Our lemon tree has its first blossom! It seems like an odd time to start making fruit, but what do I know? It smells gooood!

Last weekend, we dusted off our tripod and took a bunch of pictures of ourselves around our apartment and neighboring park. I'd like to start a tradition of taking pictures of our family every year around our anniversary. I briefly thought about getting a real photographer to do it, but it's so much cheaper to use the timer function on the camera. None of the pictures came out great, but there are a few good ones. This is my favorite:

And then there were some not-so-good pictures, like this one, in which I was telling Patrick that I couldn't look down at him because it would make my chin/neck area look bad. Not like looking up was such an attractive choice either.

On Tuesday I left work early and drove up to Petaluma to cash in my anniversary gift certificate and take a letterpress class at Dauphine! I got there with enough time to walk around and have dinner before the class started. I looked around Dauphine (which was a very cute store filled with sweet cards and paper goods, as expected) and purchased some cards (blurry picture). The friendly saleslady told me that they were out of their normal cute bags, so she had to give me their candy bags instead (which are normally reserved for ribbon purchases). I thought the candy bag was plenty cute!

I had decided to go to Central Market for dinner because it looked like just the kind of place I'd like, plus people online seemed to like it. They didn't have their hours posted, so I waited until a little after 5 and walked in. It turns out they weren't open until 5:30, but the host said he wouldn't turn me away and seated me. I was brought some bread (house-made ciabatta and crackers dusted with chili powder and studded with fennel seeds--unusual but good) and cucumber water to keep me occupied until the kitchen was ready. It was so nice of them to let me hang out until they actually opened!

I was the only one there for most of my meal, and the owner and chef, Tony, stopped by and chatted with me a few times. He had some attitude, but he was friendly enough. I was flattered that he took the time to talk to me and make sure I liked everything. And I did like everything!

I decided to go with a relatively light dinner of soup and salad. The soup was a sweet corn chowder with baby scallops, bacon and opal basil. It was sweet, smoky and delicious. Next, I had a salad of butter lettuce, thinly-sliced apples, smoked trout and dried cranberries with a mustard vinaigrette. It was yummy, but my mouth tasted like smoked fish for the rest of the evening. I guess that's my own fault.

I hadn't planned on getting dessert, but I caved and ordered the butterscotch pot de creme. It was served in a coffee cup and topped with frothed milk, with some sort of coffee-flavored sandwich cookie on the side. The cookie didn't do much for me, but the pudding made me very happy :)

I would definitely return to Central Market in the future. The service was pleasant, I liked the spare decor, and the food was delicious. As I was having dessert, a group of well-dressed people came in and started discussing some sort of wine deal (I guess that's standard in Somoma County). I wanted to stay and see what happened, but I had a letterpress class to attend!

The letterpress class was from 6:30 to 9:30pm, and there were four other people enrolled. I had assumed that we would be setting type, like we did in college, but upon further reflection, that wouldn't be practical in only three hours. Instead, we used adhesive-backed photopolymer plates of various letters (not a complete alphabet, sadly) and line drawings that we just stuck in place on the bed. It was kind of elementary compared to what we did in Typography back in college, but I still enjoyed it. I'd missed using a letterpress. This one was a Vandercook, a lot like the presses we used in Typography.

Two of the other women in the class were graphic designers, and they put together some well-composed cards. I wasn't able to come up with a coherent design given the components at hand, but I did make some cute bicycle prints. I'm not sure what I'll do with them, since they're not perfect (we didn't have time to perfect the inking or positioning, so they're smudgy and off-center), but I think I could cut them out and glue them onto another piece of paper.

The class was enjoyable, and the people at Dauphine were really nice (they wished me a happy anniversary when they found out the class was part of my anniversary gift). If we lived closer to Petaluma, I'd totally attend more classes and buy more cards from them! You can also rent press time, once you're trained, so that's good to keep in mind if I come up with any ambitious letterpress projects in the future (not likely!).

While telling my coworkers about this class at lunch, I found out that one of them has three letterpresses and 20 cases of type that he inherited from his grandfather (who worked as a print-maker all his life). It would be awesome to have a press and type but a pain to move it anywhere, as this coworker has learned. We'll just have to wait until we have our imaginary home with plenty of barn space for Patrick's welding and my letterpress (and goats and chickens and sheep!), and then I can buy an old Vandercook and start printing things!

Last night, I made Arroz con Pollo from the September/October 2006 issue of Cook's Illustrated. I was under the impression that it would take a little over an hour to make, but it ended up taking 2.5 hours, so we had a late dinner. But it was really good, I must admit. Cook's Illustrated knows what they're doing. It seems like it would be lots of fun writing for them and perfecting recipes all methodically.

I would make the dish again, but maybe on a weekend so we could eat at a reasonable hour. I like the first picture because it shows the pimento-stuffed manzanilla olives that are used in the dish. They're so festive, all red and green. I've never had cause to buy them before.

Finally, here's the diet entry I've been talking about for months. I still have 0.8 lb to lose before officially meeting my weight loss goal, but the target weight was an arbitrarily chosen number anyway, so I'll just consider myself done. You're allowed to round down when it comes to dieting (Dietwatch agrees--when I entered my weight today, I got a pop-up window telling me that I'd finally reached my goal).

Now that I've written the entry, I feel like nobody but me will want to read it. It's so self-congratulatory! And superficial--who cares how much I weigh? But I think it's valuable to mark this milestone with an entry, so I'll post it anyway. Losing weight took a lot of effort and willpower, and I'm allowed to be proud of myself for succeeding. Yay, me!

Back in February, I learned about a website called Dietwatch, where you could track what you eat and how much you weigh and all sorts of other things. I had never gone on a diet before, because I felt like I loved food too much to treat it like the enemy. I'm not sure why exactly, but in February I decided it was time to try dieting, hopefully not ruining my relationship with food forever!

I don't think I felt particularly overweight at the time, though when I weighed myself at the start of the diet, I learned that I was starting to creep into overweight territory based on my height. I guess I just wanted to see if I could do it. I didn't want to make a big deal about the dieting in case I failed, so I didn't take any before pictures (stupid! People love before and after pictures!). I also didn't want to be the girl on the diet who asks for dressing on the side and whines about how many calories are in everything. I don't think I let myself fall into that mindset too often, but it was hard enjoying food while keeping track of how many calories I was consuming.

Upon starting, I was discouraged to learn that I was consuming way more food than I needed to (cereal was the big culprit; I was eating a lot more than 1 serving each morning). I didn't really lose much weight in the first three weeks, so I stopped weighing myself, afraid of failing. But I kept using Dietwatch and stayed within the calorie guidelines pretty frequently, and when I weighed myself again three months later, I had lost weight. Imagine that!

I kept at it, and people at work started commenting on my weight loss, which was mostly encouraging, though also kind of weird, since I'm not used to having people comment on my appearance. At least they were saying nice things.

Here we are, almost nine months later, and I've finally reached my target weight, losing 28 pounds in the process (it was a very slow weight-loss process, but hopefully that means I'll be able to keep it off). I'm smaller all over, and I can feel bones in places where I used to be soft and squishy (shoulders, elbows, wrists and hips especially). Turns out I've got a skeleton inside of me! It's still kind of weird. I like the slimmer me though; I feel more self-confident, and it's more fun trying on clothes.

I worry a little bit that I've lost too much weight, even though BMI charts tell me that I'm doing fine. I'm pretty sure I weighed less than this when I started college. It just feels a little scary that I can cause such changes in my body.

I hope I can maintain the weight I'm at now, but if I don't I'll try not to feel bad about it. At least now I know I'm capable of losing weight if I try. It wasn't particularly enjoyable at first, feeling hungry and frustrated with myself for eating things that turned out to be high-calorie or high-fat. Within a few months I got used to eating smaller portions and knew what to expect when I entered stuff into Dietwatch, and I don't mind it anymore. It's just part of my daily routine. I like being aware of what I'm eating.

These are the things that I found useful:

• Dietwatch - I didn't use the meal plan feature, but I used the site to track my food intake as well as my exercise and weight. It also taught me to pay attention to serving sizes, which tended to be smaller than I'd expected.
  
  
• Moosewood Restaurant Low-Fat Favorites - I relied heavily on this book for dinner ideas, as it was full of healthy recipes with nutritional information provided.
  
  
• Patrick - he was very supportive and willing to eat whatever I wanted to eat for dinner. He also patiently listened to me whining about calories when I fell into unpleasant diet girl mode.
  
  
• Afternoon snacks - I would normally have a small snack at work in the afternoon so that I wasn't starving by dinner time. I have been enjoying Plumsweets recently. I guess they're just dressed up candy, but at least they have some health benefits.
  
  
• Riding my bike to work - I started doing this in May for Bike to Work Day and have kept it up, riding to work once a week. This has all sorts of benefits. The benefit most relevant to my diet was that I got to eat more food on the days I rode my bike, without feeling guilty.
  
  
• The gym - I actually didn't work out much apart from riding my bike (I should exercise more, I know). My rule was that if I had eaten 900 or more calories by the time I left work, I had to go work out at the gym to earn some of them back. This helped keep me within the target daily calorie range (1200-1500) for the most part.

Although I didn't take any real before pictures, I scrounged one up from right before I started the diet. To be fair to February Caitlin, I picked the least flattering picture I could find. I looked better in other pre-diet pictures.

I think I've been really lucky to have gotten this far with only minimal diet frustration. It wasn't always fun, and sometimes I stressed out about food, which sucks because I love food! But I feel really good about the condition my body is in right now. Here's to maintaining it for a while and not being too hard on myself if I gain the weight back!

I have a bunch of tidbits I've been meaning to mention for the past week...

Appearance

• I haven't gotten my hair highlighted since right before our wedding, and last time I got it cut, the last of my highlights went away. My hair is now its natural color for the first time since I was 16, I think. You can see it best in this picture of me looking incredulous at whatever Tree was telling me at Indian Rock.

  

  I like the color better now than I did when I was a teenager. Back then I thought it was the boringest color hair could be--somewhere between brown and blond. I still don't think it's the most exciting color, but I'll keep it this way for now.

• I have waited so long to write an entry about my diet that it doesn't seem worth writing about anymore. The last pesky pound has been sticking around for over a month. It just doesn't want to go away! Even if I can't quite get to my goal weight, I should still write a little about it. Maybe next week.

Food

• Recently I've very much enjoyed eating Nature's Path Pumpkin FlaxPlus Granola. It tastes really good, and for some reason I can't get enough of the flax seed-pumpkin seed combo. Since it's granola, it's pretty high in fat, but as long as I pay attention to the 1/2 cup serving size, it's fine. After I'd finished my first box and went looking for more, neither Safeway nor Draegers had it in stock. So I bought the Ginger Zing and Pomegran Plus granolas, but they weren't as good as the pumpkin seed kind. Luckily, Trader Joe's had it when I checked, so I'm stocked up for now.

  I also found the pumpkin seed granola in bar form at Andronico's. It's pretty good, but I prefer it in a bowl with milk. Kashi makes good granola bars--I've been enjoying the TLC Peanut Peanut Butter Granola Bars as work snacks on days when I have a few extra calories to spare. Even Patrick likes them! I like the fact that they have so many grains in them, plus sesame seeds. Yum!

• Last week, at my request, Patrick made a batch of Golden Split Pea Soup (from Moosewood Low-Fat Favorites, of course). It had sweet potatoes and apples in it, and it smelled really good, but it only tasted okay. My mom's split pea soup (with ham!) is better. We probably won't make it again. On the side, we had two more items from the same cookbook: roasted vegetables with Cantonese dressing and Fragrant Jasmine Rice. Both of these sides were pretty good.

  

• For our next dinner, we broke out the crock pot (which has been behaving much better than it originally did) and made Onion-Braised Shrimp from The Healthy Slow Cooker. I served it on top of leftover jasmine rice, topped with peas. I thought it was pretty good; Patrick was indifferent. The braised onions made it nice and sweet.

  

  For dessert, I made Pumpkin Custard, which was billed in Moosewood Low-Fat Favorites as a lighter version of pumpkin pie without the crust. That was a fair description. It wasn't as rich or sweet as pumpkin pie. Given the low calorie count, I think it was a good dessert, but in a perfect world, I'd rather eat normal pumpkin pie filling. I'd make it again though.

  

  This was my first time using a water bath to bake custard, and amazingly I managed to do it without pouring boiling water on myself or into the custard. It would've been easier with a tea kettle. We should get one of those...

• On Friday night, we went to Naomi for the first time with my awesome boss and her family. At her bidding, we tried Omakase A (there was also an Omakase B option, which was $20 more). The atmosphere was pretty casual (probably more so because we had two little boys eating dinner with us and were seated in the back room, which seemed to be reserved for families with kids), but the food was yummy!

  The courses were (to the best of my recollection): (1) a scoop of tuna tartar in wasabi sauce, (2) seared tuna topped with browned garlic and greens, (3) duck medallions with yummy noodles and tempura seaweed, (4) miso soup with clams, (5) five kinds of nigiri, and (6) cream puffs and little ice cream sandwiches. Courses 3 and 6 were my favorites. The courses were small, so we weren't overly full at the end of dinner. Now when we want to walk to sushi on a Friday night, we'll have to decide between Akasaka and Naomi. What a hard life we lead ;)

• We went to the Stanford Mall today to do some much-needed fall clothes shopping, and we had lunch at our favorite butcher shop, Schaub's. We'd noticed their daily special board before, but we'd never had lunch there. Patrick went for their sandwich special--black forest ham, melted swiss, and grilled pinapple rings on a French roll. It tasted a lot like Hawaiian pizza. A little odd for a sandwich, but good. I had the Fred's Steak sandwich--thin slices of Fred's steak topped with melted provolone on sourdough. It was really good. Yum!

  While we were eating our sandwiches out in front of the shop, three different kids ran in and excitedly rode the mechanical pony in the front window. You don't see those around much anymore. It seems like a good family-owned store. I hope they stay in business for a long time.

• I'm on the Halloween party committee at work, and I wanted to have some sort of caramel apple dipping station at the party. Tonight I did a trial run with 1/4 bag of caramels and an apple, and it did not go well. My plan was to cut the apple into wedges (since people won't want to eat a whole caramel apple *and* all the other food at the party) and dip the cut faces into caramel so they don't oxidize. I got to use our brand new apple corer, which was very exciting. I even wrote up a little experimental protocol beforehand so that I could determine which apple-dipping parameters worked best.
  

  I used our Little Dipper (our first time using it; it came free with our crock pot) to melt the caramels along with 1/2 tbsp water, which took ~1.25 hours. With Patrick's help, I tried a number of permutations, including eating the dipped apples immediately vs. refrigerating for 30 minutes and eating plain vs. rolling in mini chocolate chips (either right after dipping or after refrigerating). Sadly, the caramel had no interest in sticking to the juicy cut apple, and it all just puddled on the plate. That seems to be a common problem with caramel. Our best results came from dipping, refrigerating for 30 minutes, and then rolling in chocolate chips, but most of the caramel still slid off.

  My guess would be that it might work better if we first dipped the apples in melted chocolate and then in caramel (maybe the caramel would adhere better to the chocolate?), but I don't think it would be a good idea to have chocolate and caramel available for consumption twice in one weekend. Bad news for the diet. I think I'll give up on the caramel apple idea for the party and make cupcakes instead.

Beverages

• A few weeks ago, I had a hankering for pearl milk tea, so we visited Tapioca Express in Mountain View. I was feeling adventurous, and I ordered a Barley Milk Tea. It was basically a regular milk tea with a bunch of wheat germ thrown in with the pearls. It was texturally not what I was expecting at all. Very gritty. But I actually enjoyed it. Patrick did not. I don't think it's for everybody.

• I've been enjoying my Mighty Leaf assortment. So far I've tried the Orange Dulce, Chamomile Citrus, Green Tea Tropical and Mountain Spring Jasmine. Clearly my tea tasting skills are not very developed, because I made the same notes for all of them: smells yummy, tastes mild. Plus, as already noted, the Chamomile Citrus tastes like Pez (yum!). It's enjoyable tea; I'm happy with my purchase.

Acquisitions

• Last weekend, we briefly went to Burgess Park to Kepler's Day in the Park. They had a bookswap planned, and we have boxes of books that we want to get rid of, so we picked out 8 good ones and headed over. It was pretty early in the day, but the bookswap table had a decent selection. Our books were well received by the nice women running the table. We left with 7 books that looked promising. I guess it didn't help us reduce the number of books in our possession by much, but it was still worth doing. I like our local bookstore!

• I bought a bunch of stripey socks from Sock Dreams recently. They have such pretty pictures! Their site makes me want to wear skirts and stripey socks and mary janes all the time! Too bad that's not acceptable lab attire. The item I'm most excited about are these arm warmers (in violet). They're German, and they fit really nicely and have such nice colors! I hope I find myself in many situations in which my arms need warming.

• My old cell phone (a hand-me-down from Patrick) had been acting weird for a while, so Patrick finally got me a fancy new phone. Conveniently enough, it was a buy-one-get-one-free deal, so he got a new phone too! It's the same phone Tree and Andrew have, and it does all sorts of exciting things that my old phone didn't do, like take pictures and retain a battery charge! I bought a cheap pink striped faceplate off of eBay. I can't decide if I like the faceplate or not. I've decided to give it a week and then re-evaluate the situation. Luckily, it was only $3, so it's not a big loss if I want to switch.

  

• I'm still riding my bike to work once a week, and it has been getting cold in the mornings recently. Today we stopped at The Runner's High and bought a windbreaker (baby blue, to match my bike and my helmet!), as well as matching gloves and hat (so glowy!). I am excited about my new bike gear! I may also need to wear a scarf on the coldest mornings, but I can just wear a normal scarf; I don't get that sweaty when I'm riding.

• In addition to buying locally at The Runner's High, I also bought some cute fall clothes at my favorite local clothing store, The Quattro! They had a good sale in progress (as usual), and I got some pretty things. I tend to buy nice things and then not wear them because I'm worried I'll get them dirty, which is silly. I figure if I remove all my boring Gap and Old Navy shirts from my closet, I'll be forced to wear my fabulous clothes instead, and then I'll look nice more often. We'll see if that plan works...

• While at Crate and Barrel, I bought cupcakes!, by Elinor Klivans. It had such pretty photographs and yummy-sounding recipes--how could I resist?! Somehow I have gotten this far in life without owning any cupcake cookbooks (though I have a good number of general baking cookbooks that include cupcake recipes). I am very excited about this cookbook!

Anniversary Weekend, Part 3: Everything Else

After checking out of Olema Druids Hall last Friday morning, we spent a long time looking around their affiliated store, Vita Collage. We ended up buying a present for Patrick's sister and a cute little aqua-colored bud vase. There were a few other items that we almost bought, but we talked ourselves out of them. The owner of the store was really nice and patient.

Next we drove up the road to Point Reyes Station. We looked around a few stores there (probably not Patrick's idea of a good time, but he went along with it pleasantly). We stopped at a garden store called Flower Power and bought a tile to add to our small collection of tiles to use in our future imaginary-tiling project (you know, if we build our own kitchen or something).

(The tile on the left is from Spain and was a gift from Nat and Sara, center is the tile we bought in Italy, and at right is the tile we bought in Point Reyes, made by Blue Slide Art Tile)

We once again had lunch at the Cowgirl Cantina, though I don't think our experience this time quite lived up to our first visit. I had a salad plate with three salads of my choosing: panzanella, early autumn salad, and quince-fig compote. They were all good, don't get me wrong, but I think I would've preferred a sandwich, in hindsight. None of the sandwich choices for the day really spoke to me though.

We stood around looking at cheese for awhile but were intimidated and decided to go have a snack at Bovine Bakery first. We split a gigantic oatmeal-coconut-raisin cookie on the bench in front of the bakery, and all was well with the world.

We decided to return to Cowgirl Creamery and buy a little Mt. Tam (yum!) to eat later in the afternoon. We did just that and bought some fancy creme fraiche/green onion flatbread crackers and a good-looking peach as well. We sampled some of their featured cheese (Shepherd something; it was a little harder and sharper than we wanted), and were impressed by how they shaved off such thin slices of the cheese for sampling.

With our mini-picnic in tow, we headed to the Bear Valley Visitor Center, to decide where to go next. Inside the center, there was an old exhibit of local wildlife, full of posed taxidermied animals. It was pretty cool, in a dusty nature center kind of way. We decided to make the drive out to the Point Reyes Lighthouse. We had almost gone there during our first visit, but it was late in the day, and we had given up before we got there. Not this time!

We drove out to the lighthouse, passing historic ranches (each assigned a letter of the alphabet, some still in operation). I liked looking at the pastoral scenery along the way. It was almost as good as the lighthouse itself. In a few places, cows were wandering along the roadside, which was a little alarming. None of them bolted in front of our car or charged us, so that was good.

The lighthouse was located about a half mile from the parking lot. It was overcast and windy-- a brisk day. Luckily we'd dressed appropriately for the weather and weren't uncomfortable. There were some spectacular ocean views from the lighthouse visitor center; here's a picture of us obscuring one such view.

The 300 stairs down to the lighthouse itself looked somewhat daunting, but we decided it was worth a little exertion. There wasn't a lot to see, but I was glad we took a look around. I didn't read the informative placards posted nearby, so I don't know exactly how lighthouses work (something to do with Fresnel lenses, right?), but the machinery looked pretty cool.

The stairs were helpfully numbered on the climb back up, so we knew exactly how far we were from the top. The climb up wasn't as bad as I'd feared, though I did get winded. There were small resting spots every 75 stairs or so. We chose one about halfway up to stop and have our picnic. We used Patrick's pocket knife to cut off wedges of cheese and peach and quite enjoyed ourselves. Here are the stairs we made it up before we stopped for our snack, as well as some cool red lichen on the rocks opposite our little bench.

We were a little sleepy after all the eating and climbing, but we decided to try to make a stop at Drakes Bay Oyster Company, since it was on the drive back. We didn't know their hours, and when we got there, they had just closed. I don't know if we would have eaten any oysters had they been available; I just wanted to see what it was like. We did get to see some kids dump a shopping cart full of trash into a nearby dumpster, so that was something.

We toyed with the idea of going hiking down Estero Trail, but after we had navigated more un-fenced cows and were in the parking lot and faced with a sign warning us about deer ticks on the trail, we decided we didn't feel like hiking and that we should just go get dinner instead.

We returned to Point Reyes Station and went to Rosie's Cowboy Cookhouse for dinner. It was fine, but not the highlight of our trip (I guess it's hard to top Manka's). The best part of the meal was dessert--we split a cup of Straus Creamery mint chocolate chip ice cream (I hadn't even realized they made ice cream until we saw it at Toby's Feed Barn earlier in the day). Yum!

And then it was time to drive on home. It was a short getaway, but we had a wonderful time. And because we had done all of this on Thursday and Friday, we still had two whole days of normal weekend time in front of us!

On Saturday morning, I went down to Stanford and donated blood without mishap. Patrick had donated the weekend before, but he was nice enough to come along with me, and he even helped out at the clinic by hanging Halloween decorations while I was giving blood (they had all sorts of vampire decorations up, and Patrick was the only person tall enough to hang a bag of fake blood so that it looked like one of the vampires was drinking it. The nice nurses felt sure that this particular decoration would be taken down when the higher-ups saw it on Monday). Now that they know that I have small veins, things are much easier. I was cold, so they gave me a nice hand-knit blanket to snuggle under while I was giving blood. I almost feel like I should be paying them for the privilege of giving blood, what with the blankets and cookies and friendly people. I'm glad I'm becoming more comfortable with giving blood. It's a good thing to do.

On Saturday afternoon, we drove up to Oakland to celebrate Andrew's birthday at Tree and Andrew's apartment. We met a few new people (they're good at picking friends) and ate Zachary's pizza and cake from Masse's. It was a good way to spend the day.

Sunday was our actual anniversary. We had exchanged presents the day before. We both tried to give presents in keeping with the one-year anniversary paper theme, but Patrick did a better job of it than I did. He got me a gift certificate to Dauphine Press in Petaluma. They offer an array of letterpress classes, in addition to other crafty classes. Not only that, but the gift certificate was printed using a letterpress, as was the thank-you card they sent him for buying a gift certificate from them. I love that! I'm signed up to take a letterpress notecard class from them in a few weeks. I can't wait! It'll be a good refresher, since I haven't worked with a letterpress since senior year of college.

For Patrick's present, I bought him two books (get it--paper?) and made him breakfast in bed on Sunday. Not as inspired as his present to me, but I think he liked it. I printed up a little menu using the same layout that I had used for our wedding menus.

So on Sunday morning, I got up early and went to Draegers to buy the necessary breakfast ingredients while Patrick slept in. Breakfast took longer to prepare than I'd intended, but luckily he had a book to read while he waited. I really should have gotten him a newspaper to read, but it was my first time preparing breakfast in bed. I'm still learning.

Breakfast consisted of: earl grey tea with honey, orange juice, toasted Acme sour batard with blackberry jam, citrus-berry fruit salad (based on a recipe in Williams-Sonoma Breakfast), and honey-yogurt waffles topped with caramelized bananas and drizzled with citrus blossom honey (waffle recipe from Waffles: From Morning to Midnight, caramelized banana recipe here). It was all good, especially the bananas. Yum!

For dinner, we ordered pizza, lit a few candles, and had a picnic on the floor. We opened our first year bottle of wine (Duckhorn Vineyards 2004 Napa Valley Sauvignon Blanc), and I made my best effort to enjoy it. After I'd sipped my way through a glass of it, it wasn't so bad. Still, I have a way to go before I'd actually consider myself a wine drinker.

We had our year-old wedding cake top layer for dessert. Thanks to Edith's baking prowess and Nat and Sara's expert cake-packaging skills, it was still pretty damn good. The cake part was a little dry, but the frosting was awesome. I like cake :)

It was a wonderful anniversary weekend. I love spending time with Patrick. This whole marriage thing has been great so far. How'd I get so lucky?

Anniversary Weekend, Part 2: Olema Druids Hall

After leaving Manka's full and sleepy, we headed down the road to Olema. We had a room reserved for the night at Olema Druids Hall (there are no longer any Druids there; they just built the place). We had stopped in Olema earlier this year when we had dinner at Olema Inn. It's a tiny town, but it's well-situated, convenient to outdoorsy activities and good food.

We arrived after hours, so they had put our key in a little lockbox on the side of the building, along with a helpful note telling us how to get to our room. I liked their choice of font and ink color (same goes for their in-room stationery). I was also charmed by the building, the grounds and our room (the Nest). I loved the paint colors and the furnishings; the room looked like something out of Real Simple or Martha Stewart Living. A lot of the fixtures looked like they were from Restoration Hardware, though I suppose they could have been the real thing. The whole place exuded a feeling of simple luxury (carefully orchestrated, I'm sure).

Here are some of the things I loved about our room (Patrick says I'd be a good crime scene photographer given the number of pictures I took of our room).

Gold dupioni silk curtains, including one above the door. The door had a little covered pass-through, which seemed like it could be useful (say, for receiving meals en dishabille):

Chocolates, bedside lamp, and crisp, white quilted bed linens:

Cool shower curtain hooks and unusual light fixture in shower (the shower curtain did not stay closed very well, sadly):

Fancy knobs and faucet in the sink and shower:

Pretty grate covering the fan in the bathroom; walls and ceiling painted robin's egg blue:

Plush bathrobes (available for purchase for a rather steep sum) and Aveda bath products neatly arranged in a basket in the bathroom:

Sweet framed prints of bird eggs, stacked baskets, and a giant blue armoire (true to its name, the Nest had many bird-related decorations. I couldn't decide if I liked the idea or if it was too cutesy):

Dainty gold door handles on the giant blue armoire:

Pink rosebud ironing board cover:

My newish shoes, the hardwood floors, and the blue armoire. Something about those colors together made me happy:

The welcome note by the bed informed us that if we heard any strange moaning noises at night, it was probably just the friendly neighborhood cows. I'm afraid I slept too soundly to hear anything at all! The bed and pillows were very comfortable.

After a good night's sleep in our cute room, we awoke the next morning and went downstairs for breakfast. I think there was only one other person staying there that day, as there were only two tables set in the main room. A nice woman showed us to the continental breakfast and got a fire going in the fireplace.

The breakfast was modest but yummy. It made good use of local foods, as promised on the website. We shared a sticky bun that had been brought over from Bovine Bakery that morning, and we made toast using bread from Brickmaiden Breads (that brickmaiden is hot!). I believe the granola was also from Brickmaiden, and we topped it with creamy yogurt from Straus Creamery. There was some good fruit and a cute hardboiled egg (still warm!) at each seat, decorated with a sprig of lavender. Our table was outfitted with an ingenious little crock filled with butter and an array of tiny jams and spreads (we had a little whipped honey on our toast).

After breakfast, we sat in front of the fire, paged through a few magazines and their restoration scrapbook (they did a really good job restoring the building!) and thought about what we wanted to do for the rest of the day. We also explored the grounds a little bit. I liked the stack of firewood outside the kitchen, though I would be paranoid about black widows if we had a wood stack of our own.

Sadly, we were only staying at Olema Druids Hall for the one night (they require a 3-night stay on weekends, which is why we ended up staying on a Thursday night instead). You can probably tell that I enjoyed our brief visit very much. It felt both rural and luxurious at the same time. I would definitely stay there again. It was a good choicce for a one-night anniversary getaway, especially paired with dinner at Manka's. We were lucky to be able to celebrate our anniversary in style.