Pool, Beach, Pool

The Cobbs came to visit us in Houston this past weekend (yay!). When we picked them up from the airport and asked them what they wanted to do, they said, "Pool!"

So that's just what we did:

The next day, we headed down to Galveston to shop at tourist traps and have lunch at a biker bar:

What did we do when we got back? Go to the pool, of course! We had a lot of fun and were sad to see them go.

Dave Used to be a Thespian

We have a lot in common with our friends Dave and Dana. You might remember them from our rodeo adventure. They're cute on the outside and nerdy on the inside. Like some kind of nerd M&M. So they recently convinced us to play Dungeons and Dragons with them.

Dave was the dungeon master and it turns out, he also used to be a thespian. Here he is planning our destinies:

We got together and made our characters:

Here are all three of the white cats:

Then we played! We had an epic battle characterized by sound effects courtesy of our thespian dungeon master and rolling mostly <5.

I was the only one who had never played before. Not knowing what to expect, I created an avatar for my character Viola La Rue (it's a family name). Viola is a hermaphroditic dragonborn cleric.

Thankfully Dave and Dana had a sufficiently gender ambiguous action figure for me to play with. They're so accepting!

International Day

The last day of our glorious vacation, we made an elaborate 5 course Italian meal--one of Eddy's favorite activities.

Antipasti was a caprese. We made the mozzarella from scratch first thing in the morning.

Here's the finished product with the obligatory tomatoes and basil:

Primi was a spinach pasta with buttered mushrooms and Parmesan. We also made the spinach pasta by hand.

It gave me Incredible Hulk hands.

Here's the final result:

Secondi was a Braciole--a rolled beef filled with provolone, prosciutto, pine nuts and garlic and simmered in tomatoes, red wine and beef stock. For contorni we made zucchini.

We topped it all off with an almond flavored pudding. The eating extravaganza took place over the course of several hours. In order to space out the courses and gain maximum enjoyment, we watched at least one episode of One Piece between each course. Manga + Italian food = international night!

That's the end of our fabulous four-day weekend! Thanks for joining us!

Nicci Furlough Days
Tandem Day

Tandem Day

Day two, we were totally crazy on our tandem bike. We went for a ride first thing in the morning.

Later that afternoon, we attended the wedding of one of Eddy's work friends. We decided to ride our tandem bike over there. It seems we were quite the spectacle in our dress clothes on our sweet old tandem.

That evening, we went to the reception at Fung's Kitchen. It was an intense 10 course Chinese dinner. The wedding ceremony and most of the reception were in Mandarin, so we were pretty lost through most of the festivities. In fact, we made a bit of a faux pas. When we sat down, there was a bottle of champagne on our table. After what we thought was the toast, we broke out our bottle. With 10 people at the table, it didn't last long. Turns out, we were supposed to wait until after the meal when the bride and groom and family come around to all of the tables to be toasted by each guest. Oops. At the last minute, we found some Sprite, filled our glasses and toasted them! At the end of the meal, they served this awesome mango pudding molded into the shape of a fish.

One more installment of our four-day extravaganza coming up!

Nicci Furlough Days
International Day

Nicci Furlough Days

I recently had a four-day weekend with no work, so I made Eddy take what we called "Nicci Furlough." Like real furlough except that he got paid and he was forced to stay home by me rather than by his employer. We did so much that we are publishing our exploits in installments. Day one, we went to the pool.

This included copious pool snacks!

Be sure to wait with baited breath for us to publish our further exploits!

Tandem Day
International Day

Le Going to France

I went for a job interview at the Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et Automatique (or just INRIA for short), the French national research institute for computer science research. I landed in Paris on Sunday morning, and in getting ready for my first interview talk the next day, I managed to look up the word for "clothes iron" (it's "fer à repasser" btw) and ask for it completely in French! Pretty cool, eh? Except that I ended up with the grossest, nastiest iron and ironing board ever:

Oh well, I didn't need to iron my clothes anyway...

My Tuesday talk was the more formal interview: I had a 25 minute slot, with 12 minutes for a talk and 12 minutes for questions. Boy, was that intimidating! But, I did wear my sweet suit. Don't I look nice?

Turns out it didn't help. I didn't get the job. Boo! So, what did I do about it? The same thing any red-blooded American does when disappointed: I ate! Probably my best meal was on Tuesday night. Having just finished reading the book Cod, I remembered the French word for it ("Cabillaud"), and I ordered some. It was delicious!

You can just barely see in this picture how awesome this seat was, where I could watch all the people go by as I ate my dinner. I finished off with a cheese course, which I unfortunately cannot remember the name of (saint someone-or-other), but it was fabulous:

The next day (after visiting the famous Sacré Cour), I also found some real French macarons:

Of course, what trip to Paris would be complete without... Sex Toys? Don't forget, zapping is only 2 euros: