The title of this post was going to be “cheeseburgers from heaven” when I had thought about writing it a few weeks ago. But it’s Mother’s Day today and the fact that I’ve been without mine for almost two years now hurts just a little more this weekend.

I had been thinking about my mom a lot one morning and on the way to drop off pup at the groomers, I turned on the radio instead of the usual CD. The next song played was “Cheeseburger in Paradise” by Jimmy Buffet, which I haven’t heard in years. I can’t say I like Jimmy Buffet all that much but I somehow know every single word from many of his popular songs thanks to my parents, specifically my mom. She always wanted to have a cheeseburger in a town called Paradise (there is one in Florida near I-75!) but we never made the detour on our many roadtrips together.

I found myself belting out the chorus with the windows open and just then, hearing that song at that moment, felt like a penny from heaven.

(Ryan, my dad, Lauren, me, and my mom in Oklahoma, probably 1984)

On a brighter note, I happen to be lucky enough to have three other women to celebrate this mother’s day—my gram, Tess, Eric’s mom, Susan, and my step-mom, Lynn. Having all of them in my life has made the loss more bearable.

Thank you all and Happy Mother’s Day.

One of the first things that Eric researched after we bought our plane tickets was potential waterfall hikes. It hasn’t rained in San Francisco for several weeks, so we knew the waterflow was going to be low, but we were hoping it was still early enough in the season to get lucky.

Once we were on the ground we decided to concentrate on the Laurel Dell trail near Alpine Lake because the hike paralleled Cataract Creek and there were bound to be at least some water flowing over the falls.

Compared to other people’s photos after a good rain, the water flow was meager, but we enjoyed the fresh air and gratification that a new waterfall every couple hundred yards brings.

Eric photographed ten cascades along this uphill hike… all the shots are in our San Francisco Flickr set. We’ll also have all the photos and directions up shortly on our waterfall database.

We didn’t have time on this trip to make it out to Sequoia National Park to visit the largest redwoods, but we still got to see some enormous coastal redwoods on a hike through Muir Woods near sunset.

The setting was almost surreal. We were surrounded by huge trees while shafts of light filtered through into the still quiet of the woods. I told Eric that if fairies suddenly appeared, I wouldn’t be surprised.

We took the Hillside Trail, the longest way around, and as the trail ascended, we quickly lost sight of most of the other people sharing the park with us. The two mile walk was a lovely transition from city to nature and warmed us up for the hiking we planned to do the following day.

While exploring downtown San Francisco (specifically Chinatown) was entertaining, this type of stroll is much more our scene. We would take hiking in the woods over hoofing it around a city any day.

It doesn’t matter if you’ve never been to San Francisco, everyone knows what the Golden Gate Bridge looks like. Admittedly, I was pretty darn excited to see this bridge for the first time.

We caught a glimpse as we drove up Lincoln Blvd on the western side of the Presidio, but the money shot is from the parking area on the south side of the bridge.

The sky was as clear as it was for our entire trip on Sunday afternoon, so the view was magnificent. We crossed over the bridge and got another shot looking back toward downtown San Francisco.

On Sunday afternoon, after braving the BART ride back to the airport to pick up our rental car, we stopped off at Golden Gate Park to visit the Japanese Tea Garden and the SF Botanical Gardens.

Eric remembered enjoying the Tea Gardens when he was there as a child, so we made it a priority to make it back.

We were able to find free parking on the street instead of having to park in the deck, so the $4 per person entry fee didn’t bother me that much. What did bug me was that the gardens were very crowded (not their fault) and didn’t seem very well maintained (definitely their fault).

The structures are lovely, however, and when you did find a little quiet way from all the people it was a nice setting.

Across the street, the SF Botanical Gardens were overall more impressive in terms of peacefulness and sheer amount of flowers.

The gardens are divided into regions sharing similar climates to Northern California—Chile, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. Easily a great way to spend an afternoon.

We saw lots of plants familiar to us from our trips to South Africa as well some new specimens, like this “big red” anigozanthos and marmalade bush.

We started this blog about a million 8 years ago in preparation for our wedding. We wanted a space to share the planning and excitement of the upcoming event with our friends and family who lived nowhere near us. Since then, it has grown into a healthy snapshot of our life together through multiple moves, home improvements, a mini schnauzer rescue, and extensive travel photos.

And perhaps unexpectedly, I’ve made several online friends whose blogs I’ve been reading for years; None of whom I’ve ever met in person.

One of the more surreal (and flattering) experiences I’ve had was this post. Her incoming link was how I found her blog a few years back and I’ve been hooked ever since.

So, upon planning our recent trip to San Francisco, I contacted Leah of agirlandaboy.com to see if she (and Simon!) were free any of the nights we would be in town. They met us for dinner in Oakland on Monday night and although we were all exhausted from a busy weekend—birthday partying and visiting with friends for them and us hiking and driving around—we had a wonderful time at dinner. We felt instantly comfortable with them (the glass of wine may have helped on my end, hee!) and there was never a pause in the conversation.

I feel very lucky to have the opportunity to travel as much as I do, and when it gives us the chance to finally meet people that we’ve technically known for several years, well, that’s a pretty sweet chocolaty icing on the cake.

Thanks again guys for the lively company and a very tasty restaurant suggestion! :)

After spending a lovely night at the Sir Francis Drake on Saturday night and a hearty (but overpriced) breakfast across the street at Sears, we spent Sunday morning walking around Chinatown.

It was still early, so the streets were free of tourists. I loved the ambiance, smells, and artwork that filled the windows on Grant Street. There was also the liberal use of lanterns.

I picked up some ginger tea at the TenRen tea shop and we also bought some freshly-made fortune cookies (with naughty fortunes!) at this tiny factory in Ross Alley.

She was nice enough to pose without me asking, I guess she’s used to silly tourists. :)

The day after we got back from Christmas, we bought this coffee table during a huge sale at Nowell’s Furniture. That would be January 3, 2008; we were hoping to have it for the Superbowl.

We just picked it up yesterday.

The furniture store called to say it was going to be an extra few weeks, but it took four months. Granted, the delay wasn’t entirely their fault, but they could have made more of an effort to ease the frustration. Like, say, free delivery? Instead, we got excuses, shrugging and transfer of blame. Because of this, I’ll definitely think twice before buying any big ticket items from them in the future.

With that out of the way, look at our new coffee table! Hooray!

We have been looking forever for a small glass coffee table (under 24 inches in diameter) that would fit with our sectional couch. The nice part about this one is that it swivels out to reveal three levels of glass that more than doubles the amount of table space when we need it.

And Eric says it makes the living room look bigger. :)

Today I got an email with all our French Open tickets attached! Hooray!

The first thing I did was translate the entire ticket since it’s in French and I needed to know why all the tickets have my name on them when they clearly show an illustration of someone checking IDs. Turns out I just have to change the names online and they will be registered correctly in the computer when the ticket is scanned. Check.

My next challenge was to find a good seating chart so I know where we’ll be sitting. Apparently, the organizers for Roland Garros have something against straightforward information about just where exactly your seats are. I could only find zone colors, no mention of the other qualification, OB/NB, on the tickets.

After looking all over the official website and various other ticketing aggregators, I decided to just make my own seating chart (hopefully helping out a few other folks) combined from several maps I found.

Behold!

So now I know where our tickets are!

(Here you go, Mom.)

June 2, 2008 (2 men’s singles/1 men’s doubles) - OB, Row 20, Seats 4, 6, 8, 10
June 3, 2008 (1 men’s singles/2 women’s singles) - NB, Row 5, Seats 60, 62, 64, 66

It’s spring again and that means another year of trying to score an heirloom sungold tomato plant from Craig and Susan LeHoullier. We got started too late last Saturday and by the time we arrived at 11am, they were sold out. Since I didn’t feel like driving out to their house in North Raleigh during the week, I was determined to arrive early enough this morning.

Now, I get up every morning around 7am to take the dog out and give her breakfast. Then she crawls back into bed with me and snoozes for a few hours while I work on my laptop. This morning, however, we left right after breakfast.

This is how she looked on the way to Raleigh…

I think pup was missing her morning nap.

We pulled in at 8am sharp and I am happy to report that I am now the proud owner of a tiny sungold tomato plant. It joins the Tiger Tom heirloom variety that we purchased last week.

They may be little now, but look what happened last year. :)

(Did I really say that I would only buy one tomato plant this year? Whoops!)

In other garden-related news, we will not have to buy any herbs this year, as illustrated by this photo that Eric took this morning.

This is what the deck box looked like just a year ago.