We're turning into Snobs

Zahra had an interesting observation tonight: we're turning into snobs. It started after work, when we prepared dinner: roasted organic potatoes, wild caught tuna, and salad using our organic lettuce and organic heirloom tomatoes. All the organic stuff came from our CSA.

Then after dinner, Zahra lit some candles to get rid of the dinner smell. Here is how the conversation went:

Me: "Maybe we should buy one of those long lighters for lighting our candles -- the ones that people use to light grills and such"

Zahra: "We can, but in the meantime our matches from Gary Danko is all we have."

Me: "I guess those will do."

We got matches from Gary Danko when we went for our anniversary. Oh yes, that is some wild unadulterated snobbery. It was a slippery slope from my wild and dirty days in Triangle to now.

Norouz!

Now that I'm officially Persian (meow!), Zahra and I decided to put up a Haft Seen in our new place for Norouz. We did run into a few problems though:

1. Petco was out of Goldfish
2. We didn't have any gold coins
3. We had to substitute our fondue candle for the normal candles
4. We had to substitute Zar's Mac compact mirror for a real mirror

Whatever, it's basically the same thing.

slinging snot

There are parts of the city that have always scared me and always will, no matter how long I live here. One of those places is the civic center. Last night, I got off the shuttle at the civic center stop to take the bart to union square to meet some friends for dinner. As I got off the shuttle, I noticed a woman in a business suite with a fancy backpack on walking briskly to her destination. Then I noticed a crazy person walking quickly to catch up to her. As he approached, he paced himself so that he was continuously a few steps behind her, and started blowing his nose. into his bare hands. and flinging the snot at the woman's back.
i love the city.

Barf About Town

This year was our first time participating in the city's Dine About Town . We ate at a few great restaurants, and some not-so-great ones. The best deal by far was at Ruth's Chris steak house where we had a huge fancy goat cheese salad, 6 oz filet mignon, side of creamy garlic mash potatoes (or creamed spinach in Ryan's case) and dessert for $31 a person. Yum! Needless to say, I couldn't eat for a whole day after that.

The next week we went to a cute small-plates restaurant in the marina neighborhood. The place was overflowing with people, so the tables were all packed pretty close together with a table of 4 people in their 40-50s at the table to the right of me. As we waited for our first course, we suddenly heard this yacking sound, and suddenly, the woman sitting directly to my right threw up all over herself as well as me. I was in such shock I had no idea how to react. The first thing I did was look down in a panic to make sure nothing got on my clothes (which didn't) - but I was left with a pukey arm. The restaurant brought me hot towels to clean up, and gave us free champagne at the end of the meal, but that still doesn't make up for the fact that the woman or her party didn't even offer to pay for our meal.

I've renamed dine about town to "barf about town" - at least for this year.

A quick word from our sponsers

My company (Xobni) launched a gmail-style invite campaign today. You can read about the launch here.

If any of you are Outlook users, and have real pain when trying to search and organize your email, let me know!

Furniture!

We got more furniture today! It's weird thinking about how my hours at work have directly translated into wooden furniture being in my bedroom. Time at work == money == furniture. It's almost like I built the furniture myself. Weird.

Well my arms are sore from all that furniture building, so I better get a move on.