Rome, Day 4 and Milan Days 1 and 2

We loved touring St Peter's Basilica in Rome before we headed to Milan on the train. Once in Milan we went out to dinner with Nadia and Federica and had some of the best pizza I've ever had in my life (with parmigiana, prosciutto di parma, arugala, and tomatoes). The next day we took a day trip to Mantova (about 2 hours outside of Milan) with Guisi, her son Gabriele, Nadia and Federica. The following day we went to Lake Como and Lugano Switzerland with Federica. Everything was so beautiful!!

Rome - Day 3

On our third day in Rome we visited the Colosseum, the Vatican Museum and Keith was on an Italian Radio show. You'll have to ask Keith for the full story of how he ended up on the radio. :) The Vatican Museum and the Sistine Chapel were amazing. What a great day!

Rome - Day 2

On our second day in Rome we went to Trevi Fountain, Palantino and saw the Colosseum. It was a great day!

Rome - Day 1

I intended to post photos along the way, but the internet connection was always painfully slow. Here is the album from our first day in Rome. This is unedited so there are lots of duplicates and things. I LOVED Rome!! Our friends Federico (who Keith met at a concert in NYC last month) and his wife Carla made our visit so easy and fun. What great friends! They took us on a whirlwind tour of Rome our first night. It was a cold 5 or 6 hours walking around Rome but we saw almost ALL of the spectacular sights of Rome that night. Click on the album below to see larger pictures and read the descriptions.

Magic-al Day!

My most recent Facebook update has got WAY more attention than any other things I've ever posted.  The second most popular status update I've posted was me declaring myself to be a great "cook" after eating my first attempt at homemade ice cream.  A lot of people had opinions on that.  Anyway, since it was so popular, I thought I'd blog my photos of my day with Magic Johnson.  

Magic Johnson is 6'9".  I am not.  I've never felt smaller.  Look at how big his hand is on my shoulder!!  :)  Magic was at my work to give a talk about his new book and his work building up innercity communities and neighborhoods.  I helped host him (introduced him to all the executives, walked him around, etc) and got to listen to all his cool stories.  He's a seriously funny and nice guy.    

He was so sweet and took a million photos with people.  I think it's so funny that I could stand right in front of Magic is this group photo and you can still see the top third of him.  I'm barely up to his chest.  That's why everyone in the photo is laughing. 

All in a day's work...  :)

Old married couple?

I think the universe is trying to tell me something - and I don't want to hear it.  It's telling me I'm old.  Well, maybe not old... but it definitely wants me to know I'm not getting any younger.  First we got moved over to the University Ward where (almost) everyone is younger than us AND they look at me with big eyes when they learn that we've been married for 8 YEARS.  When even my church friends think that's a long time, I know I'm into the big numbers.   My next clue was when I went to a dance class at the gym at work and enjoyed every minute of making a fool of myself - until the next day when I literally limped trying to walk or go down stairs.  I limped for days!!  Also, somehow along the way Keith has become more flexible than I am - which I cannot explain.  

Then the final straw came yesterday when our new toaster arrived in the mail in a smiling Amazon box.  Our old toaster has started sparking and threatening to burn down our house each time we use it (and toast is NOT worth the drama!).  As I was unpacking our shiny new toaster I suddenly realized that the toaster I was throwing away had been a wedding present!  A wedding present!?!?!   I am old enough to be replacing wedding presents?  Oh wow.  It felt kind of sad to get rid of it, even though I can't remember who was cliche enough to give me a toaster for my wedding.  But then I had a proud realization.  My marriage to Keith has outlasted a toaster.  Then I felt happy.  That is no small feat!  

So I'd like to offer a toast (pun intended!) and a big thank you to Keith for staying with me longer than the toaster.  I love you Keith! Goodbye old toaster.  

By the way - we literally took 21 photos of us with our old toaster trying to get a usable picture.  I guess this is as good as we get.  ;)

Ski Trip!

I know I've been a bad blogger lately.  I thought I'd show you a bit of what has kept me so busy.  Last week I planned a huge ski trip for 350 of my coworkers (thanks to the help of LaDawn and many of my fellow assistants who made such a huge task possible).  I'm happy to say that everyone had a great time and no one got seriously injured - which unfortunately is a huge improvement over our last team offsite (a whole other story).  I wanted to post this picture as proof that I had all 350 of them smiling at once at our party, but I can't figure out how to make this bigger, so you'll just have to take my word for it.  

I coordinated everything from the shuttles, hotels, food, party, entertainment, skiing, rental equipment and lessons.  It was an enormous job.  The worst part was that I got really sick right before the trip - and I never get sick!  I got this cold/flu thing that's been going around.  I was really congested, had serious body/headaches and a very soar throat and cough.  It made it hard to have the strength to get my work done AND hard to get any sleep.  By the end of the trip I was beat!  I worked from home on Friday and slept almost the entire weekend.  I would sleep about 9 hours at night and then be up for a few hours before I would have to take a nap and sleep for another 5 hours!  Thankfully I feel much better now.   Here's a picture of LaDawn and I at the ski trip party.  We had a great time.  :)

Happy Anniversary!

Keith and I celebrated our 8th wedding anniversary over the long holiday weekend.  We enjoyed the fantastic weather and spent a lot of time outside.  We went to Point Reyes and saw the lighthouse and then drove over to Napa Valley.  In Napa we ate lunch at an outdoor cafe and it was so sunny and warm I was worried I might get a sunburn.  After lunch we got 2 bags full of treats from our favorite bakery (Bouchon) and then went on a hike.  I thought the hike would take about 45 minutes and would be more like a romantic walk ... but it really took about 2 hours and left Keith and I dripping with non-romantic sweat.  We still had fun and cooled off during the second half of the hike through the redwoods.  On our actual anniversary (Tuesday) I worked from home and watched the Inauguration on TV for most of the morning (since my boss was in DC attending in person).  That night Keith and I went to dinner at Gary Danko and ate ourselves happy with our 5 course dinner of delicious food.  At the end of our meal our waiter brought out a special anniversary dessert for us (even though we had just devoured a chocolate souffle and a chocolate caramel mousse). 

Happy Anniversary, Keith!  I love you!  

Happy Birthday Sam and Keith!

So this birthday wish is clearly a bit late but I want to tell Sam and Keith how much I love them. We had a great double birthday dinner at Bix in San Francisco. It was super fun and delicious!  We had tuna tartare and steak (!) tartare as an appetizer.  I also had the lobster spaghetti and it was incredible.  

Happy Birthday boys!  :)

Christmas 2008

I'm a little slow in blogging this, I know. Before too many holidays pass me by I wanted to show you some highlights from our holiday in NC. You can double click on the album below to see larger pictures and read the captions. We miss you all!

Holiday Cheer

Keith, LaDawn, Brent and I had a great time at my boss' holiday party last night. Her parties are always amazing and this year was better than ever. There was real snow in the front yard, an ice rink in the back yard and her new movie theater in the basement (complete with a full candy stand and popcorn!). Not to mention fantastic food and lots of friends. Check out some of the photos of the festivities below. Double click on the album to see larger photos and to see the video of the ice rink at the end.

California December

I love California. I love that even in December you can spend an entire weekend outdoors enjoying the sunshine. Last weekend Keith's friend, Neil, was visiting so we spent a lot of time together in the city. We did a lot of walking, talking, eating and touring. We even took a boat ride around the Bay and under the bridge. Keith and I also go to a 49ers game in Candlestick park. We had a great weekend! Wish you all were here to enjoy it with us! (click on the photo below to see the whole album)

From Neil weekend

Thanksgiving

We had a great time enjoying our all pie Thanksgiving at LaDawn & Brent's place. It was super fun to have Erin here to visit. Here are some photos of the holiday. I wish I got some photos the Wii matches between courses of pie. We had a great time. :) (Click on the album below to see all the pictures.)

From Thanksgiving 2008

My new haircut

I finally cut my hair after months of talking about doing it. I hadn't planned on going super short, but my stylist insisted that this cut would look great on me so I went for it.  I really like it. People I don't even know are commenting on this cut constantly. It seems like everyone has an opinion.  This happens every time I cut my long hair short. The weird thing is that people keep describing it as short and "sassy". I think sassy is the last word I would use to describe myself.  One engineer at work (with admittedly little social skills) told me that this cut makes me look 12 years old.  Another engineer reacted by yelling "what did you do?!?!" in the cafe at lunch.  A girl in the restroom looked at me and said, "wow, it must have been so hard for you to do that to your hair".  I don't know how to react to these comments.  Good think I like the cut.  Otherwise I would have freaked out by now.  

Mom's 50th Birthday Bash

I am back to blogging! Woo hoo! I finally paid to increase my storage space and can now share 10 more gigs of photos. I would like to commemorate this with photos from our trip home to surprise Mom for her birthday. I miss you guys and am so, so glad we got to see each other. That was so fun. I promise that my blogging famine is over and I'll start sharing more photos than you care to see. :) Love you all!

Fashion Week

I do a lot of crazy and cool things for my job but I have to say that working at Fashion Week in New York is my new favorite - and will probably stay that way for a while. I worked 3 3-hour shifts a day promoting the fashion skins on iGoogle. The real perk was that I then got to go to three huge fashion shows and people watch a celebrities walk by all day. I got to see fashions shows by Michael Kors, Anna Sui and Zac Posen. HUGE. I was a real "pinch me" moment.



Blogger is being dumb and won't let me upload the photos now. I'll try again soon...

US Open in New York

I go to New York for work pretty often now but I finally got to go and have some fun. Keith and I went to watch the US Open in New York a few months ago and had a great time watching Roger Federer win the title. We had to wait an extra day for the match because of a huge rainstorm that came through but the match was really fun and the sun came back in full force.



We also visited Central Park and ate some great food. It was a wonderful weekend away.

Hangin' with the Idols

As Brent mentioned on his blog we went to the American Idol concert in San Jose on Tuesday as personal guests of the show's producer. We had a great time at the concert and backstage afterward meeting all the Idols. Here is a picture of me with Michael  Johns (left) and American Idol winner David Cook (right) backstage after the concert.  I have a lot more pictures, but can't upload them now because Goog tells me I've hit my upload limit.  Who knew I've uploaded a gig of pictures already?!  I'll go harass a colleague now and try to get more space.  In the meantime, you can enjoy Brent's pictures from the night.  We had a blast!  :)

(Yes, I am so geeky that I wore my work badge at the concert, backstage and in this picture with rock stars.  I'm hopeless.)

Norway and Frankfurt

I just landed back in SF a few hours ago after an unexpected delay and overnight stay in Frankfurt. I'm tired now and will try to type up a few stories not captured in the pictures here. For now, here is a preview:

St Petersburg