Last, last Saturday (the 9th) Chris and I went to the Santa Barbara Harbor and Seafood festival with a friend of mine and her mother. It was fun. It's like a harbor street fair. There are booths for people to sell their stuff and lots of food booths. The maritime museum was open for free and they had some boat rides along with a tall ship present. I tried a mussel for the first time and it wasn't a pleasant experience. I guess they didn't get all the juice and stuff out of them and biting into it was a big burst of saltwater -- ICK! Yeah, didn't get to swallow it. It just wouldn't go down...Chris was slightly amused. I did order albacore and got 2/3 of that down before my system (possible mental state) just couldn't take it anymore. :P I did get a strawberry shortcake and strawberry lemonade and those were REALLY good! Anyway, it was fun! Chris says it should happen every weekend. LoL
Last Wednesday I saw Jhumpa Lahiri (Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction - Interpreter of Maladies) and got a book signed. It was one of the quickest book signings I've been to and there were a lot of guys. Most signings I go to (perhaps with the exception of Neil Gaiman...) there are not a lot of guys. Lahiri read from Unaccustomed Earth and took some questions. Some of the questions were just "odd." Like one lady asked about how positive thinking is a big movement right now and Lahiri's books aren't so "positive thinking" and what she thinks of it or something. It was odd. Basically she was saying what Lahiri thought about how most books these days have to have a happy ending at the end of them and Lahiri's books don't always have a happy ending, but something more realistic. Lahiri's books are usually about immigrants or moving from one area to another and everything that goes with that -- positive and negative. Anyway, it was weird and Lahiri asked back, "Are you saying my books are depressing?" It made us all chuckle. She seemed tired, though. So she wasn't as chatty as you'd imagine someone like her would be. Or, maybe that's just her personality. Who knows.
Last weekend, Chris and I went down to San Diego and visited our friends Tori and Andy. :) It was fun! We went all around San Diego on Sat and Sunday we all went to Medieval Times. Sat was a busy day since we went to Todai and the Birch Aquarium. They took us to dinner at this place called CheeBurger, which is pretty cool. It's like The Counter (custom burger place), but it's a 50's theme and they basically do everything custom - milkshakes, burgers, sodas, etc. The milkshakes were insane because you could mix a TON of stuff together and the burgers too. They also do a pounder and if you eat the entire thing, they announce it to the whole restaurant and you get a picture up on the wall. We arrived right when someone ate one and I saw one guy who couldn't finish one. Chris says the next time we go down, we're ALL ordering a pounder and finishing it. If I finish it, I won't be able to move...Birch Aquarium was super small, but fun to see. I still enjoy going to aquariums even if they won't live up to the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Medieval Times was really fun! We got an upgrade so we had seats in the first row, which was cool, but the 2nd row might have been better. There was a stupid glass piece in front of us (it's fine), but there was a bar at the top! So the bar was right in your line of vision. Other than that, it was fun, though. We want to do the Pirates Dinner Adventure next (it's right next door to Medieval Times).
School is pretty much the same with stress about GP piling on...So much to do and we're just not making much progress. We all know what to research, but there's just a LOT to research! So it's stressful. Especially since our review meeting is in a month. *sigh* Oh well. What are you going to do? All you really can do is keep working at it and hope it all comes together when you least expect it to. :) Rest of classes are fine. They're so repetitive now that it's kind of boring and uneventful. I need to start writing my econ paper so I don't let that get lost in my "easy" class schedule and start looking over stuff for the final. Environmental modeling we have our 3rd assignment due tomorrow, but we haven't received our last 2 back yet. So who knows how I'm doing there! I'm definitely looking forward to next quarter...Maybe not environmental institutions (might be interesting), but the rest should be interesting.
My fish and shrimp are doing well. My water definitely doesn't evaporate as fast here in SB as it does in Monterey. Not sure why, but I'm sure it has something to do with the temperature. The one new plant I bought when I moved back is growing like gangbusters! I keep having to trim it and planting the new trim. One of my shrimp missed a cycle. It looks like she may have aborted the eggs, but I can't tell for sure. I don't check them enough to really know. I just know she had the eggs and then she didn't have another set ready. I'm pretty sure, though, she had another set of eggs ready when she got rid of the last set. So...I don't know. They're healthy, though. They live to 1-2 years and these guys are going on a year old, so maybe they're slowing down a little.
It's been raining here in SB and lots of thunderstorms, which is kind of nice! The only downside is the power flickers. It hasn't gone out but it definitely flickers every once in a while. I don't remember rain this early last year so maybe we'll get more this rainy season! Let's hope for less warm days, though. This school year definitely started hot and it wasn't this hot last year!
Well, with that, I need to head off to do more reading for GP. We've got our team meeting tomorrow and we got an e-mail from our project manager that kind of was a slap in the face to wake-up and smell the coffee. On the other hand, I don't think it was needed (I already knew everything she said), but none-the-less it was good.
Photo albums:
Seafood Festival
Birch Aquarium
Medieval Times
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