Hungry?

Tuesday night was Big Dan's last wine tasting chef's dinner at Kincaid's, so I met up with his lady and his family to partake of his going out with a bang. The meal was so stinking good that I'm going to break it down here so it can be recorded for posterity.

• Amuse bouche: a lovely light crab rangoon, paired with champagne.
• Dish one: A seared scallop with fava puree and savory vanilla lemon sauce. Paired with a sauvignon blanc. My favorite.
• Dish two: Smoked duck breast with pickled cherries. Paired with a chardonnay. My second favorite dish.
• Dish three: Here the wine started kicking in and it got hazy. I remember lamp chops in a blueberry sauce with haricot verts, paired with a tasty California red.
• Dish four: Handmade boar sausage with a side of beans and pickled onion. Paired with an Italian red.
• Dessert: Roasted peaches with whipped cream. Have you had freshly whipped cream lately? It's divine. Paired with a dessert wine so delicious that I bought a bottle and am dreaming of when I'll open it. The only photo I took is this one of Dan's sister, looking as excited as I felt about this wine.

I didn't take notes at the time and I got pretty sloshy, but what I remember should be enough to convey that is was an epic performance. Then Dan took us to a dive bar and then the night ended with shots of Jameson while sitting in our living room, as every good night should.

Domestic disturbances

Last weekend was a doozy. Mike was in LA to play a show so I filled up my schedule as much as possible. Turns out I was a bit too ambitious.

Friday: work from home, get some serious bangs cut, interview a local artist and restaurant owner for Haighteration. Get picked up by Beth, head to the Fillmore to see the Comedy Central special taping of a comedian who totally bombs and requests that the audience not tweet, blog, or talk about her performance. Excellent. On to Vanessa's birthday at Dear Mom, where a million friends have convened to drink and photobooth. Shut the place down.

Saturday: meet P+E for brunch at Maverick, delicious. Wander Valencia, get a beer at Zeitgeist, head to Dolores Park for Pride festivities. Spend the rest of the afternoon volunteering for Dyke March in several capacities: acting as a marshal/barricade mover for Dykes on Bikes, breaking down the organizer's area, picking up trash left by tens of thousands of drunkos. Wander to 16th and Market to check out the crazy street dance party scene, run into a group of friends, get pulled in for an evening of tacos, cuddling with ten other ladies in bed, and delirious chats.

This is where it gets weird: head home, read in bed until about 2 a.m., trying to ignore upstairs neighbors' increasingly loud fight. Very, very angry fight. Slam slam boom through the floor kind of fight. Lady neighbor getting louder and shriekier, finally starts absolutely screaming for help, for the police, for 911. It is not a sound I'll forget anytime soon - high pitched, desperate, horror movie-esque. I called the police right away, and they showed up in what seemed like only a minute, but lady neighbor had gone completely silent and I was sure she was dead. I answer the door to the cops with my new bangs sticking straight up, in my bathrobe, with my hands shaking from adrenaline and fear. Cops storm through my house (which smelled like butt, thanks to a fresh dook from Ezzie), out the back, and up the stairs with their weapons-grade flashlights drawn. Occasional thumps, mostly silence. I close the doors to the house that the police left open, still shaking. Call Mike a million times, leave plaintive messages. Call my mom, who per usual is amazing and soothing and talks about her garden until my hand stop shaking and I can get off the phone. Walk outside to catch the cop cars driving away. Run into the road to hail one. Me: Is everything ok? Cop: Situation is under control. Me: So no one is hurt? Cop: I wouldn't say that. Talk to Mike, get further soothed, go to bed.

Sunday: wake up, still exhausted from previous night's drama, still glad no one got killed. Interview a neighbor about their backyard for Haighteration. Hit up the farmer's market. Garden, garden, garden. Mike comes home, we head to Fly Bar for dinner, then Madrone for drinks. Home, revisit old epidodes of Firefly, helloandgoodnight.

I'm exhausted just writing about it.

Magazines

Look what I helped make! Digital magazines, for you and for me and the entire human race. This was a tough product to work on, for reasons personal (I know less about the magazine industry than I do books) and organizational (we had some churn in the product manager department). But its out, and it looks great, and I'm so happy.

Launch days are always anticlimactic. You've been working on something for months and years, and then boom - it's out in the wild. But you're still at your desk, with your plastic cup of champagne in your hand, unable to hear your baby blowing people's minds all over the land. You have to call your mother or email friends or obsessively check TechCrunch to get any reaction.

And on a day like today - with product launch after product launch, and some freaking skydiving thrown in for good measure - a non-gadget isn't going to get too much love. But it's out there, it's working, and I'm savoring it.

I'm a bloggah

My new post for Haighteration is up, covering a restaurant revamp in my hood. It's got 44 likes, biatch.

Treehouse of my dreams

It will be mine one day.

Tiny Furniture

A few days ago I finally watched Tiny Furniture. I haven't yet seen any episodes of Girls - though people are always telling me I should - and so it was my introduction to Lena Dunham and her style. I thought it was wonderful. I've never seen onscreen a true portrayal of the physicality of the way women act with one another - the hair touching, the arm squeezing, the back rubbing, the cuddling in bed. "Come to bed" was the catch phrase that got our group of friends through college. Bad day? Come to bed. Breakup? Come to bed. Stressed out from studying? Come to bed. Someone will brush the hair out of your eyes, scratch your back, and spoon the crap out of you. It was moving, and somehow validating, to see that onscreen.

The dude stuff was pretty real too. Maybe a litte extreme, but I'd be surprised to find a woman for whom the essence of it - the hope, the excitement, the almost inevitable embarrassment and lack of anything resembling romance - wasn't a bit true. But mostly it's the girl stuff that stuck with me, and that I think makes the movie so lovely.

Also, she goes pantsless a lot. I liked that part. Pants are for chumps.

Porch revamp

We recently made some improvements to our porch, and now I want to sit out there all the time. You should come over and hang out with me and drink wine.

It used to look like this, complete with me making a crazy face.

Coffee table, futon, cat-smelling futon cover, all slowly molding.

Now it looks like this.

I found two chandeliers on the street, and we strung them up. I bought a small dining set off Craigslist, and hung the party lights in a slightly less haphazard manner. We've got the heater standing by for chilly nights, and the grill for making dinner. Recent experiment: grilled bread, halloumi, and peaches. Two thumbs up.

Haighteration

My first post on neighborhood blog Haighteration went up this week! I profiled a few interesting backyards in the neighborhood - or at least, ones I thought were interesting. One commenter begged to differ. And yes, I know I'm not supposed to read the comments.

But! It was nice to get back to interviewing and writing, and I plan on doing more. 

Errata

There are about a million things I want to do in the next week. Free food truck happy hour at Elbo Room tonight, Big Freedia at Public Space, dance party fundraiser for Lyon-Martin, friends to see and a blooming backyard to sit in and drink wine. This weekend is supposed to be warm and sunny, and I plan on taking full advantage. The Proxy Project in Hayes Valley has a little bike party going on, there's a new food truck lot in Soma, and a singalong movie in Dolores Park on Saturday night. And eventually I'm going to do one of these midnight mystery bike rides. Next week there is a free Hendrick's party at the Swedish American Hall, SF Weekly's summer party, and a lot of summer solstice action happening. Plus: getting ready for Pride.

In my world in consumerism, Heidi has a pop-up online shop. Luckily all the things I wanted sold out quickly, so I couldn't do any damage. 

Last night I made the tastiest beast of a dinner. I had leftover tsukemen broth from Hapa Ramen's popup at Wing Wings (the ramen was really tasty), and I poured it over curried spaghetti squash and roasted brussel sprouts and broccoli. The two Brecki modes of eating are (not very artistically) displayed here:

Mike's plate is neatly segmented and hotsauced up. Mine is a mess. A very delicious mess.

Home again

Goooood morning! I am way perkier than I usually am before 8 a.m. because I'm still on east coast time. I flew back yesterday, after two weeks in New York, many great meals (eat here, here, here, here, here and here if you can), too many late nights out with friends, back to back work meetings, and some excessive laziness thrown in for good measure.

I brought some ladies to rural Pennsylvania to hang out at my parents'. We did some beekeeping with my dad.

Bees are absolutely incredible. They kick all the males out of the hive to die before the winter, then just make more in the spring. They can communicate - through head waggles and booty dances - exactly where a source of food is. They make wax AND honey. That's the one I can't get over.

We sat around and drank wine.

We chased wild turkeys, and then gave up for some glamour posing.

We watched an incredible sunset, while still sitting and drinking wine. 

We cooked, a lot. We snipped fresh herbs. Grilled cornbread-crusted catfish and corn, made guacamole with cherries in it, baked rhubarb cake, stirred up omelettes, roasted s'mores over a bonfire. We went for runs and bike rides. It was glorious.


And then, at the end, I checked into my hotel, into this view.

I spent days at the Javits Center.

We did karaoke.

We checked out the Brooklyn markets.

And we ate, and ate, and ate.

Muppet theory of the universe

I believe this article to be absolutely 100% right: we are all either Chaos Muppets (Cookie Monster) or Order Muppets (Bert). I am most definitely an Order Muppet.

This has supplanted Meyers-Briggs and Gay or European? as my favorite human classification system.

Cookie Monster, Ernie, Grover, Gonzo, Dr. Bunsen Honeydew and—paradigmatically—Animal, are all Chaos Muppets. Zelda Fitzgerald was a Chaos Muppet...Your first grade teacher was probably an Order Muppet. 

This article is just too good.