Sunday, December 25, 2005

Slept in. Picked up Mom Ryan at Mission Dolores. Met Kerry at Mom's place. We opened Christmas presents. Patrick and I got Mom Ryan a 5-disc DVD set of the Barbra Streisand Television Specials. Patrick got me two books in hardcover: The Commitment by Dan Savage and How's Your Romance? by Ethan Mordden. Kerry got a bunch of clothes. The four of us went to dim sum breakfast at Yank Sing (415-957-9300, 101 Spear Street). Neither Mom Ryan nor Kerry had had dim sum before—they both seemed to enjoy it. Mom Ryan was even chopsticks-capable after only one or two tries! Yank Sing was excellent once again. They seemed to have some dishes that weren't normally available. We had: Shanghai dumplings, potstickers, hot tea, foil-wrapped bacon-wrapped pork spare ribs, breaded prawns, pan-fried green beans, shau mai, shrimp and chive dumplings, char siu, Peking duck, Chinese broccoli, egg rolls, shrimp toast, honey walnut salad, chicken satay, orange jello, mango pudding, pistachio and almond ice cream cake. Afterwards, we took Kerry on a driving tour of San Francisco. We drove past the Golden Gate Bridge (but it was too foggy to see it), drove down Lombard Street, drove through the Haight and the Castro, stopped at the AMC Van Ness but we had just missed the starting times for the films we had wanted to see (The Chronicles of Narnia, King Kong, Mom Ryan wanted to see Rumor Has It), back to Mom Ryan's place where we watched disc 5 of the Barbra Streisand Television Specials on DVD. Patrick and I returned home. We sent out the Lodestar announcement—a few days late this time. I edited yesterday's photos and photos from my recent trip—color correction, rotating and cropping, fixing red-eye, and so forth. Experimented with PhotoStitch more - got some nice panoramas to emerge. Tried to figure out how to create a QuickTime VR panoramic (movie?) from a 360-degree panorama of Kailua Beach I had created - could not figure out how to do this easily in Windows, gave up (for now). Dinner at home with Patrick: leftovers. Watched The Apartment (1960) taped from PBS.