Busy Weekend

I think weekends should *always* be 3 days. By the time Sunday evening rolls around, I'm beat and need a day to just do nothing. That's what Mondays should be for. Some would argue that people actually do nothing on Mondays, even when they're at work.

On Saturday, Greg played in the AACO Sports Day volleyball tournament with some friends. When he got home, the first words out of his mouth were, "I'm too old for this stuff." I don't think it was the volleyball as much as it was the beer and sangria that he drank between games.

While he was having fun in the sun, I was volunteering at a Pound Puppy Rescue adoption event in the morning. There were lots of puppies; I'd guess about 30 puppies. I didn't have a foster puppy, but I helped out with the sign-in sheets and making sure everyone got interviewed. The majority of the people came to see the mountain bike litter, 8 lab mix puppies; 4 yellow and 4 black. They are C-U-T-E! If I was fostering this litter, I might have to keep one of the yellow lab pups so Tachi could have a little brother or sister as a playmate.

In the afternoon, I took Tachi to the Fort Funston with Ann, Newton and their dogs, Buttercup and Muffin. Tachi LOVES Fort Funston. We love it too because he always comes back really tired and messy. (Okay, we don't really like the messy part, but it's worth it).

On Sunday afternoon, we went to the Mountain View Obon Festival. A friend of mine was working the corn dog and french fry booth. I'd never been to the Obon festival, even though in college, I went to lots of parties/dances that happened in the evening after the festival. Greg told me he used to go the Obon festival at the Buddhist Church in Sacramento, where he spent most of his time at the game booths. We ate corn dogs and shaved ice (the line was super long for shaved ice), played Bingo (didn't win anything...boo), checked out the exhibits and watched a Taiko performance. We didn't stay for the Bon Odori dance, which seems to be the highlight of the festival. Maybe next year, we'll check out the San Jose Obon Festival, which is supposed to be bigger than the Mountain View festival.

Apricots, apricots and more apricots

It turns out the tree in our front yard is an apricot tree. It's a very productive tree too! Over the past 2 weeks, I think we picked ovr 40 lbs of apricots. The crazy thing is that we didn't really do anything special to the tree.

At first I was really excited about being able to pick and eat as many apricots as I pleased. Greg didn't share my enthusiasm, which was fine. Just meant more apricots for me. I soon realized that we have more apricots than I could possibly eat.

So, I started giving them away to friends, family, neighbors and co-workers. I even shared with the squirrels in our neighborhood. (We'd find discarded, half eaten apricots on the ground around the trees in front of our house. And sometimes we'd even see a squirrel dart up our tree and have a picnic in the tree.)

We still had a ton of apricots! What was I going to do with all these apricots? A friend suggested that I make jam. And that's exactly what I did today. I made 14-8oz. jars of apricot jam.

It was actually a lot easier than I thought it would be. Sugar, lemon juice, sliced/diced fruit, and pectin...lots of boiling water to sanitize the jars, lids and bands...a little help from Good Eat's Alton Brown...an online recipe...and voila....apricot jam! I felt very "Martha Stewart" as I was making jam in our kitchen. I'm quite impressed with myself and with the jam, even though I haven't tried it yet!

California Academy of Sciences

Last weekend, we went to the California Academy of Sciences with our friends and their 4 year old son. We've been wanting to check it out for a while, so we were pretty excited.

We got tickets for the planetarium show in the morning and the 3D bugs movie in the afternoon. Greg enjoyed a nice nap at the planetarium, which was surprising. Guess he's not that into stars and planets. I really liked the rainforest sphere with all the animals and butterflies. One of the giant butterflies with blue wings landed on my camera lense! And then it quickly flew away. Boo.

The aquarium was a pretty neat too. I think I like the Monterey Bay Aquarium more. Although it's probably not a fair comparsion because the Cal Academy of Sciences is more than an aquarium. We really enjoyed out time there and plan to go back. It's a great place to take kids...even big kids like Greg! Next time we plan to try the pho a the cafe because our friends raved about how good it was, but they didn't have any noodles the day we were there.

You can check out pictures here.