Happy Birthday to Me!

My birthday was on Labor Day, so I'm a little late catching up with photos, but here we go!

It seems Clyde may have had a bit to drink...

Birthday cake! It's lemon with chocolate frosting, which everyone
said sounds weird, but they also said it was good.

Clyde hangs out in the middle of the table, among the peanuts.

Presents!

It was a very fun birthday! And I think Clyde had a lot of fun too. We don't have much time left together, so we'll have to have a lot of fun for the next couple of weeks!

Iceland

And after France, we went to Iceland! We flew into Keflavik, drove to Reykjavik, and stayed for two days, mostly wandering around Reykjavik. It was a brisk 55* F (a welcome change from the 80s F of Paris, and definitely better than the 90-100 F friends were getting at home!)

I'm 95% sure that's the Arctic Ocean. (It's not like they labelled it for us.)

Coca-Cola has this thing in other countries right now where they
put "share a Coca-Cola with" and names. Also, Coke in other countries
is made with real sugar, not HFCS. YUM.

Delicious sandwich for lunch. It was Thai-style, with chicken,
peanut sauce, cilantro, and mango.

Clyde and some krona, the currency of Iceland. (They accept Euro and
dollars in most places though.)

Pretty lava sculpture near the water.

Bike-shaped gate to keep cars out of this street.

I got myself a new little friend: a puffin! He joined Clyde in my bag
on the way home.

So that was our trip! We had a great time, but it's always good to be home.

Paris (Part II)

More photos!

On the balcony to our apartment

Looking off the balcony toward the Cafe les Deux Moulins
(the cafe from Amelie)

On the balcony, seen from the kitchen

Trying on Fiance's beret... looking snazzy, Clyde!

It took a few tries to get it right...

This doesn't seem right either...

Maybe we should try again later, Clyde.

This is the market from Amelie, where M. Collignon works.
We stumbled across it on our way back from the Bastille Day fireworks!

In the women's yard at the Conciergerie (the prison where - among many others -
Marie Antoinette was held before her beheading)

CREPES. Literally the best food in the world. We ate several. This one
happens to be miel (honey).

Eiffel Tower from Trocadero

The most... ahem... family-friendly photo I took at the
Musee de l'Erotisme. Clyde was scandalized.
(Not by the wire corset sculpture. By... the rest.)

Mmmm, strawberries, raspberries, melon. The freshest, most delicious
fruits I've ever eaten. They don't put waxes and sprays and whatnot
on their produce to make it look nice for a week. You just have to eat it
within two or three days, and you would anyway, because YUM.

Louvre!

Closeup at the Louvre

 More to come!

French Food

I promise to post more about France when we get home... I'm taking more photos than I'm posting, I swear! But I wanted to stop in and make a note of the food here, because that's one of the things we were most looking forward to.

We just had sushi for dinner. It was delicious. I know... not French. But delicious. It's a lot like the sushi at home, but with better produce and a different kind of tuna (so it was a color you don't want your tuna to be at home, generally).

 

 

Other people in our group (not myself) went to a class to learn how to make macarons! Lucky for us, they brought back the fruits of their labor and generously shared the deliciousness!

 

 

There are more food photos to come when I do big posts when we get home, but that's it for now!

Clyde in PARIS: Day 1

Clyde and I are in PARIS! Yes, that's right folks: PARIS. Check out the view from our balcony (you can see le Cafe des Deux Moulins, famously known as the cafe from Amelie):

We arrived at 1pm (after 12 hours of travel, with driving to DC, flying to Iceland, switching planes and flying to Paris, most of which was not conducive to sleeping, and I don't handle plane landings very well - they make me feel sick - so I didn't take any plane/airport photos, and we napped when we got here). After the nap, we wandered around Montmartre to familiarize ourselves with the area, and had a lunch pieced together from the markets on our street. Lunch included the most amazing, flavorful strawberries & raspberries we've ever eaten:

 
Also, baguettes, cheeses, and roasted chicken. Then we watched some French TV, and had a dinner similar to lunch, then wandered around some more after dark. And I ordered a crepe (with Nutella, of course) and a Coke from the guy on the corner! (I was a French major and have never been to France before... the sense of accomplishment I got from this minor task was ridiculously awesome... not to mention, the crepe was AMAZING.)

Anyway, it's already past midnight here (though I'm posting in Virginia time still, so this will show as Saturday evening) so it's Bastille Day! There are already some celebrators in the streets, and the occasional feu d'artifice (firework) and the next 24 hours promise to be CRAZY!

Packing (and a Movie Ticket and a Cucumber)

I've taken a few little inconsequential photos here and there this week, and I'm adding them all together to make one post!

We went to see World War Z on Sunday.
It literally was NOTHING - I mean ridiculously NOTHING - like the book.
Why bother with the title card "based on the novel..." if... never mind.
BUT... it was still enjoyable.

Om nom nom... reaping the benefits of Dad's garden in the form of fresh cucumbers!

And packing for our trip!!!

The good stuff starts tomorrow, with TRAVEL PHOTOS!

Marshmallows

We had a get-together at Fiance's parents' house last night for Memorial Day weekend. We had a big Costa Rican dinner, and topped it all off by toasting marshmallows and making s'mores!

You can kind of see the bay up there at the top, too. It was a little chilly out when it started to get dark, but the fire was nice and toasty!

Oysters

Fiance's dad grows oysters under the dock at the house. Not only are they good for eating (in other people's opinion... I'm not a fan) but they're good for the Bay, because they're little water filters! Fiance's friends J & L are in town for the weekend, so we went out to the dock last night to try to fish. (It was too cold to catch anything, and we only saw a handful of jellyfish and minnows, a teeny tiny blue crab, a heron across the water, two raccoons fighting - which we heard rather than saw - and two guys on a speedboat.)

These are sea grapes, or sea squirts. They grew all over the oyster pod and this rope.
They won't grow above the water line because they're filter animals like oysters. They fill with water
and stay puffed out like this until they dry out or get burst (by stepping on them or
poking them too hard. Ours aren't half as pretty as the photos on Wikipedia.

Clyde and the oyster basket. It's too blurry to tell, but there are quite a few
sea squirts on here, too.

(Same photo with the flash. It was about 9pm so the lighting was less than ideal.)

Some of the oysters that came out of the basket!

Birthday Cake

Fiance's birthday is tomorrow! And he's working 5pm-1am tonight, so I thought I'd get his birthday cake made, so it would be waiting for him when he got home! Clyde was a big help. We made a step-by-step:

1: Put the cake mix in a bowl and grab a spoon.

2: Add the oil, water, and eggs. (Rinse egg off your fingers,
if you're a messy egg-breaker like me.)

3: Mixmixmixmixmix!

4: Remove some of the batter into another bowl.
Add food coloring.

5: Mixmixmix! (Not pictured: Repeat with another bowl and another color.)

6: Pour batters in layers into your greased pan.
(By the way, you should have greased a pan before now.)

7: Smoosh the layers outward a little (they should, in theory,
spread more while they bake... I don't know, I've never done this before).

8: Put the cake in the oven (which, by the way, should have been preheated
to 350F before now) and wash the dishes!

9: Put the camera away and forget to bring it out while you pull the cake out,
let it cool, and frost it (and add sprinkles!). 

Step 10: Wait for Fiance to come home and enjoy his cake!

5/10/13: BONUS PHOTO... I didn't tell Fiance it was pretty inside so I made him cut it before we both left for work:

Pretty!

Cinco de Mayo

Yeah, Battle of Puebla Day is not something I typically celebrate. I'm not a huge fan of tequila, and I'm usually working anyway. But since Fiance and I wanted Moe's for lunch... well...

We were a little bit festive anyway. (That isn't margarita though... I still had to go to work!)

Cooking Dinner

I'm not proud to admit that this is such a rare occasion that it was worthy of photographing, but Clyde helped me make dinner tonight!

Clyde reminds me to clean up the mess on the stove, and put away the milk when I'm done

Mmm, smell the garlic potatoes! The chicken! The corn! Delish.

Yum! Hopefully I'll be doing more of this in the next couple weeks, along with going out to see fun things, because I'll have MORE TIME OFF! (I cannot emphasize this enough, friends. I had NO days off in April.)