Annot

We got up early today and I made some onigiri, the unbeatable japanese travelling food:

for breakfast and the car. As we got closer to the valley under the Mont Aiguille, we were greeted by beatuful views of mist and fog carpeting the valley floor


and then perfect blue skies above the mont aiguille itself.

We met Amy, Mark, Dave and Sandy (Actually just Sandy because everyine else were off trying to find the boulders) at the Requiem for a Bloc sector in Annot at a little before noon. After the usual stumbling through underbrush, we found the boulders and had a full day of sliding off the perfect sandstone slopers and sanding the skin on our fingertips down. I tried the 'Requiem for a Bloc' (b9) problem, but didn't get very far. I also struggled pretty hard to get Connerie divine b6. Next, we walked over to Place Vendome, which had a boulder with a very unique undulating texture, and a lot of really high stuff as well. Dave experienced the joys of highballing on an unnamed B4 with a heart-in-the-mouth topout. Shortly after, I had my own "don't fall moment" on a
tall B7 on an arete with a nasty landing.

We had a nice dinner at L'Avenue of crustillant de Rouget followed by a daube, and then fell asleep at 10 pm.

HAPPY BRACE OFF CHRISTA!!!!!

yaaaay!

FREEZING

it snowed today at higher altitude.

Berkeley: entertainment capital of the USA?

After discovering that the guys from the 'Bu are from Berkeley, I started thinking about how there are actually quite a few kids from my middle school, neighborhood and high school who have gone on to become entertainers: Lyrics Born, AKA Tom Shimura lived down the street from me and we used to skateboard together. Adam Sessler and I went to the same middle school and was the first of our friends to have a nintendo. Oh yeah and Rebecca Romjin went to Berkeley high when i was there, but I couldn't find any links to her.

Chamomile, Mutha#%#a!

Even though I'm physically feeling a bit worse now, I'm in much better spirits after finding The Lonely Island. I watched all nine The 'Bu episodes and pretty much everything else on their site, including the pilot for Awesometown.
I came across their site from a link at BoingBoing about how they had become popular through their creative commons released material, and how they were all going to be working for Saturday Night Live this season! On their contact/about web page (thats Brooke Shields in bed with them), it turns out that they grew up in berkeley! I think they're a little young to have overlapped at Berkeley Heigh (if that's where they went to HS), but maybe not. Anyway, one of my favorite things from their web site is this rap song and is the soruce of the title of this post.

sick

Even though I should be at work trying to finish things up, I'm home sick with a cold/flu which is just getting worse! I made myself some udon soup with crispy rice to ease my burning throat

Jambon/Brocante

We went to the Jambon Brocante (Ham and Antiques) experience today, which Chloe had fortuitously seen the sign for yesterday as we came back from Ombleze. It was quite nice, with a lot of deals to be had, just like the last one that we went to. There some really nice armoires and bonnetiers for not too much money. Here's chloe gazing longingly at one

There was also the normal selection of random and inexplicable things like tortoise shells

rodents with glasses

and creepy mannequins


But there were also some great food stands with Jambon (duh!), olives and bread


I'm going to miss all of this.

There was one stand which had an impressive selection of old french tools, and... duck decoy heads?!

We bought a cool pair of old scissors at this stand. Also, after circling back twice, we decided to buy this beautiful walnut coffee table

for 530 euro, delivered. Its a beautiful table, and even has a drawer on one end.
On our way back home, we stumbled on a pottery installation, which was mostly uninteresting, except for a demonstration on how they make big clay jugs

Ombleze

we went to Ombleze with mark and amy today; I'm really going to miss this place! Afterwards we had drinks at the excellent Moulin de la Pipe. We had hoped to eat dinner and stay the night there, but it was completely booked.

Pata Negra

My friend Carlos brought us back some special ham from Spain called Pata Negra, which I have heard a lot about from my friend Francois and from Carlos as well. Its a special ham made from a special breed of pig which is fed oak acorns.

Carlos told me to slice it as thin as possible which meant that it was time to re-sharpen my yanagi and aritsugu paring knife

We harvested some of the beautiful tomatos from our terrace

and made a cheese plate with some three year old Comte de Montagne, "VSOP" Gouda that I bought at Schipol during my layover, some Tomme Crayeuse and some real Bufala mozarella

I found that the ham wasn't easy to cut into the large slices that they sell at the grocery store without making them too thick, so I just made small paper thin slices.

The ham was better than any prosciutto or french ham that I have ever had. In particular, the lightly marbled section of it was sweet and delicious. Hopefully we'll be able to find this in the states!

We also went to Caro de Lyon today with Mark and Amy. It was fantastic as usual, and my favorite part of the meal was the lobster farfalle: perfect.

Creatinine

Chloe was recently diagnosed with a kind of hypothyroidism called "Hasimoto's disease", and at more or less the same time, that there were some potential problems with her kidney. The hypothyroidism was a clear diagnosis and she is now ramping up on levothyrox, which has been very effective. The kidney problem (if there is one) hasn't been diagnosed or treated yet because we were hoping that it would go away with the thyroid medication. However, the first round of blood/urine tests showed that there were still some irregularities. One thing that they needed to test for was creatinine levels. When Chloe picked me up from the airport yesterday, she immediately, and with great glee announced that there was a jug of pee (HER pee) in our refrigerator, and not to confuse it with anything else. It turns out that the test for creatinine requires that you collect all of your urine during a 24 hour period. I have to admit that I very indiscreetly asked whether refrigerator storage was completely necessary, for which I was sternly reprimanded. I guess you don;t want the creatinine breaking down any further... or something.

Dim Sum

Today, on my last day in the bay area, I ticked off my last "Must Eat": dim sum in san francisco. We went to Yank Sing , which I had never been to before, and it was amazing.

Kirala

Another bay area food ticklist: Sushi at Kirala!

hamachi

mirugai

We also tried some new things (to me) like "kampachi" (i think), which was a slightly leaner version of hamachi, as well as shiro maguro, which was also good. The real star of the evening was the mirugai though.

I also dug up this funny picture of me as a baby

Ceramics

My mom took me to a great ceramics supply place in richmond today:

TACOS TACOS TACOS

I ticked another of my feeding requirements today: tacos from fruitvale

Kenji's soup

don't know how it's made though

also I got to see my mom in her rowing outfit

State of the Apartment

In "Une Hirondelle a fait le Printemps" (one of the movies I saw on the plane) there's a scene where the power goes off in the farm house. It looks pretty miserable because there's a foot of snow outside and driving wind. It got me thinking about the sorry state we are currently living in though: A car that barely works, no freezer, no bathroom door, electrical wiring which sometimes makes fizzy noises, light switches which warm up, a bedroom shutter which we can't raise, a bed which periodically collapses with us in it, no useable heating and no AC. Anything after this is going to seem like pure luxury.

Sticky Potatoes

the hard part is finding the nagaimo, but once you have it it's easy. First skin ~ 2 cm off the end

Then chop the skinned section into slices, which you then further chop into "rods"

now add seaweed

and citrus soy sauce (forgot the japanese name)

mix it up and you're done.

Zuni

We had lunch at Zuni on Market st. today. I ordered the burger, which was good, but not nearly as good as the fantastic roasted chicken that my parents ordered

We also ordered a tray of eighteen oysters (three kinds, which I can't remember the names of... but they were all Japanese). It was a significant event for me, since I hadn't dared to eat oyster since my last experience with them. I'm happy to report that no violent intestinal trauma accompanied these oysters though.

Miso Soup

Here is kenjis Miso soup recipe:

Boil some Kombu

in water for a little while

remove the kombu, put in tasty nuggets of your choice

add some udon sauce


and some wakame mix

and then the miso

On a related note, I am really amazed by the selection of miso that is now available. It used to be just one kind: a vacuum packed pouch, but now there are at least ten different kinds in fancy packaging.

tomatos schooled

when I got home, I saw my parents' tomato plants which have been raided by various critters over the last few weeks. they are very impressive, and the tomatos taste really good. I should mention that they cheated and used tomato food though. Mine are organic if you don;t count the cloud of diesel exhaust that shrouds grenoble.

Back in Berkeley

I've flown to and from Europe quite a few times in the last four years, and generally find it to be a pretty uncomfortable experience (with the exception of that one time when I was upgraded to Business class!). Today however, I think I found the best economy carrier for long flights: KLM. In an unheard of occurance, all of the meals were actually very good and I might even have considered eating them outside of a plane. Things started off a little rocky though, since their video system wasn't working at all, despite a few calls to the IT guys back home in Amsterdam. As luck would have it, the Scottish guy sitting next to me on the plane was a video engineer and sorted it all out after fiddling with some cabling. I found it a bit strange that they didn't even acknowledge him. An eleven hour flight with no movies leads to some serious resentment of the nearest representaives of the airline = the flight crew; I know because I've been on a SGO-Paris flight where the projectors stopped working. While they were trying to fix the movie system (=cycling the power multiple times), I worked on a presentation on my powerbook until the battery went dead. Then I listened to my ipod until it went dead, and discovered that I have a battery problem with the stupid ipod now. One hour of listening isn't normal. I did manage to have kind of a freaky moment listening to Paul Williams/Blackalicious's Release:

I can think of nothing heavier than an airplane 
I can think of no greater conglomerate of steel and metal
I can think of nothing less likely to fly

I have to admit to being a little bit of a phillistine as far as poetry goes, but I really love Saul Williams' section of that song.

ANYWAY. With all my electronic pacifiers dead, I resorted to the in flight magazine with bonus Duty Free Section. In it, I found one of my top ten most bizarre items. I took a picture for your pleasure:

It's the last line that really gets me. What can you say, really?

When they finally got the video fixed, they rebooted it, and I was pretty floored to see a linux penguin and a boot screen happily chug along and start up the movie GUI. I guess other people have seen this as well. Once the system was up I was very impressed with it: you can pause and fast forward through the movies, play games etc etc. Sure the little controller things is a bit awkward, but come on: I had around 50 movies to choose from! I ended up watching the Incredibles (since Chloe won't watch animated movies with me ... snifff), the Assault on precinct 13 (boring, predictable and ethan hawke should just give up already), A Japanese movie that I can't remmber the title of, which involved drunken haircutting and a dude stuck between two buildings, and finally Une Hirondelle a Fait Le Printemps (aka "The Girl From Paris") . The last one was my favorite, not the least of which because it is set in my climbing stomping grounds of the Vercors. Sleepy time now.