Forewarned is forearmed...

G'day all!

What a busy busy busy week it has been! I had not realised how much work it is having visitors! It's been INSANE! MiL and AiL want to pack it all in (and I don't mean the Australian sense of giving up and going home, no I mean get as much seen and done as possible in the shortest possible time). They are running me off my feet!

But they have gone off to Yosemite until Friday and I have a chance to catch up, get some housework done (!!!) (I have been fascinated by the different pubes that have appeared in the bathroom and lordy may I never have a pure white bathroom again!), do a lot more knitting, some shopping without having people gawping at the enormousness that is Wholefoods, general mucking around and not having to go someplace and entertain people. Not that they are high maintenance but I am just not used to not having much of a break in between Doing Stuff. (I'll be putting more pics up on Victorian, On the Move eventually.)

So what have we done in the last week?

Knitted two sleeves and half the back for my LYS shop sample. (no pic)

Wandered around San Jose for half a day after visiting DH at the office and having lunch in the Adobe cafe (good food, cheap!).


(one of the art museums, was a post office!!)


(City Hall - this building is empty! Just for looks or what?)


(The Martin Luther King Jr library at SJSU)

Had a slow day. Yay!

Visited the local historic house - it only dates from 1925 so it isn't really old but it is beautiful. It is also decorated in a restrained fashion unlike the Victorian/Queen Anne style homes.



Can you believe that this whole house was relocated from a site a mile away? (Plus one of my friends back 'ome should like its name :-)

Picked up a car and tooled around the burb showing AiL and MiL where we live and what the burbs look like here. We nearly got taken out by a veteran reversing his stupidly large SUV into us - he only used one wing mirror and could not see us right behind him. Even with persistent use of the horn he still kept coming at us... and we were stuck in the parking lot with cross traffic stopping us from getting out. Someone stopped to let us out, thank heavens, otherwise we would've been ringing up to say the rental car we had had for 1.5 hours had just been run into...

We checked out Los Gatos. I found a shady spot to park the car in TWICE! I guess everyone had gone away for the long weekend - it was July 4th, after all.

(Cute restaurant)

We then had a picnic in the (car)park at Adobe and watched the fireworks.



I was very surprised by how low key the 4th was here - it was somewhat more ra-ra in Colorado. I guess that the Bay area has an awful lot of non-Americans living here, and we are not really into celebrating another country's independence (but we are happy to watch their fireworks :-). All of the joy, none of the responsibility!



Earlier we were enthralled by the planes flying over the Adobe towers. The towers are in the flight path for the local airport. I have a video that I might try uploading.


Saturday we drove off to the mountains and the sea. We had requests for redwoods and the Pacific. So we took off down the 17 (highway), Bear Creek Road,


Skyline Boulevard (the end of it is one lane only - such a fun road!),


(looking out over the Bay area from the less exciting part of Skyline))

Alpine Road (redwoods!)






and thence to Half Moon Bay for lunch.



We like Half Moon Bay - it is very much a tourist town but it is funky and has a good vibe to it. After lucnh we were off down along the highway to some beaches,


(it was foggy along the coast until we got to Pigeon Point, where it was foggy on one side of the point and sunny on the other. Weird, huh? I guess it is the same fog that envelops SF.)


for a paddle (my aunt in law. My word, the Pacific was COLD! I stood in the path of a wave whilst taking a shot of some cliffs and OMG! My legs went numb instantly! I've never known seawater to be so cold and I come from a place where the currents sweep up from the Antarctic.)

and flower pics





and a lighthouse (Pigeon Point).

We stopped to watch some kite surfers -


these dudes are mad!


Finally we had dinner in Santa Cruz


at a chocolate shop. LOL I got very cross indeed with this sock

after I dropped one p2tog stitch that ran and ran and ran and in tinking to fix up something I dropped another couple of stitches.... This sock is by the same designer as my most beautiful socks in the world. Anyway, I recorded the sock for posterity and ripped it. I really hate the pattern. No down time in it at all - yo, p2tog all the way....

Sunday. Sunday was slack. We cruised down to Santana Row,



the local equivalent of Chapel Street (but prettier) - it is the place to be seen. I liked the architecture:



Today (yesterday by the time I've put all these pics in!) the in laws fled the Bay area for Yosemite.

At this point I must say I am very grateful to them for keeping the temps down in the Bay area. Until they left, that is...


(Side note - why oh why do I HAVE to put dates in Gnumeric in AMERICAN FORMAT???? Why can I not use a very common, non-American standard? Day, month, year? Why can they not think beyond their own shores or realise other places use different stuff? You might be surprised by the venom with which I made my feelings clear...)

Oh and it has been clear as a bell until yesterday - no smoke from the fires or anything. Today? Back to ole smoky!

So this week is catch up week. Then we are off to Monterey next weekend, and thence to San Francisco for a couple of days, then they fly back 'ome a couple of days later. I am hoping to blog a bit this week and catch up some. Then again I may just lie here feeling overly hot and trying to knit more of this pretty cardi for the LYS.

anon!