Caught this poster for Tourism Canada on my train ride home the other day...   more »

A couple weekends back, we spent a nice day hanging out with Brian, Sooji, and Haiden.

Brian works for LucusArts and he took us to his office complex in the Presidio, which I've always thought was just was just a nice park area in the city - I never realized it housed the nicest office complex I've ever seen.   The four low rise buildings do

A sign of LucasArts, I am

not look corporate at all and they surround a very well landscaped park that just cries out for picnics on its manicured lawns.  It's all very serene and looks more like a very expensive hospital instead of the headquarters of LucasFilm Ltd.  There is absolutely no signage to indicate that this is home to George Lucas' empire, and the buildings are simply marked Building A, Building B, etc.  The only thing to give it away is the Yoda Fountain, which as you can guess is a small water fountain bearing a life-sized statue of Yoda.  I can't believe Brian works in such an environment!  I'm sooo jealous.  We didn't get to tour the office itself as it we were visiting on a Saturday, but there is a room somewhere in there that contains all things Star Wars, not to mention the movie theatres which are of course THX certified.  I'll have to go visit someday and check it out.

Old Faithful

After the Presidio, we headed up to Calistoga, which is north of San Francisco and in Napa Valley, a.k.a. Wine Country.  We weren't going on a wine tasting, however - we came across an Old Faithful geyser on the internet and wanted to check it out.  Apparently there are only three geysers in the world to earn the 'Old Faithful' designation, which indicates that the geyser erupts predictable and regularly.  Our Old Faithful erupts every 30-40 minutes and according to the brochures, it is supposed to shoot sixty feet into the air, which sounds totally awesome and I was looking forward to being impressed by it... in actuality, the geyser got no more than 25 feet into the air and we were all quite disappointed.  It had the feel of a tourist trap the moment we got there, with the cheesy souvenir store charging an $8 entry fee to see the geyser... the whole thing was so pure tourist trap that it actually was fun for us to hit a place like that.  I won't be recommending it to any visitors, though.

Check out the pictures from the day out.

We obtained a storage locker a few months back, which enabled us to clear out all of our boxes and get rid of a lot of junk.  The condo now feels very airy and spacious and not so cluttered, especially when compared to the last set of pictures I had posted.

Finally got rid of the boxes

The cleared up space also allowed us to finally create a real second bedroom.  Previously, we had the guest bed out just sitting out on the open floor which didn't sit very well with us - we wanted to provide some bit of privacy, but at the same time we didn't want to lose any of our condo space.  Building walls would create a permanent separation and we would end up losing space to a seldom used area.

After tossing around a bunch of ideas, Sara finally came up with a great solution: use curtains as walls.  With the curtains pulled back we retain the open and airy feel of the condo, and when we have guests over we can draw the curtains to provide some privacy and clearly identify the bedroom area.

I've posted a bunch of new pictures of our condo so potential visitors can see what their lodgings will look like....

Last Thursday morning, an earthquake hit the Bay Area at 4:30 in the morning. It was a magnitude 4.3 and the epicenter was ust across the bay in Oakland.   more »

Woah.... just experienced my first earthquake.  The whole building shook for about half a second.  Not a lot of shake, just one big shake, as though someone dropped something really big and heavy nearby.  I had shivers run up my spine right after it happened.  No sirens or fires and my electricity is still here, so that's good.  I'm quite unsettled right now.

I looked up some data on what just happened.  Happened just a few minutes ago at 8:40pm PST, epicenter's 17 km away and was a magnitude 4.4... take a look on the earthquake map, it's a pretty big red square....  scary stuff.

Update:
sfgate.com has a front page article about the quake.  Sounds like it was quite scary near the epicenter.  Also, the last line of the article is not exactly the most comforting thing I've heard:

"Of course, I could be dead wrong. But the odds are in my favor."  If he's wrong, he (and the rest of us here in the Bay Area) will definitely be dead....

TO furniture is now here

All of our Toronto belongings arrived today, and the place is a huge mess now.  Gonna be lots of unpacking for us over the next few weeks.... maybe even months, considering we haven't really completed unpacking from our original move-in back in November.

Having the tv will be nice, but now we have a TON of stuff that we were getting along just fine without.  *shudder*

Anybody wanna come visit and help unpack?