Gratuitous Cat Pictures

There's something funny about this laundry...

Perfectly executed synchronized carpet swim

Mom's visit to Berkeley

My mom recently came to visit and we had an awesome time. We had lots of fun walking around Berkeley in the spring smelling and taking pictures of the amazing variety of flowers currently blooming.

I'm trying to take lots of sunny pictures of flowers and such during my last month in Berkeley. I figure I'll use them to help me through the upcoming long Michigan winters.



We also walked around San Francisco and stopped buy Coit Tower and Pier 39 where we saw the sea lions

San Francisco

Coit Tower

Land Fish

We did more flower sniffing at the Berkeley botanical gardens.

We went down to Castle Rock State Park near Scott and Sarah for a nice hike last weekend. It was a gorgeous day. The park was full of pretty flowers, great views, and an ominous buzz of some large bee hive not far in the distance.

As an aside, my bread baking project is going slowly, but well. The newest addition was some delicious challah, shown here getting mysteriously picked at. Why has the baking slowed? Because I was finishing up the final touches to my dissertation, which is now completely finished and submitted! We now have free time until moving to Michigan, along with a long list of things in California we are going to see, so keep checking in to see the upcoming adventures.

Cow painting

A while ago my dad brought me back this awesome T-shirt from Spain. It had the cutest little circle cow on it and I always thought it would be great to make it into a painting (I did look online first and see if I could just buy one from the artist). So, while my mom was in town I took advantage of her artistic know-how and the two of us painted this uber cute replica. Of equal importance, Steve agreed to the hanging of the purple cow in our home!

Beginning the process of penciling in the cow. It's amazing how hard it can be to exactly recreate a blob.

Starting with the light purple. Moon shaped horns and horn shaped moon (horny moon?)

Almost done!

Painting the edges for the perfect finish!

Very warm double layer hat

I made this super warm double layer hat to match the scarf I made a while ago. I figure I really need to beef up my hat collection for our move to Michigan.

Breads of the World

I made some more bread last week while I was finishing writing my dissertation. I got English muffins and some ciabatta made. The English muffins grew quite tall on the griddle, and were delicious! The ciabatta turned out well too. We made it into sort of open-face pizza sandwiches when Scott and Sarah came up for dinner. I ran out of yeast, so I'm not sure what bread is coming next.

Spawn Shower

My (Steve's) labmate Eric and his wife Kristy are having a baby soon, so they invited us to their baby shower, although they referred to their future son Jake as their "spawn" a lot on the invitation. We had a great time hanging out with them, playing some games like pin the penis on the baby, and winning a sippy cup full of chocolate eggs by guessing the right amount in there- I was dead on!