Go on, get! - San Antonio

Dad and I drove to San Antonio for the final leg of our Texan adventure. San Antonio has a cute little Riverwalk for tourists to hang out, stroll down and eat on. So after our first full day, we were starving and found this cute and yummy Mexican restaurant, Asencar. We sat right on the edge. I had the Tuna Margarita. Yes, tuna. No, there was no tuna in it, I think it was called tuna because it was a dark pink like tuna meat. And it was delicious.

I got crab tacos and Dad got the slow cooked roasted pork which you can see the mountain of above. It was so amazingly good. I always thought the best Mexican food was in California, but Texas does some damn good Mexican food. MMM!It came with these cute little torta tortillas. I made Dad pose with them. He resisted, but with a little encouragement I can get Dad to do anything. HAHA!Dad didn't care for his dinner very much. Actually, he killed it.

I won't bore everyone with all the work we did there. So I'll skip to our last day. We had a couple hours to kill, so we walked over to the Alamo for a quick tour. Then it was off to the airport.

One thing that struck me at the airport was when a women came up to the counter next to us at American Airlines and asked if she could pay the $35 charge for her son to be able to check his bags in Jacksonville. He was a student with no money on his way home for Thanksgiving, but didn't have the $35 cash to pay for his 2 suitcases. So his mom went to the American Airline counter in San Antonio and was trying to pay for him. I hope things worked out for the family

Dad, I had a great time with you. Love you!

Yeee Haw- Austin

So we hit the road from Fort Worth to Austin. The drive was almost exactly 3 hours. Here's Dad driving, with one leg up and on the cell phone. He originally had his right leg up and no foot on gas or break (cruise control) but I was very uncomfortable with that and called Mom to make him put his leg down.

We met Kavon at his place of work which was a really lovely office.We need to get a foosball table for our office. No work would get done and it would be very loud.

So after a tour of Kavon's very cool pad, including the hot tub on the roof top which I could not get to because the narrow spiral staircase to the third floor freaked me out, we headed to Stubs for dinner. I didn't realize this, but Austin is the live music capital. Every single restaurant and bar we walked by had live music. The guy on the left had the coolest sounding instrument that none of us knew what it was.

Here's us with our Stubs grub. Thanks for showing us around Kave! Hopefully next time we'll get to hang out for more than a couple of hours. Next we head off to San Antonio....

Giddiyup

Dad and I headed to Texas for the beginning of our conference tour. First stop Fort Worth. The trip started off good with an upgrade to first class. Here's Dad with his warm nuts: They give you warm nuts when you're ballin'. We took some pictures out of the window. This is somewhere over the southwestern US:We got to Texas and Dad wanted steak. So we headed to The Chop House which was right up the street from our hotel. Fort Worth has a really cute downtown area.We split a surf-n-turf which was a steak with lobster tail. The next day was time to work. Despite the fact that this was the most expensive show we'd been to, and that each of us gave a presentation, it was the most dead of any conference or show we'd been to EVER. Which was pretty disappointing. It was a pretty huge show though. Over 150 exhibitors at least, the conferences I normaly go to have 8-16 exhibitors. But barely any attendees showed up despite 3500 preregistered attendees (wondering if that's true).
Lockheed brought an airplane and flight simulator. Show offs. After two days of minimal contacts with attendees, on the last day we had quite a few people that showed up at our booth wanting information. So that was good. Then it was time to hit the road.
We stopped by Le Madeline for some lunch. I had the croque monsieur and tomato basil pesto soup. Dad had the French onion soup and a roast beef au jus. It was yummy.

I made Dad do this. It took like 5 takes before I got a decent one. He humored me because I hadn't taken enough pictures for a decent post.

And now, off to Austin to visit Kavon.

Fall Foliage From Bean Town

Conference in Boston

Hello Family,

I have not been blogging of my travels, so I am back-blogging now. The conference was kicked off with a marching 3-man band, revolutionary style, marching up and down the aisles of the conference.

On election day, they showed the election coverage on big screens in the main hall.

I had dinner with Kristy and had my first bowl of chowdah. It didn't sit well in my tummy because of my election anxiety.
Here are Kristy and me. I had my trusty gorilla tripod with me and took a few pictures of us..

I went back to the hotel just in time for a fire alarm and had to walk down 20 flights of stairs to find out it was a false alarm. One lady in the lobby let us all know that she was in NYC for 9-11 and that she was NOT going back to her room because they were told to go back to work after the first plane hit and look how that turned out. Needless to say, I slept lightly that night. Although with a big smile on my face thanks to the fact that there enough smart American's voting in this year's election.

Wednesday night I went to dinner with our Brazilian customers. They are the nicest people. I won't post pictures, but want to mention that even though they are our customers, would not let me pay for dinner even though I invited them out.

Love you all!

Weekend Adventure

Well, I've definitely talked the talk. So after much anticipation, Jenny, her mom Debby, and I walked the walk, and headed to Nevada to help campaign for Barrack Obama. It was quite the eye opening experience. Here's how it went...

We left Jenny's house at 4pm and got to Vegas around 9pm on Friday night. Debby drove the whole way. Thanks, Debby! We had a quick dinner at Mulligans somewhere in Vegas, way off the strip. This would be our first of several greasy spoon meals. It was the first and only time that I've been to Vegas and gone to bed before midnight, and having had only one beer. This was not a trip of leisure. We were all business. We woke up at 6am (another first for any Vegas trip), and managed to get showered and ready in an hour with only one bathroom and 2 towels between the three of us ladies. Impressive, no?We left the Sienna Suites at 7:30am and headed to the park were we were going to meet other Obama supporters. Jenny remembered to bring clipboards for us. Thanks, Jenny!

There was a pretty large turnout, about 200 people at this location. It really gave me hope that all these people want the same thing. Bottom line is we love this country, we feel informed and are not being led by fear or lies, and want to make sure that the US doesn't make the same mistake it made in 2000 and 2004 by not paying attention and not voting for the best candidate. So we headed to an assigned field office where we would find out where we would be canvassing.We got our information packs and hung out for a short while. Here's one of the walls inside the office with the Obama artwork made by some children. Too bad these kids aren't old enough to vote. Our mission was to get people to vote early and give them information on the dates and locations for early voting. We also had literature, and cards for other people who might be interested in volunteering.So we hit some neighborhoods on the outskirts of Las Vegas, about 6 or 7 miles from the strip. The houses we visited were either super spread out, or in tight cul-de-sac clusters. Most people weren't home, but when they were home there was always an interesting story to tell from our interaction with them.Debby knocked on the door at the house above. She talked to the man who answered the door and as she was walking away, he handed her some trash and asked her to throw it away on her way out.

We had a door slammed in our face, and another person turned on the sprinklers on us. Then there was the "we don't want any Obama stuff in this house", and also a "I'll never vote democrat, never have, never will, because they spend too much money and they'll take my guns away". Which by the way, is not true. If you're going to have issues with government spending, consider the 10 billion bucks a month spent in Iraq. That's a Republican president spending your money honey.

There were a couple of spilt households, one man said his wife's voting Obama and he's voting "McClain" (not a typo).
One of the houses we visited happened to be Penn Jillette's house (the illusionist/comedian). How cool is that! We rang the buzzer to be let into the gate, but no one answered.It wasn't a fancy neighborhood, there was more gravely space between houses than there were houses. So it was unusual to see this compound style residence in the middle of the desert.

There were a couple of houses that were already voting for Obama, and had yard signs. That made us happy. I wish there had been more of those. Hardly anyone even had political yard signs.

All in all, it was an eye opening experience. These were people that are very different than the people I know, and see, and hang out with, so I was happy to meet other Americans that will be voting even if they have different views than mine. I would have liked to know more about what they thought and wished I could have had a good sit down chat (with some of the folks).

After a full day of work, we hit the road and headed back home. Jenny drove the whole way. Thanks, Jenny! We stopped at the Mad Greek in Baker for some dinner.
The food was alright. I had a tummy ache the whole rest of the night though.All in all, we felt really good about the contribution we made. I don't know if we had any effect on the outcome of this election. I hope someone we talked to, or left literature for, found our efforts useful and try to find out more about the candidates and see that Obama really is the better choice for this country. And if they don't, fine.

We were a little bummed out when we arrived at Jenny's house and saw that her across-the-street neighbor had put a McCain sign in their front yard. This morning several other neighbors had the same sign. It just means we'll have to work that much harder to get the word out.

Weekend in Bay Area

We drove up north for a wedding on Saturday. As with most weekend road trips up north, we stopped for lunch at In-and-Out burger. Doesn't Cary look like he's dancing and singing to "If you wanna be starting something" by Michael Jackson? Actually, he's just asking where's the ketchup.

For those of you who know me, its a little known fact that I have a *moderate* fear of heights. When Cary booked our hotel on the 19th floor of the Westin St. Francis and asked me ten time if I would be OK with the height, I said yes. I knew it would be hard, but I'm so tired of my (many stupid) phobias. He also mentioned that the elevators were glass, to which I replied that's fine (ha!).

It really wasn't fine the first time we rode the elevator. I had to press myself against the door, as far from the glass part of the elevator. Just the blurred reflection of San Francisco skyline on the elevator doors freaked me out enough that my palms and feet were sweaty by the time we got to the 19th floor, and that was without ever looking out of the glass elevator, my back was to it. This video was taken after I had gone up and down a few times and was a lot more relaxed.

I ask Cary, "Are you ready to get on the elevator?" To which he replies, "Are you ready to not grip the walls?"

Yeah, I grip walls. What of it?

Last Hours in Lisboa

I'm sad to say that I didn't get to experience Lisbon the way I would have liked to. But I'm glad I got to at least get a small taste of it. After we finished work on our last day, we went to the local restaurant of a colleague's cousin. Dad had been to this restaurant 4 years ago and had mentioned its a must-do thing while I was there. So I'm glad I was able to go.

This is the name of the restaurant. If you try to pronounce it as its written, you'll probably get it wrong. Portuguese is a very interesting and unusual language. It plays tricks on your eyes and ears.
I remember this tasting so good since I hadn't really eaten too many things recently. The cheese was soft and tangy, and the bread it came with was really good. I remember tasting the salt in the salami because I hadn't had too much salt recently (except maybe the tarts earlier) and it was so satisfying.
Here's my dish. I got the duradao. It was really good, but so full of bones. Really fresh. I was only able to eat half because I ate so much bread, cheese, salami before hand. Plus because I had to spend so much time on the bones, my brain let my tummy know I was full before I wanted to stop eating. Probably cuz my stomach shrank from not eating too much recently. I hate that.
I got to taste the special of the day which was polvo (octopus). So tender, not rubbery at all.
Sign outside the restaurant, and the street it was on. Lots of character.This little guy came out to let us know that he had his eye on us, in case we wanted to dine and dash.

This has nothing to do with no one, but as I waited on the tarmac for the shuttle bus to take me 20 yards away on the other side of the tarmac to board our plane, I saw this easyJet.com plane. There's just no way I could fly an airline with dot com in it's name. I already have issues flying on planes of airlines with real names.

So I'm back home and I've got to say that its damn good to be home. So so happy to be home. Home home home. I love home.

Packing it up

So its midnight and I leave in 11 hours. I will post the rest of what little pictures I have. Yesterday was the first real solid food I'd had in a while. It was so good. I went to the cafeteria in the Gulbenkian. These tastey morsels are tarts, filled with goat cheese and spinach on the left, and beef and mushrooms on the right. I was only able to finish half of the big one, then my tummy got mad, but it was so worth it. My tummy hasn't fully healed yet.

After the conference was over for the day, we walked to the dinner that was being held that night. Here's a pretty city view on the walk over there.
The dinner was held at a green house in Parque Edward. The food was, well, meh. Salright. Pond outside greenhouse. It was an interesting, random location for a dinner.

That's all I gots. I want to thank Dad for upgrading my flight home. Thanks, Pop!

I'll post about lunch today when I'm home.