Apple snakes and Vampires

Somehow 6 weeks has gone by since my last post. This is what it's like when you get close to 40— time speeds up and then you have to piece together what happened. Luckily, there are some clues in the form of ye olde iPhone camera roll, so here's a short list of events since I last went on about that silly bridge:

• Liz and I spontaneously produced a child (OK, we went for a hike with Britta, Emily and Hugo in the lovely Redwood park)

That's our little Hugo.

• Spotted some New Mexico green chile in our local supermarket. Decided not to trust it.

The flags were a nice touch, tho.

• I read the fabulous new young adult novel, And Then Things Fall Apart by my dear friend Arlaina Tibensky. (Do yourself a favor, folks...) Coincidentally, while drinking wine with our neighbors, Tiffany brought out her nail polish collection. So, inspired by said YA novel, I painted my nails blue. 

Punk Rock

• I won a prize in a drawing for the first time in my life! The prize was entry to an ePublishing conference. Don't make fun—I got to go to Chicago. The conference was actually really useful (if I want to stay employed, that is) even though the McCormick center in Chicago is a miserable, miserable place. Luckily, I had my evenings free to wander around downtown and hit up 3 local breweries (Goose Island, Revolution, and Haymarket). Traveling for business means eating alone, so I've found that it's more comfortable to do so at a bar. I even found time to do a couple of 3 mile runs along the lakeshore which made me feel like a serious runner since I was making it happen in a new city.

The Palmer House. I stayed in this fancy place after a housing CF courtesy of Graph Expo. Long story.

Goose Island Brewing

Bagel + Pretzel = Bretzel. Brilliant.

• I got to go to an A's game with my ex Maggie and her 2 kids, Lucas (5) and Sora (3). I admit, I was a bit worried about taking little kids to a game, but these 2 were super fun and totally engaged. Lucas patiently absorbed all of my explanations about how baseball works and asked really great questions. For example, he asked how we picked which team to root for, and I explained that the A's are the home team, they're underdogs, and so on, to which he replied, "Yeah, but which team practices more?" Touché. By far my favorite moment, though, was when Sora asked what the vampires were doing. We looked at her like, "Vampires?" and she said, "The guys in black that hang around." Somehow "umpire" morphed into "vampire" for her and now I cannot stop thinking of them as the undead, lurking around, making judgements.

Lucas and me

Sora and her favorite part of the day, a lemonade

There were other wild moments in the past 6 weeks (including a whirlwind overnighter to the faded glory that is Reno, Nevada), but that's probably enough photo-narrating for now.

The blog name is a lie

There are actually 4 bridges and 2 tubes on this island city of ours.

When people talk about "the tube," they're actually talking about the 2 parallel bores right next to each other on the west end of the island. They are officially the Webster Tube (Alameda-bound) and the Posey Tube (Oakland-bound).

That's a minor technicality, but the 4th bridge is just an out-and-out omission on my part for no particularly good reason other than "four bridges and a tube" somehow is less poetic to me than "three bridges and a tube." That 4th bridge is actually quite charming and leads to a strange and magical land called Bay Farm Island (whose name is also a lie because it's not an island, but a sort of chunky peninsula attached to Oakland). Bay Farm is an odd collection of suburban homes, lagoons, golf courses, industrial parks, the Oakland Raiders headquarters, a shortcut to the Oakland airport, and a secret (shh) outpost of the always crowded east bay restaurant, La Penca Azul (née La Piñata).

Liz and I actually spend an inordinate amount of time on Bay Farm because it also features some really beautiful running/walking/biking trails. We do most of our longer Couch-to-10K training runs there because the views are awesome, we can run on dirt for a good bit, and there's something special about how isolated we feel out there in the middle of the bay.

Anyway, back to the bridge. We park the car and do our stretches right under the Bay Farm bridge, and last week we had the rare opportunity to see it draw up to let a sailboat or 2 through. This is exciting because: 1) engineering feats, however small, are neat (read: I'm a geek), 2) I've only seen the bridge go up twice in the 5 years I've lived on Alameda, and 3) the adorable adjacent bike bridge (arguably bridge #5) draws up too! Look!

So, to make up for leaving it out of the blog title, consider this my ode to the Bay Farm Island bridge and all the secret fun it leads to.

Dream Taps

Despite my like/hate relationship with social media, I just wasted 2 days making a Tumblr thing (Tumblog?) about one of our favorite conversations: if you owned a bar or restaurant that had 5 available taps, which beers would you serve?

Could be fun. Click the blue square on the right and check it out. 

Another Cat & Cocktail, with a Side of Cliantro

Okay, so I started to feel shy about posting too many cocktail reports all at once. Problem is, I try to take a little posting "break" and then lose stride for over a week. So we're back at it with the Cat + Cocktail series.

This time around I finally made the Thai Me Up (aka Thai Martini) I'd been hankering after pretty much since starting work at the hangar. It was DELICIOUS. The kaffir lime vodka came through, but so did the cilantro. Some ginger simple syrup was also involved, but the overall taste was light and somehow clean, yes clean. Here's out it looks, both with and without cat:

One cocktail was perfect for me. Well, I guess Josh wound up drinking part of it, so there's that. But Greenie felt it a bit more, apparently:

Cat + Cocktail

Lately I've been feeling the need to mix up some cocktails a little more often, since we have all this good booze in the house. With that in mind, I'm aiming to try out new (to me) cocktail recipes a couple times a week. If Josh and I share each one, it's not like we're even drinking that much, right?

I kicked things off the other night with a Kirsch Manhattan and a Basil Sazerac (both recipes courtesy of my esteemed hangar colleagues). The Kirsch Manhattan was yummy, though a bit sweet for us; it features both vanilla simple syrup and sweet vermouth. Next time I'll try it without the simple, just to see how it tastes.

The Basil Sazerac was delicious, plus I got to pick the basil leaves from our own garden.

Harder to tell what Greenie thinks: