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So as I think I’ve mentioned in a previous entry, Jon and I have kind of gotten into the cooking-themed reality shows. The finale of “Cooking Under Fire” was on last night, and I must say that I was kind of disappointed. I thought that some of the eliminations that they (Todd English, Ming Tsai, and Michael Ruhlman) made were kind of arbitrary. One guy got kicked off for not being assertive enough when he was supposed to be a sous chef for another contestant. In a real restaurant, standing up to the head chef and telling him, “no, you need to to it my way,” would be a one-way ticket out the door. I guess Todd English must run his restaurant differently. And then picking Katie as the winner, even though she didn’t have a dessert at the end of a six-course meal, and was 30 minutes late, seemed a little unfair to me. It seemed like the judges had already picked her from the beginning, and so therefore she wasn’t penalized for mistakes that would have gotten anyone else kicked off (86′d, in the show’s turn of phrase). And she just seemed kind of bitchy. And the prize seemed a little, well, underwhelming. Not “Todd English will let you run one of his restaurants” or even “you win a meal in one of Todd English’s restaurants,” but just “a job” in one of his restaurants. I mean, did they fire someone to make room? Or did he figure that it made more sense to go an extended leave of absence and get paid (presumably) a pile of money to find new kitchen staff than to just simply put a want ad in the NY Times? My final impression of the show was that it made all three of the judges seem kind of nasty, and, at the same time, lacking in much personality. It made me glad that Jon and I went to Circo in Vegas instead of one of Todd English’s places.

Enough of that…on a different note, I’m going to see Chris Isaak with my friend Katy tomorrow night. The concert is at the zoo, of all places. We don’t get done with work until 6, and the concert’s at 7, so hopefully our seats won’t be too atrocious. In other concert-related news, I got tickets to the Garbage concert today. I’m excited to see them as a headliner, I saw them open for No Doubt, and they were good, but they didn’t do a lot of my favorite songs. Hopefully this show will remedy that.

Gotta get some sleep…I have to be at work at 5 tomorrow morning. And after the concert tomorrow night, I have to have enough energy to endure a crowd of 12-year-0lds wearing thick glasses and stupid hats to grab a copy of the new Harry Potter book. I might just wait until Sunday though, we’re having people over Sat. night, and if I have an unread book in the house, I won’t get anything accomplished in the way of cleaning and cooking.

Just got back from a KICK ASS vacation with the man…it was our anniversary on the the 7th and we decided to take a trip even though we didn’t really have the money for it. We left on Wed. night and went to Crater Lake on thurs. The weather was perfect and it wasn’t too busy since it was during the week. What a gorgeous view. On Friday, we hiked through the Oregon Caves, which were also really cool, and spontaneously decided to make a side trip down to the redwoods since we were so close. We didn’t get down to Avenue of the Giants since we didn’t even get into Cali until about 4 pm, but we went hiking through one of the more northerly parks and through a couple of the groves along 199. It was so amazingly peaceful in the forest. It kind of made me sad to think that there used to be hundreds of miles of forest like that, and now it’s just little bits and pieces. I feel like we really didn’t do the area justice though, we’ll have to come back when we have more time.
Then we headed out to the coast for fri and sat night. We went to the Sea Lion Caves down by Florence, which were really cool, despite being pretty smelly. We also went tidepooling at Strawberry Hill, which was amazing…lots of cool stuff in the water and a colony of Harbor Seals about 20 ft from the shore on the rocks.
We happened to talk to another couple at the B&B that we stayed at, and they mentioned that the Country Fair was this weekend, so instead of coming right home, we spent a couple of hours people watching there. And there were lots of interesting people to watch. We took a bunch of pictures, they should be up soon.
It seemed like the time went really fast, but at the same time, we did so many things, it feels like we were gone way longer than 4 days. It’s nice to be home though, and I know the kitties are happy to see us after no love for a while. I think some of the pics are already posted in Jon’s blog, if anyone is dying to see how we spent our time : )