ciao samin

alright, so i've been doing some cool stuff lately:

last week, j-do took me to dinner (courtesy of her company) at tamarine, a fancypants asian-fusion restaurant in menlo park. the food was pretty good, and it was totally the type of place i would never be able to go to on my own. and even though i live in berkeley, being in menlo park and seeing a completely different kind of university life in action made me suddenly want to be in school again. i started thinking about how wonderful it might be to go to stanford. mostly, though, it was just good seeing my friend, and having a great time with her. thank you so much, j-do.

on friday, lasassy and i got together to make a present for j-do's birthday. i went over to her house and we pretty much spilled every art and craft thing we own on the floor and proceeded to make pages for a book we bound for our friend. presents, like prada lip balm, a brooch, and gold and tourquoise earrings, were parts of the pages. it was a really great thing, i think, and j-do seemed to love it. we also baked her a matching tourquoise cake with gold rolos on it.

saturday, after spending hours fruitlessly looking for my white ipod headphones, i met lasassy and we made our way to the bambuddha lounge, where we met everyone for the birthday dinner. it was fun, but ridiculously expensive, and the food didn't compare to where we'd eaten on monday. the best part was when they brought out the lame cake we made--this trendy restaurant bringing out a lopsided, tourquoise cake!

later, we made our way to voda, on belden place, and eventually home.

on saturday, lasassy and i met MARGARET ELIZABETH SASS and took her to the thai temple. for once, we didn't get too much food, just some soup, pad thai, curry and mango with sticky rice. it was a beautiful day, and all of berkeley seemed to be there.

after we dropped off maggie, we made out way to the most excellent della fattoria in petaluma. we get their amazing rosemary-lemon and campagna breads at the restaurant, and i'd met ed and kathleen before. they recently opened up the sweetest cafe, so we went to visit. unfortunately, we were still totally full from our brunch at thai temple, and couldn't eat a thing. but they sent us off with some wonderful semolina pullman bread, a banana bread, and a tiny chocolate decadence cake. it was all delicious (i'm assuming the chocolate cake was delicious, because i didn't try any of it).

after a stop at the outlets (lasassy, you totally should have gotten the marc jacobs shirt. it was so cute!) and target, we made it back home and started work on our tuna melts. they were pretty much the best tuna melts i've ever had. read about how to make them here.

after that, i've pretty much been back to work. oh, i had philly cheesesteaks over at bakesale betty's house the other night, and she taped american idol for me. but when i got home, it was just 2 straight hours of the home shopping network on the tape! oh well, i watched the elimination show last night and even though i was bummed about nikko smith not making it into the top 12, i have to say that i am pretty content with the finalists that were chosen. my favorites: mario vazquez, anwar robinson and nadia turner.