Thursday, July 29, 2010

An End and a Beginning

Friday was the last day in San Francisco for me and Scope. :-( We had a few short hours to play before taking our flight back to Seattle, so, of course, the first thing I wanted to do was have my picture taken with our awesome doorman….


We had an almost-free breakfast (thanks to $20 worth of vouchers we had saved up by opting out of maid service two days of our trip—score!) at Scala’s Bistro. The food was delicious, but the wait staff kinda creeped me out. They were waaayyyyyy too formal and tended to walk around together in groups of three, almost as if the waiter had bodyguards.

Bizarre.

After breakfast, we walked to The Embarcadero to snap a few (or like 50) pictures. These are my favorites….










Then we had to go check out of our hotel and get ourselves back to the Oakland Airport to fly back home…. or my home, I guess…. but not really my home since I’m moving to Chicago soon *fingers crossed*, and my stuff is all half packed and whatnot….

Hmm….

So, basically, we flew back to some place that used to be home, but doesn’t feel like home now and looks like a bomb hit it and where there are no pictures on the walls anymore and boxes are piled precariously everywhere.

Totally depressing.

*sad sigh*

I ended up in tears that night, sitting in my dining room. I just bawled my face off. I’d sooooooooooooo rather be back in San Francisco, just playing, y’know? Packing up my entire life can really SUCK. But oh well….

Saturday, Scope and I went to the hospital because my sister had her baby that morning. It’s a girl! I can’t tell you her name, but I can tell you she’s named after two trees. Yes, two.

(No, not Willow Sequoia. Don’t be silly!)

(No, not Maple Nut either. C’mon, knock it off!)

*snicker*

Scope was the first one to get to hold the baby, besides her parents….


(AWWWWWWWWWWW.)

And here is the baby with her very delighted and proud big brother….


Next, the big sister (who WAS the baby until now) got to hold her….


….and she seemed to be having some second thoughts on this whole big sister business….


(Hee hee hee.)

And here I am with the baby….


….and, of course, always the class act, not only was I having an atrociously bad hair day, but I had a Janet Jackson-esque wardrobe malfunction as well and I had to leave the hospital in disgrace a few minutes after this photo was taken because one of the straps on my dress broke with a big ol’ *SNAP!* which sounded (and felt) just like someone had shot me a rubber band!

Niiiiiiiiice.

Then, most unfortunately, Sunday arrived and I was forced to take my husband to the airport and send him back to Chicago.

Without.

Me.

*curling into a ball on the floor*

That’s right. I can’t move to Chicago yet. Nope. I have to stay here in WA for awhile longer, sorting things out and waiting for the legal a-okay to move my baby out of the state.

I know.

Sucky, huh? But it's temporary. Just temporary....


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Wednesday, July 28, 2010

Alcatraz Schmalcatraz. I’m Not The Only One Who Keeps Accidentally Calling It “Azkaban”…. R-r-right?

Our fourth day in San Francisco was cold. And windy. And foggy. And, apparently, so is my memory, because I have absolutely no recollection whatsoever of where Scope and I had breakfast that morning. (????)

We bundled up in layers (no, we’re not sissies; there were people out in scarves and gloves, for chocolate’s sake!) and made our way through the fog to Pier 39….


….where we bought tickets for a boat tour around the bay.

While we waited for our tour to begin, we amused ourselves by frisking the statues….


….and getting our Tacky Tourist on by having our picture taken on a green screen….


….which is actually one of my favorite photos of the whole trip, fake-iness and all, because we, frankly, don’t have many pictures of the two of us together.

*sniff*

Once aboard our boat, we set off out into the bay, passing dozens of barking sea lions….


….including this cutie, who gave us a wink!….


(Awwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww.)

I, of course, was armed with my camera and shot—ohhhhhhh—roughly 200 pictures on the boat that day….


No exaggeration. (It’s sad, isn’t it?) (I know.)

We passed Ghirardelli Square….


….and headed towards the Golden Gate Bridge, all cloaked mysteriously in a curtain of fog….


A seagull kept pace with us, right overhead for awhile….


….(ACK!!) but eventually he got bored with us and flew off to terrorize someone else. Thank God. I hate birds.

*shudder*

We cruised under the Golden Gate Bridge….










….and then we set off for Azkaban Alcatraz, which I have a hard time remembering is actually called Alcatraz and not Azkaban (true story), and which has caused me much ridicule in many a conversation.

*pout*

(JK Rowling, I am hereby suing you. My lawyer will be contacting you soon. So there)….












We didn’t get to actually go inside Azkaban Alcatraz or anything. We’ll have to save that adventure for a future trip. But it was still absolutely incredible taking the boat tour all the way around the island.

Wow.

After Azkaban Alcatraz, I had to sit down and stop taking pictures for awhile because I started feeling worryingly seasick. Weird. I’ve never been seasick in my life.

Never.

I blame the Dementors. Clearly.

I was most relieved as we headed back to the pier. I definitely needed to be anywhere but on a swaying boat on the sloshing water. Like right away!!

The sea lions welcomed us back. And so did a couple of pelicans….


After lugging my queasy self off that boat, Scope and I stopped in Biscoff Coffee Corner for some hot chocolate (which came with free cookies!! WOOT!!)….


I don’t know if it was the hot chocolate or the cookies (maybe both) but after our stop at Biscoff’s, I was feeling much, much better.

We looked around Pier 39 for awhile and bought a couple of souvenirs and I made friends with this fella….


….while Scope found someone who made him feel runty for once….


….and then there was an impromptu meeting of the redheads….



We saw the famous Fisherman’s Wharf sign, of course….


….and then we hopped a bus to Golden Gate Park, where we snagged one more quick look at the bridge….


….then took a walk through the beautiful park to get to the California Academy of Sciences Museum, where we had our picture taken on a green screen yet again….


Ha! You can still see the green screen through my hair. I look like I’m molding! Or like I’m Beetlejuice! But I don’t care. I plunked down the $30 for the picture anyway because it is a picture of the two of us, and so I love it, darn it!

We had lunch inside the museum, then we checked out their Living Roof….


….which soooooooo reminded me of the Teletubbies!

*gag*

We also checked out the Extreme Mammals exhibit, which was so extreme (almost-unending standing, walking and reading) that we were both thrashed by the end of it and decided to bail.

*yawn*

We went back to our hotel and had a much-needed nap. Then we hit Cheesecake Factory for dinner. Mm-mm-mmmmm....


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Tuesday, July 27, 2010

Dude, Where’s My Tour Bus?

The morning of our third day in San Francisco, I awoke feeling pretty darn gross and unhoneymoony. I felt lethargic and I was achy in—umm—a certain place one doesn’t particularly wish to feel achy and gross on one’s honeymoon (aka chocolatemoon) (and if you don’t know what the hell I mean by chocolatemoon, then go check out yesterday’s post, slacker!)

Skipping over all the rest of the icky TMI, let’s just cut to the chase and say that I had *dramatic pause* a bladder infection.

Well, color me sexy.

I wasn’t sure what to do about it. Should I dropkick all our day’s plans to the curb to go wait in a walk-in clinic or the ER alllllllllllll daaaaayyyyyy lonnnngggggggg so I could pee in a cup and beg for an antibiotic? Or should I just live on cranberry juice and Tylenol for a few days, suck it up, and hope for the best?

Tough call.

Of course, when I told Scope about my predicament, he immediately went all Superman on me and insisted we would find a doctor ASAP and that it would somehow magically NOT ruin our day’s plans.

*crickets*

Pfffffffft! Well, okaaaaaayyyyyyy, hubba-hubba-hubby, if you say so…. and can I have a pet unicorn which farts rainbows too????

*hand on hip, looking skeptical*

So, after breakfast, Scope led me to Walgreens where he said they sometimes have nurses there, sitting around, twiddling their thumbs, waiting for sickos to waltz on in in need of medical care. Cool. I did not know that. The Walgreens by our hotel didn’t have a nurse on staff, but the pharmacist gave us the address of Traveler Medical Group, which was just a couple of blocks away.

Scope and I raced over to the address we’d been given and found ourselves in a small clinic which had photos of dozens of celebrities shaking the doctor’s hand framed all over the walls.

Dang.

Dr. Savage sure gets around! I kept staring at a photo of the doctor with Will Smith. For some reason I couldn’t take my eyes off of it. “I have the same doctor as Will Smith,” I kept thinking to myself.

“I HAVE THE SAME DOCTOR AS WILL SMITH!!!!”

I put my name down as a walk-in, and it only took about 30 minutes for me to be seen by the doctor, which stunned the heck out of me because I can’t even get service like that at my family doctor when I have an appointment in the book!

Dr. Savage was a funny, quirky fella, I must say. The first question he fired at me was “how long was your flight?,” followed by, “was your wedding dress tight?” when I mentioned I was on my honeymoon. He told me he sees honeymooning brides with bladder infections all the stinkin’ time because we brides tend to not drink enough water on our wedding day (because tight dresses are difficult to go to the bathroom in), so we get dehydrated, then we make it worse by not drinking enough water when we fly off on our honeymoons, and *POOF* we end up with bladder infections. He said it’s so common that he didn’t even need me to pee in a cup or anything. Nope. No test. He even had the pain meds and antibiotic I needed right there in the office, so I didn’t even have to go to a pharmacy.

Wow.

The whole thing took about an hour. Ish. I started taking my meds right away and was feeling totally fine just a few short hours later. Score! And because the doctor got me in so quickly, none of Scope’s and my plans were ruined.

Hmm.

Go figure.

My hubba-hubba-hubby was right!

:-)

But anyway…

Scope and I had purchased tickets to take a tour bus to San Jose to visit the Winchester Mystery House. We still had some time before our bus was scheduled to pick us up, so we walked around a little bit and took a look at a building Scope’s company has an office in….





Then we took a cable car ride. (Yeah, it says ‘no passengers’ but they were totally letting passengers on)….


We ogled this Fella *snicker*….



Then we boarded a bus and set off for the Super Sightseeing Tours ticket office where we joined about 9 or 10 other people on a tour bus which would take us to the Winchester Mystery House.

It was a long bus ride to San Jose, but the scenery was gorgeous. Eventually we made it to the mansion and our bus driver gave everyone in our small group a ticket and instructed us to meet him at the bus stop at 5:05pm.

Fine.

No problem.

We can do that.

(Ahem)

We weren’t allowed to take any pictures inside the mansion because, as our Miley Cyrus look-a-like tour guide so very wisely put it, “if there were pictures, there wouldn’t be a mystery and stuff.”

Amen, sistah.

So, since I have no pictures of the inside of the mansion to show you, I’ll just tell you that whatever you’ve heard about the mansion is probably true. It’s like crazy and money collided with a big ol’ KABOOM! There’s a staircase that goes all the way up to the ceiling, a room with three exits but only one entrance, a door on the second floor that opens to a sheer drop to the ground below, an obvious obsession with the number 13, and just a whole lot of what the heck was Mrs. Winchester thinking?!

Our tour guide said Sarah Winchester was afraid the spirits of those who had been killed by Winchester firearms were haunting her and she was convinced that if she kept building onto her house 24/7 and never ever completed construction, the spirits would be kept at bay.

Okidoki then.

The tour was really quite awesome! Once it was over, we had a little time to walk around the outside of the mansion, taking pictures before heading back to our bus.

Here we are outside the mansion….




This is the front of the house….


A lot of the windows looked like spider webs….



There’s Scope taking a picture of the door which opens up to a sheer drop to the ground below, “The Door To Nowhere”….


“The Door To Nowhere”….


Mmm. Interesting. No matter which way I turned, when I tried to get a picture of the fountain and the front doors, I kept getting a green orb in the picture. Funny, huh? But, better yet, at the same spot, Scope kept getting a purple orb in his pictures! He’s posting it today, and you can check it out HERE. SpooOOooOOky, no?….


We passed Scope’s camera off to two girls from our tour bus and they took this picture of us….


….then Scope and I headed off to the bathrooms, and I quickly bought four postcards in the gift shop, and at 5:06pm (only a mere 60 itty bitty seconds late) we rounded the corner to our bus stop. And our jaws hit the sidewalk.

Our bus was gone.

Gone!

We’d been left behind. Stranded.

We panicked for half a second, but then Scope whipped out his blackberry and by 5:09 he had placed a call to the tour bus company who had called the driver and ordered him to drive back and get us. And so we waited for our bus….



It took that dude about 15 minutes to get back to the mansion for us! And guess who didn’t get a tip when we got back to San Francisco?

Once back near our hotel, we went to Uncle Vito’s for dinner….


While we were waiting for our pizza, I took my camera outside onto the crowded sidewalk to try to get a sneaky picture in the front window of the restaurant at a couple of—uhhh—snazzy women who were eating there. Just as I started to get the ladies in focus and was ready to snap a picture that would have been bloggy gold, some grody, dirty, matted-haired bum who was passing by stopped right in front of the women in the window, totally blocking my shot and stared at me.

”How does that thing work?” he asked me.

”It’s a camera,” I replied, acidly.

”I know it’s a camera,” he said, “How does it work?”

*annoyed sigh*

Y’know, I like people. No, really. I do. But not when they’re asking me stupid questions. And especially not when they are guys asking me stupid questions when they think I’m alone, because I know where that road leads, okay? One minute a guy will ask me while I’m pumping gas at the gas station, “hey, whatcha doin’ there?” and then next he’ll be asking for my dang phone number!

(Does that really work on some girls? Really?)

I felt a poorly-aimed pick-up line a-comin’ my way, and I was not amused. “MOVE ON!” I snapped. Then he called me an @$$hole and I went glowering back into the pizza parlor, all full of venom.

Gah!

The one time I set foot on a San Francisco street without Scope, and a creep crawled out from under his rock just to talk to me! The one time! I was so mad! And, to add insult to injury, I didn’t even get the picture I wanted! But Scope did. And, fortunately, he shares with me. :-) So, here you go….


And on that note, I’m done.

(Whew, this was a long post, huh? Sorry about that! I hereby vow to be less yappy tomorrow.)


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