Thursday, November 10, 2005
Late last night I bought a new digital camera for my birthday. The last digicam I had was one of the first models of digital camera—a Ricoh RDC-4200 which didn't take very good pictures. The next digicam I have a lot of experience with is the Canon PowerShot G2 which I bought for our office in 2000. It takes very good pictures except it's a little hard getting good macro shots with indoor lighting—if you use the flash it overexposes, if you don't your photos come out too blurry to be very useful. The new digicam I chose is the Canon PowerShot A610 which I selected because I couldn't find any reviews that said anything bad about it that I thought would be problematic for me. On the whole, it seemed to be praised everywhere I looked. It's a lot less expensive than the G6 but with many of the same features. Since I'm familiar with the G2, the interface learning curve will be very small. I also bought some new AA 2500 mAh batteries—the last time I bought batteries a few years ago I got 1800s and I'm surprised that the technology is changing so quickly. Now to find a high-speed SD card to go with it... Patrick cooked my favorite breakfast for me—deluxe style. It was too much to eat! Tina called just before I left for work to send birthday greetings. I chatted with my sister at work to get ideas for gifts for my nephew Jeremy's birthday coming up. The office held a small birthday party for me: Cindy, Lucia, Ena, James, and Timmy. We had Lucia's lemon blueberry pound cake and chocolate chip cookies, James's frosted banana nut bread, Cindy's variety of scones from Arizmendi Bakery, and orange and berry juices from Joel. Met with student JL whose laptop refused to connect to the network either via wired or wireless. I spent several hours with his computer and I'm not sure exactly how I fixed it because I was going back and forth between normal mode and safe mode a lot. In Safe Mode With Networking, TCP/IP worked, but in normal mode, it wouldn't work. Sometimes I'd get a valid IP address but it just wouldn't connect to anything, other times I got 0.0.0.0 or a 169.254 address with no connection. The Program Files folder had incorrect permissions on it, so I fixed those. I reregistered some system DLLs. Chatted with Don Don online who says happy birthday. He and Jenna are expecting a baby in May! Dinner: Patrick took me out to dinner for my birthday. He didn't tell me where we were going, so it was a surprise. We rode bus 43 from 9th and Judah for a long time before getting out in the area where the Fillmore meets the Marina. We stopped in front of 3127 Fillmore Street, where we entered PlumpJack Cafe (415-563-4755). The dining room is surprisingly small, but more cozy rather than crowded, and tastefully designed, with a coat of arms and flags-hanging-from-curtain-rods theme detailed throughout. We started with Pelligrino sparkling mineral water ($7) and bread and butter. Not long after Patrick selected a bottle from the 21-page wine list, the wine arrived—a half bottle of Chateau Monbousquet Grand Cru 1999 Saint-Emilion ($70). Next was an amuse of cauliflower soup topped with chives, compliments of the chef. It was served in a small, white tea cup with saucer. Tasty. Appetizers: ahi tartare cones (yellow fin tuna, hijake, chives, sesame, jalapeño-ponzu gelee, yuzu crème, wasabi tobiko, $13.00) and dungeness crab duet (fresh dungeness crab arancinis, sherried crab bisque, $13.00). Main courses: For Patrick: grilled "premium Hereford" filet (wild mushroom stuffed artichoke heart, truffled mac n cheese, caramelized shallot-red wine sauce, $34.00), for me: seared sea scallops (roasted baby pumpkin stuffed with butternut squash risotto, pumpkin seed and sage brown butter, meyer lemon, $32.00). Patrick and I shared both appetizers. The ahi tartare cones are fantastic! They're served in a towering polished wire holder (see plumpjack.com for a photo). The cones themselves are like sugar-ice-cream-cone-shaped egg rolls stuffed with fancy sashimi. We thought at first I wouldn't be able to each them because of the jalapeño and wasabi, but it seemed hardly spicy at all. The ahi and gelee are diced tiny, and the cones are topped with the yuzu followed by the tobiko. On Patrick's second bite, he said, "I could eat 12 of these." They're that good. The crab duet was also delightful. The bisque was a little spicy, so I only had a few spoonfuls, but Patrick finished it off easily. I didn't know what an arancini was (it's an Italian rice ball), but these arancinis seemed like spherical crab cakes. They had an herby aroma which we enjoyed and couldn't place. I noticed Patrick doing the same thing I was doing while eating them—while holding a bite in your mouth, then inhale deeply. The herbs from the food are picked up and fed right into your nostrils—a pleasant sensation. Entrees: Neither Patrick nor I knew what "Hereford" meant, but we presumed it was good. (According to Merriam-Webster: any of a breed of hardy red-coated beef cattle of English origin with white faces and markings.) His filet was cooked exactly as ordered (medium) and extremely tender. I was very happy with the plate of scallops and risotto I received. We waited an unusually long amount of time between the entrees and dessert, at which point I asked Patrick if Tina had something to do with our dessert. As it turns out, I was right. When the dessert finally arrived, our server announced that it was compliments of Chef Tina Luu. One plate was a slice of chocolate cake with vanilla ice cream—a single candle burning. The other was a glass block which looked like it could also be used as a tealight holder with indentions for 3 rows of 3 tealights. Each space was occupied by a small scoop of ice cream or sorbet, so there were 9 flavors to sample. Burnt caramel ice cream with caramel sauce, white cardamom ice cream, raspberry sorbet, strawberry sorbet, vanilla bean ice cream topped with honey-coated granola, Meyer lemon sorbet, chocolate ice cream. (Patrick will help me fill in the rest later.) We had very full and satisfied stomachs when we left. A lady cab driver drove us home (about $25 after a $5 tip). I opened presents: my brother had sent a small, 6-bottle case of wine from Blackstone Winery where he used to work. Steve M sent me CDs from my Amazon wishlist: Madeleine Peyroux (Careless Love), Prince (1999), and the Kill Bill Volume 1 soundtrack.