Entire Photo Set

After an extremely wonderful wedding on October 5th, Steve and I headed off to Thailand for two weeks. We treated ourselves to business class tickets, and boy was that worth it. The seats were extra comfortable with lots of controls; they went to a nearly flat position for sleeping. Our travel time to Thailand was about 21 hours and the trip back was 24 hours (with an 8 hour layover in Seoul). Aside from great chairs, we also got five course meals, and the food was delicious! All the hostesses looked the same - young cute Asian women with their hair in a bun.

2 days in Bangkok

We didn’t like Bangkok very much. Its busy, dirty and full of car exhaust. So we spent most of the two days in our hotel room adjusting to the time difference (off by 14 hours) and just resting. I managed to catch a cold on the flight, so I wasn’t feeling up to site seeing anyway.

4 days in Chiang Mai

Chiang Mai was so much nicer than Bangkok. We both felt like we could easily breath the air without choking or shortening the length of our lives. The people were overly hospitable. One man stopped us and talked to us for a while. He gave us a whole afternoon’s worth of activities. He told us to rent a tuk-tuk driver for 50 baht an hour (about $1.44). He told the driver where to take us for lunch, then suggested a bunch of shops to check out.

The shops included a tailor, umbrella making shop, leather shop (not interested in that one), and jewelry store. At the tailor we decided to have a suit and five shirts made for Steve and two dresses for me. One of the dresses is a red Asian dress, which I’ve always wanted. Everything was so cheap, so it was hard not to buy things; and its why we couldn’t resist the tailor.

Lunch was finally a true Thai restaurant. Until this point every suggestion lead us to restaurants full of tourists. We weren’t interested in that, we wanted the real deal. This place was full of flavor and really cheap, located on a lake.

Elephant Training

While we were in Chiang Mai we took one day out to do some elephant training at the Elephant Conservation Center. We learned how to be mahouts (elephant handlers). Steve ended up with the fat male elephant who loved to eat (I often heard Steve yelling “Bai! Bai!”, which means “go forward”) and I got the slow female elephant. We were never alone with the elephants, their mahouts were always present to make sure things went well.

The day began with learning how to get on and off, how to go and stop and how to steer - all with words and our feet. After we were steering fairly well we took the elephants through the forest to the other end of the center where we watched an elephant show. Following the show we bathed the elephants, which consisted of going in the water and telling them to “lay down”.

The first time I mounted my elephant I was pretty nervous, but it wasn’t that bad. As I sat on top the mahout would hand me a few pieces of sugar cane. She would reach her trunk back and ask for the treats. i could feel her hot breath sniffing for more. She moved so slowly and deliberately, and she had a very bristly head.

We also had the chance to feed a baby elephant and her mom. She was so cute and nimbly. She kept trying to escape over the pen. And she was so strong, you really don’t want to let her wrap her trunk around your wrist - bad idea, lesson learned!

5 days in Koh Samui

The best part of the trip, save the elephants, was sitting on the beach and doing absolutely nothing. Our cabana was in the front row, right on the beach. We were about 30 feet from the water, the Gulf of Thailand.

We lounged around and read books or played cards all day. For the first four nights we would hang out with our cabana neighbors, Monika and Tim. They were from Trier, Germany. We would sit on their porch drinking Singha, getting to know one another and exchanging cultural knowledge. We had a blast laughing and talking.

One of the nights we went to dinner we ended up at a Pad Thai place. We sat down and they just served us noodles, no choices. The bill for the four of us was 180 baht, $5.18!

One of the striking things about Thailand is all the stray or wild dogs. Our resort had a chow mix that they seemed to be taking care of, but she had not tags and obviously hadn’t been to a vet. We named her Lanna. She had three puppies that were also running around, playing and yelping.

My only small complaints about the resort would be the hard bed and showering in brackish water, though the shower was outdoors, which was awesome.

1 more day in Bangkok

Our original plan was two last days in Bangkok, but since we didn’t like it, we exchanged that extra day for Koh Samui. So our last day was a bit odd. We flew there in the morning, checked into our hotel, then had to check out that same night at 11pm to fly home. Strange, but it was nice to shower in regular water before we left.

Our journey home was long; a 6 hour flight to Seoul, an 8 hour layover, then 10 hours back to San Francisco. The layover wasn’t that bad though. Because we had business class tickets we had access to a very nice lounge. It had massage chairs, food, drinks, TV, magazines. Couldn’t complain too much. If you get the chance to fly business, I highly recommend it.

All in all it was a great honeymoon

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My dear readers, I apologize for the contest delay. The winner from last month is Becky J! She was one of 20/21 who correctly guessed Subway. And the new logo is up for your guessing pleasures.

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I’m a little behind on the blogging… Two weekends ago (Aug 15-17) Steve and I went on the annual Sonoma Wine Vacation that our friends set up. This time there were 14 of us.

We all headed down on Friday. That night we hung out by the pool and hot tub, drank wine and made our own pizzas. It was a relaxing evening, full of catching up and what not.

Saturday the limo picked us up and took us to four wineries. Ridge Lytton Springs, Michel-Schlumberger, Sbragia Family Vinyards, David Coffaro and Locals Tasting Room. I liked Sbragia the best. Unfortunately Steve and I split all our tastings, so we didn’t actually get drunk, which defeats the purpose of having a limo! We drank tons of wine that night though, and ate delicious burgers and sausages from the grill.

Sunday was a very relaxing day. Everyone sort of did their own thing until lunch time. Erica made the prettiest salad I’ve ever seen (pictured above). After lunch we played this game called Caption.

I’ll attempt to explain it. You need at least 5 people. Each person gets a stack of 5 index cards (of however many people are playing - 9 people, 9 cards). Everyone writes a caption on the top card. Then you pass the stack to the left. That person reads the card (to themselves), puts it at the bottom of the stack, and then illustrates the caption. This gets passed to the left. The person looks at the image, puts the card in the back and writes a caption. You go around until the stack gets back to the original person. Then each person gets to read their stack to the group, showing everyone the pictures. It gets quite crazy! We played that game about 6 or 7 times, it was that funny.

We had a really good time, with some excellent food, tons of wine and wonderful friends

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When Steve has to go out of town for a couple days.

(I get bored and mess around with makeup and a camera.)

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This past Sunday we went down to the San Francisco Gay Pride Parade. We arrived a little late, but our friend had a good spot and we were able to squeeze in pretty close to him and take pictures.

Apparently we missed all the porn stars, but we did see some other really cool stuff. Such as this guy here who had springs on his feet. As he was walking by Steve said, “I bet he can jump really high in those.” Which he promptly proceeded to do. And on top of that, a few flips.

Cindy Lauper was in the parade, but in all the pictures I took she looks extremely unhappy.

I got a ton of great shots, here is a smattering of my favorites.

The best part of the whole parade were all the couples marching with “Just Married” signs. It brought a tear to my eye on several occasions.

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Steve’s sister Shana came to visit us for a few days. While she was here we went to Napa, among other things. We had a late start so we only made it to two wineries, Goosecross and Miner. Goosecross is a small winery that doesn’t distribute, so you can only buy the wine there or join their wine club. We really enjoy just about everything they have, so we joined the club. They’re also a blast to hang out with. They go off the flight and joke around, we had a really good time.

Miner is a bigger place. They stuck to the flight and were generally boring. After that we went to the Rutherford Grill for dinner. And to our amusement we ran into Steve’s friend Erik and his wife Lauren. It amazes me how small the Bay Area can be sometimes.

By the time we ate Shana and I had a pretty good buzz going (Steve offered to drive home), and we took some goofy pictures at the restaurant, available on Flickr of course. There are some photos of us drunk (actually I guess all of them are), some where we tried to tweak Steve’s nipples (he wasn’t going for that), and various other odd shots.

All in all we had a really good time.

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If you love shoes then you must check out endless.com. There are several reasons for this site’s awesomeness. First, there’s no charge for shipping, to you OR from you (returns). Second, they have a bunch of useful filters for finding the exact shoe you are looking for, such as color, size, heel height, type of shoe, brand, etc. Third, you get the shoes one business day later, which I find terribly convenient. To me this is so much easier than getting my lazy ass to the store and hoping they have the shoe I’m looking for. I see no harm in buying three pair and returning them all - they just make it that easy.

And from a UI perspective I think the site is very easy to use.

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On Monday I rode my bicycle to work for the 3rd or 4th time. It’s about 5 miles away. I usually try to follow cars through intersections because I fell I’m less likely to get hit by another car. So I was following a blue Mustang through and he got out of the intersection much faster than I could. Meanwhile the black car to the right of us was turning left. I slowed down a little because he caught me off guard, then I continued through - well so did he. He continued to plow straight into me, just hard enough to nudge my bicycle, but not knock me over.

I uttered some obscenities at him, then continued on. He followed me down the street and I wondered to myself, does he want to hit me again? He pulled in front of me, got out of his car and began taking pictures of me, yelling about how I didn’t stop at the stop sign and I hit his car. I hit his car?!?! What planet is this guy on?

I yelled back at him, because he hit me and whether or not I ran a stop sign is irrelevant. I was fuming. He didn’t care what I had to say, I needed to make it right. I can’t just run stop signs. My insurance has to pay for it, we’re going to do this the right way, YOU WILL BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE. Oh yeah, and the damage? Could be rubbed out with rubbing compound. Not significant, at all.

A witness pulled up and got out of his car. He said he didn’t see me run the stop sign, but he did see this guy hit me.

Luckily a cop car pulled up and separated us. They took each side of the story, and gave each of us the other persons information. Said I should call my insurance company and give them his info, because they’ll probably be contacting me. And they didn’t give me a ticket for running a stop sign.

When I got home I looked into some of the bicycle laws in San Francisco. If I were to run a red light and get hit by a truck, if that truck had time to stop then he is also at fault. The man who hit me clearly had time to stop - he didn’t even knock me over. (More on these laws here)

I am convinced that this guy purposely hit me, just enough to “teach me a lesson”. Because he probably sees bicyclists going through stop signs and lights all the time, and suddenly he had the opportunity to take his frustration out on me.

Post #13 (50-100-50 - btw, I clearly suck at this challenge)

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Of all the color schemes a triad of red, yellow and blue is definitely one of my favorites. Well, blue is just awesome in most cases. Like a complimentary scheme of blue and orange.

In these particular pictures, I especially love the shades of blue and red in the first shot. Those two colors together just drive me crazy! (In a good way).

Post #8 (50-100-50)

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We went to the dog beach again yesterday. Leigh and Sammy (Joe’s girlfriend) joined us. Joe didn’t run around as much as he did last time, but I think we all still had fun. Steve buried Sammy in the sand - she just sat there and let him do it like a good little doggy. Here’s the entire photo set.

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