Empanadas to celebrate Baby Dillon, coming July 2014.
Pretty amazing. I made a game time decision to get to Austin last Saturday to attend the baby shower for Friend Hannah (of Hannah and Jed). It’s her first baby and I co-hosted along with the Austin gal pals, so I thought I should definitely be there. But after being in New York for the week, it was going to be a tough turnaround, and indeed it was. Now I have a cold.
But damn I love a deadline. Knowing I only had about five hours in town, total, I made sure Justin picked me up and we went straight to P Terry’s (best fast burger in Austin) and dashed through the drive-thru for cheeseburgers. Scarfed ’em down on the way to El Azteca ($6.95 enchilada plate with rice/beans plus tea and a sherbert) and killed that combo meal along with my beloved flour tortillas. Had a barbecue place been across the street, we would have made the trifecta of gluttony happen, but we overdid it on chips. Still pretty proud of ourselves nonetheless.
And this should probably go without saying but, the Hannah shower was lovely — Nurse Sara hosted it at she and Andy Brown’s home, in their backyard garden. The ladies put together an event worthy of a thousand Pinterest pins.
Tim endured SIX layovers when going home from my wedding in Amsterdam, so there was no way I would miss his nuptials, no matter where it happened.
Went into the Santa Cruz mountains, home of the glorious Northern California redwood trees for the Tim Leong-Rachel Swaby nuptials-slash-YMCA-camp. We didn’t have to kill our own food. There were pretty nice little cabins shared among groups of 14 of us, just like Girl Scout camp. We had flushing toilets, but not two-ply toilet paper. These are some things that happened:
First I spent a night in SF hanging with my friend Chris. We came back to the apartment kind of drunk and promptly parked on the street. The next morning the car was gone. Guess what the minimum tow rate in SF is? $476. And on top of that, there are about $160 parking tickets to pay. So…somehow my one bad parking mistake cost more than my roundtrip airfare to San Francisco.
After getting out to the camp, we wandered into the “town” of Boulder Creek, CA and met some anti-government guys trying to get us to sign a petition against more gun restrictions. Had we signed, we could have gotten a “I don’t call 911” t-shirt with a giant AK-47 on it. We passed. But that night, one of our bunkmates was wearing the shirt.
Justin and I tried to go on a hike. The trail was awfully rocky and steep. The sign at its entrance told us it was named the Nit Trail, but upon turning back because of the rough terrain, we pulled away a leaf to realize the sign actually said “Not a Trail.”
Patrick Terpstra, yes, that guy, officiated the ceremony. He did a brilliant, funny, heartfelt job despite my utter disbelief anyone would choose him to officiate a wedding ceremony. After the bridal party exited, he ended his emceeing by saying, “Okay we’re good then.”
During a walk along the Embarcadero, I got some sage life advice from the appropriately-named Om, a lovely and generous human being who is now a venture capitalist but always a journalist at heart.
Capped off the weekend back in SF, where I took a nice long shower all by myself in a boutique hotel. The photos. Click on any image to begin the gallery:
Justin was very excited to find a hot dog place with this name.
Reunion with my long lost pal Dave outside the Twitter cafeteria. We worked to get the bros in the background.
The view from my rubber mattress bunkbed in the cabin.
A look at our digs.
I spent much of 2014 just barely hanging on. (In the NorCal redwoods, May 2014)
Oh, it says NOT a trail, not the Nit Trail.
Terp prepares to climb.
And he made it.
A little afternoon archery.
We do this selfie at every wedding we attend together.
