Sometimes California is a great place to be. San Francisco has a bit of a reputation for being foggy and cold, but that’s certainly not been my experience. Like on Wednesday, when I went into the city to do some Christmas shopping (oh, the life of leisure!). How many places are there where you can shop the week before Christmas, and have lunch outside, in the sunshine, and have it warm enough to take your coat off (at least in the Northern Hemisphere)?

Of course, San Francisco is perhaps not as tropical as the palm trees in Union Square suggest. And apparently we are at the start of the ‘wet season’ – which seems to mean that it rains once every two weeks. Anyway, I’m thankful for the nice weather, and hoping that it holds for my driving test on Monday.

Although there are only about 3 weeks until Christmas, the Palo Alto climate means that it feels much more like late September. There are still beautiful red and gold leaves on a lot of the trees, the weather is still pretty mild, at least during the day (about 17C today, and probably warmer in the sun) and there are still squirrels everywhere.

The preponderance of squirrels is partly because Palo Alto is such a wooded town. Just about every street around us has trees every few yards (metres?) down both sides, as well as some really mature trees in people’s yards. There is even a local charity dedicated to planting more trees in the town, which you can support with donations at the local grocery store (see, I even talk native now :). The surprising thing is that there are two varieties of squirrel here – not grey and red, but grey and black. As I have discovered using the magic of the interweb, black squirrels occur in lots of places. They seem to be a genetic sub-division of the grey (gray?) squirrel, like black cats or white mice. (By the way, there are some very odd people out there – just type squirrels into Google and find out!).

So let’s get the grovelling out of the way first – sorry for neglecting this blog for so long; there really are no excuses. The intention of this post, then, is to fill you in on some of the things that have happened recently.

Firstly, we now have a car. After some very complex negotiations (which apparently are mandatory) we bargained them down to an appropriate price and were able to return the expensive rental car. We have bought a 1 year old Honda Accord, because they have a reputation for reliability and being the most popular model in America, have a massive market for parts. It is also a 2-door coupe with a 3 litre V6 engine, because N needs a car which won’t bore him to tears (my taste in cars is not that sophisticated, and extends to “Will it go?” and “Will it turn corners?” – the rental car we had failed the last test).

I have also started volunteering at the Children’s Library up the road. It’s quite therapeutic work – mostly shelving and sorting out the returns. It’s also fun when you come across books you recognise – anyone remember Mr Gumpy’s Outing? You’ll be pleased to hear that I haven’t yet succumbed to reading them!

I am also starting at the Tech museum on Friday. My first shift begins at (eek!) 8:30am. Americans do have a tendency to do things early – not something I expected at all. For instance, the Friday after Thanksgiving is the biggest shopping day of the year in the US – the equivalent of the Boxing Day sales in the UK. However, here you really do have to get up early to get a bargain – some sales start at 5:30am and only last until 11am, after which point the specials finish and it becomes a regular sale.

That’s all for now – will try and be a bit more assiduous from now on.

Today is Thanksgiving in the U.S., an excuse to eat a huge amount and do a lot of shopping, with no messy religious messages to clutter up the proceedings. In this spirit, we decided to mark the occasion by de-boning a chicken (we didn’t feel that we could eat a turkey between us) and stuffing it for dinner.

This is partly in honour of N’s family’s Christmas ritual, which is to de-bone the turkey and stuff it before roasting. So N took on the role of surgeon and bravely attacked the chicken. He rather impressively de-boned the entire thing, including legs and wings, and we then stuffed it with a sausagemeat, apricot and pistachio stuffing.

About an hour and a half later (it wasn’t a very big chicken) we sat down to the chicken, roast potatoes, sweetcorn, sprouts, gravy and cranberry sauce. And very good it was too.

Photos of this escapade can be found on our photos page.

Firstly, apologies for the lack of posting in a little while. I have, however, added to the main site with a page to help you in planning your San Francisco trips – so no excuses!

Today’s subject has been inspired by a Sprint ad currently running on television, Sprint being a mobile phone company. This advertisement proudly boasts that Sprint has “got rid of ugly overages”. Excuse me? What was that? Overages? Since when is that a word for anything?! From the context of the ad, it is clear that what they mean by this is the tariff imposed on calls once the monthly minutes allowance has been exceeded (and is therefore usually quite steep). This seems a perfectly reasonable concept to require a word, so I have no particular objection to a word being added to the language. But it’s such an ugly word. It sounds like sludge. And midges. Maybe that’s appropriate if Spring considers them ugly, but couldn’t they have mined the appoximately 600,000 words in the English language to come up with something better?

Another example of this American tendency to make up horrible words is the verb ‘de-train’, as heard on CalTrain thus:

“Now arriving Millbrae. Those requiring San Francisco International Airport should de-train here.” 

Presumably, this has evolved from de-plane (which is also a horrible word). But why not use some perfectly serviceable words, such as depart, leave, exit or descend?

It’s bad enough that Americans insist on misusing the language (jam, jelly, pavement) without adding whole new monstrosities.

Next time, why music isn’t as good as it was in my day, and more bufty topics 🙂

The American palate is a strange beast. Not content with pancakes, bacon and maple syrup, which Louise enjoys – but I just can’t get the hang of, we have a new madness: Hot Sweet Potato and Marshmallows with turkey.

Bizarre.

Sweet potatoes are fairly sweet anyway, hence the name, so why the marshmallows? Because you can. Next week – chilli with donuts…

For those of you who have been on tenterhooks waiting to find out if I got hold of some suet, I thought I would put you out of your misery. I eventually got a big, frozen lump of beef suet from Draeger’s meat counter, and ordered glace cherries online from The Baker’s Catalogue.

So mincemeat has been made and put in jars, following Delia’s cranberried recipe. I failed to follow Delia’s good advice about stirring while it cools and only putting into jars once it is cold, which is why you can see a nice thick layer of suet in the picture below.



I also started soaking the fruits for the christmas cake this morning. I’m basically following Mary Berry’s recipe, but with more candied peel so I can use up what I bought, and with the addition of some dried cherries instead of some of the currants. You’ll have to wait a while to see how these turn out.

In the meantime, N has suggested that we de-bone a turkey in honour of Thanksgiving, the weekend after next…

I took the Caltrain to San Jose this morning to visit The Tech Museum of Innovation, otherwise known as The Tech. As the name suggests, this is a science and technology museum and I must say they have done an amazing job with it. I suspect having a lot of high-profile sponsors and contributors (HP, Microsoft, Accenture, Innogen, etc.) has helped, but even so there are a lot of ingenious exhibits. They currently have a large Genetics exhibition, which includes a wet lab where visitors can insert a green fluorescent protein gene into bacteria, and then view the results of their exhibit on the museum website, and a demonstration of how to extract DNA from animal tissue by precipitating it in alcohol. They also do an excellent job of looking at a lot of the ethical issues around genetics, including genetic testing in pregnancy, test-tube babies, and inherited genetic diseases.

The reason for my visit was that I have applied to volunteer there, so look out for more posts about the museum in future!

Update: Click here to see a picture of my glowing green bacteria! (It takes a moment to load).

I have been into San Francisco both of the past couple of days. Both times I cycled to the station, took the Caltrain into the city, and then caught a bus to get across town. They haven’t completely got the hang of public transport here I have to say. I suspect the Caltrain is somewhat underused (a bit hard to tell as I haven’t used it at rush hour). It’s a good enough service though, very punctual and fairly efficient, though it’s hampered by very frequent stops on most services. Also, as Americans tend not to bother with bridges and tunnels for railway lines, the train sounds it’s horn or rings it’s bell almost constantly through the journey to warn people at the level crossings. So, not the most relaxing journey. I did get to catch a ‘baby bullet’ service yesterday though, which was a much smoother and quicker journey (although comparing it to a Japanese bullet train seems a bit far fetched).

Buses in San Francisco (the Muni) are also pretty frequent and efficient. The thing these two modes of transport have in common is a reluctance to tell you anything about the journey until you’re actually on board. For the buses, there is very little information other than a city-wide map available at bus stops, and no help at all in identifying where other bus stops are. Comparing these to the

information on London bus stops leaves a lot to be desired (although London certainly has plenty of transport problems!). Likewise, the train only announces where it will be stopping once you are on board and the train is moving – by which point it’s a little late! I suppose this comes from having a train service that basically only runs along one line (to San Jose and back), the only variable being which stops it makes along the way. Still, anything is better than driving into the city…

Last weekend we decided to make a strike against the monster gas-guzzling american car and buy some bicycles. Yes, we are also going to buy a car, but the bikes should help. It’s actually not such a radical move – San Francisco is where the mountain bike was invented and cycling is a really common pastime. Add that to the fact that we’re very close to Stanford’s campus, and lots of students with bikes, and we’re in a very cycle-friendly location. So there was plenty of choice for where to buy our bikes.

We chose Marins, influenced partly by my Dad, who has a lovely shiny new bike of theirs that he got this summer. And also because it’s local! (Marin county is just north of San Francisco).

It was a bit painful, paying for 2 new bikes along with helmets, locks, lights, a pump, and fluorescent vests. But it’s worth it already – Nathan has cycled to work the past couple of days, and we are looking forward to exploring some of the cycle trails in the area. Photos will be along soon, but for now, here is a photo of my model, and here is one of Nath’s.