FONDUE!

This morning I woke up ridiculously early as usual (jet lag is KILLING me this time) and hung out in the jardin de ville, working on my iphone app. I also had a video chat with my friend Paul in Davis, which was fun. After getting my fill of free wifi, I headed to Enrique and Leslie's place, but managed to end up in the wrong building. Lolo had given me the building access code the previous evening, which I punched into the keypad. I heard the buzz of the door lock clicking open and walked into a dark corridor. I wasn't sure if I had copied the number down correctly last night, so I was relieved to be spared the embarrassment of yelling up at the window to try to get Enrique's attention. As I walked through the hall, I noticed that the building was in a pretty appalling state. Huge curls of paint were peeling off of the walls, and -- horror of horrors -- the nameplates on doors were written on paper! Shocking! Anyway, I didn't see the name that lolo had given me on any of the doors, and I was beginning to think that something was very wrong indeed. As I left the building, I noticed a plaque commemorating the fact that Stendhal had lived there. I'm sure he would be disappointed. Anyway, it turned out that Enrique +family were in the next building over which curiously had an identical door code. Their building and apartment were a lot nicer. After a tour of the apartment, I showed them the local amenities: market at places aux herbes (special care taken to point out the pouletmobile), Arthaud, K-store, Dalbe, Talemelerie (sp? I never get that one right), and finally, Les Alpages. In my absence, the cheese man has apparently won some kind of major fromagier honor, and so has his lieutenant (take a look at their website and video). They also have a sous vide machine, so I ordered almost a kilogram of comte de montagne and some tomme crayeuse as well. The Lt even recognized me, which was heartwarming. I love that place.

We made one last stop at the children's clothing store, where I couldn't resist buying another outfit for ZZN and then had lunch along the tramway.

After lunch, we headed back to Enrique and Leslie's place and had some cheese and wine, and then it was time for me to head over to the EMBL. I did make a stop at Etam to get Chloe a few things and then I hopped on the 34 bus.

After a little kerfuffle at the guard gate because I had lost my badge (edit: it turned up in my back pocket a week later), I hung out in the newly refurbished EMBL library. A view of the Chartreuse is a pretty sweet environment to be working on an iphone app! A bit later I met up with Franck, headed to St. Egreve to pick up his son Artur, and then on to his house at the foot of the Neron. I've mentioned it before, but Franck is extremely fortunate to live in a beautiful stone house which shares a large grass field with several other people. It's an amazing piece of wilderness ten minutes from the synchrotron. This time he showed me a few of the trails that lead up to a spring and I got to try out his VX125.

Even before I arrived, Franck had promised me a fondue, but he didn't tell me that it was going to be a very special one made of amazing cheese from the Laiterie Bayard. I did my best, but was not able to help Franck finish the fondue. I think I did ok for a ricain, though. As usual, there was an incredible bottle of wine involved. I had previously not been a big fan of white wines, but this one has changed my mind forever. It was a burgundy (I think it was a "St. Aubin"), and not only was it delicious, but it was a perfect complement to the fondue. Dessert was an entire cake made of ice cream from the green arch ice cream place near the jardin de ville. All the flavors were good, but the cassis in particular was out of this world. Thanks, Franck!!

Grenoble ville, Dinner at lolos

I wandered around town during the day and took a few mediocre pictures (accidentally had the iso set high -- d'oh!)






In the evening, I had dinner at Lolo and Vero's. A former grad student (Enrique) from the adjacent lab at the Salk who is now at Yale had just arrived the night before and was staying at Lolo and Vero's place. He and his family are starting a five month sabbatical in Grenoble, so I made arrangements to show them around town a little bit tomorrow morning. The meal was great and it was a lot of fun to see lolo, vero, thomas and their newest addition -- Margot!

Awesome dinner at Ciao a Te

I spent most of the day walking around (I did Zoe outfit shopping yesterday) and had lunch at the cafeteria again... this time with my old friend Lolo. It was great seeing him again, and it sounds like he is kicking ass -- director of research with twenty people working for him! Pretty sweet.

I met Franck and Thibault for dinner at the Italian restaurant Ciao a Te. I had cepes ravioli with meatballs which were just unbelievably good. It might not sound like a very exciting dish, and their description had a little more poetry to it, but it was perfectly done. Even the ravioli pasta part was al dente, which is almost never the case for ravioli. Desert was a fantastic profiterole dish with a home made chocolate sauce. Without a doubt one of the best meals I've had in recent memory. Chloe and I had been there once before, and my only memories were the excellent food, and the super hard working waiter who had beads odf sweat running down his forehead by the end of the evening.

lunch with Francois

I had lunch with my climbing buddy Francois, and it was great tallking about past and future climbs. He is planning an ascent of Rackham le Rouget, and I am really envious.

I saw a few familiar faces in the cafeteria, including a secretary at the IBS with the thickest accent imaginable. In my interactions with her, she always seemed to be yelling. When I countered with my cunning blank look of incomprehension, she would yell louder and finally leave in a huff. Trying to understand her was like a non-american trying to understand Sgt. Maj Sixta from Generation Kill. Not easy, and a little frightening.

I climbed in the fricking GYM today. Mon dieu! At least I was able to keep up with the young'uns at A blok for a while.

more dinner at Francks!

We all but finished Francks super bottle of wine tonight, discussed camera stuff and came up with a cool design for the megal bike light Mk. III. I think the configuration of lights and driver board is quite logical. The bigger questions are how expensive the part will be to manufacture and whether it can adequately dissipate the heat from twelve (!) LEDs. I finally have settled on Cree MC-Es -- smaller footprint, more optics, no enforced parallel circuitry.

Dinner @ Francks

My friend Franck was kind enough to invite me to dinner on my first night in town, which was really a nice way to ease into my stay in grenoble! He opened a superb bottle of Gevrey-Chambertin to accompany a perfect hearty dinner of charcuterie, salad, potatoes and cheese. It seemed quite close to Raclette, but maybe it wasn't an Official Raclette?

Anyway, jetlag is hitting me hard this time. I also forgot about the fact that you loose a day coming in this direction.

Marketing anyone?

On my commute home, I take 101N on the causeway through Brisbane. They've been building new condos on the Southern face of the Bayview park (That hill that rises just west of Candlestick). In today's economy, I would imagine that they are having trouble selling these condos, which seems to be confirmed by the fact that there is now a big billboard saying something like "If you lived here, you would be home already", or something to that effect. I had to laugh while passing it yesterday though, as the reek from the garbage dump a few hundred feet upwind of the new condos permeated my car. The sad part is that the wind blows the same direction pretty much every day from the spring until the fall. That's why its a favorite windsurfing spot, in fact. If you factor in the eight lanes of freeway, and the carcasses of Seagulls (they flock to the dump and get hit by cars on 101), you have to wonder what they were thinking when they built houses there.

sumppumptastic!

We just had a sump pump installed next to our downstairs bedroom. We might be able to move our junk back in soon! I think we'll paint the room before we do that, as long as we've lugged all of our stuff upstairs. EXCITING!

oof!

Since my accident, I've had several stress dreams related to car accidents. In one, I had crashed chloe's GTI (which we sold ages ago), and I was desperately trying to re-attach the bumper, wheels and other parts of the demolished chassis. LAst night I was driving some kind of classic car -- an old Merc, I think -- and was worried about not having ABS or traction control. Shortly after thinking about that, the car went into a skid and plowed into a building. Nice! I'm no psychotherapist, but I have a hunch that these dreams just might be related to my car crash in January.

grommets in the gym

Now that I've given up any hope of climbing outside in our day to day life, the climbing gym has become our new home. We usually go to the oakland gym, but occasionally end up in Berkeley, which has gotten ridiculously crowded recently. Last night we totally lucked out and happened to be there when the teenage mutant climbing team was working out. It was sweet: every inch of the lead cave decked out in ropes and kids climbing 5.13. While I was cursing our decision to climb on a Tuesday night, I came to the realization that 1)zoe (hopefully) will be one of those kids at some point, so I should just calm down about having to elbow our way through them to get on the moderates and 2)competitive climbing in the US is amazingly under-resourced compared to europe. Even poor european countries have full time coaches, dedicated training facilities and state money to climb. France, for example, which has historically produced many international competitive climbing stars, has a very impressive facility in Aix-en-Provence. A lot of the kids from the gym are internationally competitive, but you have to wonder how much better they would do with the euro resources!

Museum

We went on a family trip to the new California Academy of Sciences, which was fabulous. Unfortunately, the rain forest sphere was closed, but we made up for it by spending a lot of time in the Water Planet. We did the following routine for almost every display:

1)Carry Zoe towards exhibit
2)Zoe starts trembling with excitement and demands to be let down
3)Zoe stands in front of glass and pounds on the glass/plastic with fists
4)Zoe points at fish and makes "oooh!" noises
5)Repeat 3 and 4 for five to ten minutes
6)Pick Zoe up
7)Zoe begins screaming and arching her back, stretching her arms back towards the fish
8)Zoe begins crying and peoples heads turn
9)Zoe sees the next exhibit
10)Go back to 1)

We also checked out the rooftop garden, where I overheard a docent say that they had evacuated the viewing platform earlier in the day(swarm of bees). From the CAS, we walked to the botanical garden, and then had a big Japanese dinner in Japantown. I'll upload pictures in a few days.

Zoe at the park

Röyksopp strikes again

with another great song and video

http://www.vimeo.com/3281558

First Zoe Steps!!!

The Hazards of Velcro

After I pick Zoe up from day care we usually go for a walk to the park or around the garden. Before the walk, however, Zoe gets a snack, and because she is sixteen months old, she usually ends up smearing whatever she is eating all over my hair and clothes. Because of this, Chloe and I have taken the simple precaution of always changing into non work clothes as soon as we start handling our little walking hazmat. Today I did just that, grabbing a pair of shorts (woohoo California!) out of the dryer and walking out the door, led by Zoe. She's not walking on her own yet, but she enjoys walking while holding our hands. I was trying to steer her towards the garden, but she seemed to be fixated on walking down the street, so I followed along. Several cars passed by with people smiling broadly at the two of us. I just assumed that they were smiling at Zoe's cuteness at the time. When I got home though, I discovered another possible explanation: it turned out that a pair of red panties had attached themselves to the velcro closure of one of my back pockets and I had been walking around with them stuck to my ass the whole time.

Pressure Washer

I pressure washed all of the brick walkways at my parents and our house today. I'm not sure why it didn't occur to me, but pressure washers generate a LOT of mud and dirt splashback. I looked like this by the end of the day:

Zoe the fruit epicurian

Zoe has been an enthusiastic accomplice in my recent quest for unusual fruit. I think that she is probably pretty unique in having already tasted Feijoa, White Sapote, Red Strwaberry Guava, Babaco, Cape Gooseberry, Passionfruit in her first fifteen months! Despite their sourness, her favorite seems to be passionfruit, with Cape Gooseberry a close second.

Seckel Pear

I just planted a bare root Seckel Pear. Here's hoping it survives and maybe even sets fruit!

Persian Mulberry

Planted!

More plums

I grafted Elephant Heart, Golden Nectar, Santa Rosa and Satsuma to this tree


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