Welcome back!

I started this blog a while ago, but it sat vacant, like a field of clover. Probably because that's where my brain was. But I'd like to revive it, mostly because I realised how much fun it was to read Eli's blog, and even though I don't have a cute baby to take photos of, I have Bren and me: we're pretty cute, we're learning how to eat and talk, although we have pretty much mastered the walking part. So there Carter! :)

Yesterday, I was event coordinator. I pitched Bren, Mikael and Sally on a number of activities for the day, primarily, the Lotus Festival in hipster-neighborhood-in-training, Echo Park. The festival marks the blooming of the lotus flowers which grow on the shadier part of the Echo Park lake. It's also ostensibly a celebration of all things Asian and Pasific-Islander, but when we saw a girl on stage signing the Alannah Miles hit, "Black Velvet", I realised something was amiss here! The lotus flowers were beautiful though.





Then we went to Felt Club XL, an awesome craft fair featuring handmade knickknacks and paintings, made by some of the artists behind the recent crafting craze. I picked up an adorable pair of earrings from the Singing Librarian:



THEN, (yes there's more!), we stopped by local favorite, Scoops, in search of their signature Maple-Bacon icecream. Alas, they had not made it that day, and they were pretty much out of everything that looked good. However, I did have some Black Sesame icecream that was surpisingly yummy -- not too sweet, but subtly nutty, and a beautiful grey in colour. Mikael had a mixture of the Strawberry-Black Pepper, (awesome! you only taste strawberry at the beginning but there's a nice peppery aftertaste) and Peppermint-Chocolate.

Finally, we went to a lovely restaurant we had all wanted to try, called Canele, which some have called the Lucques of the East Side (Lucques being the restaurant in whose kitchen I worked for a bit). Delicious and unpretentious. Highlights were the Beef Bourgignon with buttered noodles, the roast chicken with sweet corn cake and sweet carrots, and what Bren battered the waitress into calling her least favorite but still yummy dish: nonni's aglio olio. YUM! Too bad I ran out of Lactaid so I couldn't fully enjoy the dessert. wwaaamp, waaaamp.

Bren and I finished the night watching this week's episode of John from Cincinnati -- the best episode so far, and a delicious reminder of the genuis of the Deadwood crew.

It was in short, a grand GRAND day!!