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Ok, time to fill in the weekdend details that you have all been so anxious to find out!
Mom’s plane came in around 5PM. I left work at about 3:50 and traffic was amazingly light. I got to SJC at about 4:40, which is pretty good time from San Bruno. After picking up Mom we went back to my place and I baked the pie, which was pluot & raspberry. Due to some problems with the crust there was a massive leak and much of the juices ran out. As this was another free-form pie the juices were able to escape to the edges of the cookie sheet, instead of pooling under the crust and causing it to boil instead of bake. This was probably a good thing. After the pie was done and put on the cooling rack we went out to dinner. We came back and had some pie, that was a bit subpar but still pretty good. Sorry, no pictures of the pie this time.
On Saturday we went to brunch at Stack’s in Campbell, which is a very tasty breakfast place. There was almost no wait, which was amazing. Then we went to the Camera 12 to see Napoleon Dynamite. Erin and I liked it a fair amount. It’s really rather funny, but it is one of the weirder movies I’ve seen. It wasn’t really my Mom’s cup of tea, but as she had told me in the past “put a bag of popcorn in front of me and I’m happy”, and she had the requisite popcorn, so don’t go thinking I was mistreating my Mother!
After the movie we went back to my apartment and chilled for a while. Eventually we went out to dinner at Fuki Suhi in Palo Alto. Erin had a couple of lemon drops with her dinner which affected her greatly. We all enjoyed our food immensely though. During dinner I got voicemail from a coworker asking me if I could be on call to help with handholding a prospective customer at 11PM that night. Seeing as there was no one else available to help, and I would just be sitting at home watching TV with Mom at that time anyway, I said I could do it.
When 11PM rolled around, sure enough I was called on to hold some hands. It was actually pretty pathetic and the sales engineer should have been able to deal with it themselves… this was a prospective Fortune 500 customer who was switching over to our appliance and making sure it worked before cutting a PO. Thankfully I just got to sit on IM and talk with the Customer Support person who was actually on the conference call instead of being on the call myself. After we showed them that things were all running smoothly I went to bed.
Sunday we left to go to the aquarium at around 10:30AM. It was just Mom and me, since Erin doesn’t really like the sea creatures that much. Traffic was pretty decent and we made it to Monterey by a little after Noon. We had to park downtown and take the free shuttle the aquarium, so we ended up getting inside the aquarium around 12:45 or so. Thankfully I had borrowed a coworkers guest membership passes so there was no waiting in line to deal with!
We went right to the “Sharks Myth & Mystery” exhibit which I had been jonesing for all summer long. It was pretty cool, but I think I was a bit underwhelmed after all the waiting. I think part of it was the sheer number of families with kids in the exhibit, making it hard to actually see much. I also wished there were a few more shark tanks with slightly bigger sharks. Oh well, it still was pretty cool and I got to pet a baby shark and skate, which was almost worth it in and of itself!
After seeing the sharks, we had a quick bite to eat in the aquarium’s cafe. The garlic fries there are QUITE POTENT. We then tooled around the rest of the aquarium. It was pretty busy, but nothing was quite so packed as the shark exhibit. I took a bunch of pictures and several movies at the aquarium. The movies are online currently, I’ll put up pictures later.
Traffic back home from the aquarium was pretty bad and the drive took almost two and a half hours. We arrived home around 6:15PM, at which point it was we decided to get dinner. We went to Fiesta Del Mar in Mountain View, which is yummy Mexican food. After dinner we watched Sunday night TV shows and Mom showed us her trick for folding fitted sheets.
I took Mom to the airport at about 8:15AM this morning, and then I drove to the train station and took the train to work. After the traffic coming home yesterday afternoon I couldn’t stomach the though of driving home today.