Monday, December 11, 2006

Back to Reality and Other Trivial Things



Sigh. It was a lovely, fun weekend. Aaron and I went to San Francisco for much needed grown-up time away. We stayed at the Monticello Inn, a small boutique hotel about two blocks from Union Square. We window shopped. We ate at places that didn't have kiddie menus. We stayed up late and slept in later. Sigh. It was wonderful! One of the best things about trekking into the City is the architecture and cool signs on the buildings.
I have a weird thing for signage, especially old signs. I think I like that they have withstood the test of time and still manage to beckon patrons into their establishments. SF is chock full of great signs with tons of character. Our hotel had a great one and a liquor/cigar shop a few blocks away was particularly eyecatching.

The weather was great, only showering on us a little bit and the sun showed up for a while in the mornings. The window shopping was fun! Macy's has gorgeous Christmas tables arranged in one set of windows and darling SPCA pets to be adopted in the rest of their windows.
Can you see all the loveliness on this table? Probably not, I took this
during a rare sunshiny moment and was awarded a nice glare.

One of the mechanical pups at Macy's.
They had plenty of real puppies in the windows all waiting to be adopted,
but they were too wiggly for me to get decent pics.
After a full day of window shopping and walking around the square, we dashed to go see A Christmas Carol at the ACT. It was an updated adaptation, rewritten to have more humor than the traditional play. Aaron really loved it and I enjoyed it, though I am a bit of a traditionalist because I like the original version a teensy bit more.
Can't go to SF without getting clam chowder in a bread bowl! YUM.
This was our third trip to SF and we marveled at how different each trip has been. We have seen completely different sights each time and still have so much more to see without ever repeating ourselves. I'm sure that is true for any big city, but it really never ceases to amaze us, considering you can see all there is to see in our area in about 24 hours. Ok not really. Maybe 72.

When we got home we were greeted with kids happy to see us and babysitters happy to be off duty. My brother and his wife were kind enough to come stay the weekend at our house and watch our kiddies. Of course they were angels the whole time we were gone, but erupted into little demons once we got home. My cousin was also over getting her baby fix (I'm the oldest and the only one with kids in town, so all my cousins/siblings come to me for their baby hugs and kisses). Since she was there and my brother and his wife were not (shockingly) in a hurry to get home we had them over for dinner and somehow along the way added another of my brothers and my cousin's boyfriend to the mix.
We pulled out our Trivial Pursuit 90's edition of which my husband and I are embarassingly good at (thought not as good as Pop Culture edition. We kick butt at that one). He knows all the wired, news, politics questions and I know the tv, movies and fads questions. We tend to purposely play opposite each other because when we play on the same team the domination is just too great. My team got a few wired and news questions too many because the guys beat us even though we got our first three pies in our first turn.

A full, fun weekend! I am a lucky girl!

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