Kris and I decided to go meet up with John to check it out.  Not knowing a whole lot about jazz, I worried that it may be boring or uneventful.  I was wrong, so so wrong, how could any street festival with fried foods and fun booths be boring?!?!  So we walked about a mile to the festival from John's apartment in the lower Haight.



As you can probably see, there was a man dressed in a full sparkly costume, another far cooler man with a puppy in his murse, and a whole lot of people packing the 6 blocks of festival. I didn't get any pictures of the bands but there was basically one for every block of booths and food.  I also did not photograph my delicious fried calamari with tangy tartar sauce, but that would pretty much look like all calamari so you can just picture it mentally.

After a few hours, we returned to John's apartment and got a call from Jaymi Berbert saying she would be in town later if we could hang out.  So we took a nap and awaited her arrival.  Once we had a Jaymi (at like 10pm) we decided to go get a few beers at Toronados, but it was really crowded, so we went to Mad Dog in the Fog, and had some tasty Delirium Tremens, followed by $2.50 Tecate night at the Irish bar a block away.  Minus one douchey Davis student, it was a pretty fun night, and of course I got to sleep on John's ottoman which seems like it is becoming a trend for me.

On the morning of the Fourth we woke up bright and early, literally because the sun was shining in our eyes, and piled into Jaymi's car to go back across the bridge to our side of the bay.  We showed her our sad little bedroom sublet and told her all about our new apartment (our apartment that Kris is signing papers for in 2 hours!!!!!!)  She unsurprisingly did not find the bedroom a great hangout place so we headed up to Telegraph to hippie-watch.  Since it was a holiday though a lot was closed and the hippies seemed to have gone into hiding, so we went to Triple Rock to sit on the rooftop beer garden and pass the time.  I had a glass of bright red pomegranate cider, which was referred to as Freedom Drank, and Kris had a beer, boring.

   

Later we drove around Berkeley trying to find a place to watch fireworks, we ended up directly in fron of Walter and Lydia's old place overlooking the freeway.  After 30 minutes even Kris (a huge fan of fireworks and all explosions) was bored and we were happy to see the grand finale!  So overall a happy and fun 4th of July