St Patrick's Day in an American "Irish" pub & Wine tasting in Livermore

St Patrick's Day at Beckett's

This week, I believe I consumed more than my annual quota of alcohol. First, it was St Patrick's Day, and a group of my colleagues and my facebook friends met at an "irish" pub in Berkeley California, Becketts. We had a great time. You can see all the photos here. Lots of alcohol was imbibed by everyone, as you can see from the photos. One of my friends, who shall remain nameless, has officially dubbed me a bad influence, since she was inebriated enough that she needed to take a taxi home. I, on the other hand, brought my own designated driver, which is a smart move, as I can barely drive when I'm sober.

Helen, Gordon, Phil and Enda

Then Easter Sunday came along and Gordon and I spent the day winetasting in Livermore with my college friends Phil & Enda. Now I hadn't seen Phil & Enda since 1982, then I connected with a mutual friend on facebook and he told me that Phil was working at Lawrence Livermore National Lab, so I got in touch and now I have college friends in the area! I am happy to say that none of us had changed a bit since college, really. So since they live in Livermore, we headed over there for brunch and then visited the Livermore wineries, which were really good. They are more low-key than the Napa wineries, which translates to them not charging you for tasting, for the most part! It was a beautiful day, Livermore tends to be warm, and in March, a 75 degree temp feels pretty good. Might not feel as good in July! Also, the owner of Bent Creek winery used to be the school principal to Phil & Enda's kids, so we had a good connection there. We hit two or three wineries, and I tasted lots of good wine. Apparently, I like port. Who knew?

Bus B3 Reunion

Aisling with fan

Last night, we had a reunion of the Bus B3 folks from our trip to China last year. We decided to do it right around Chinese New Year, it seemed like a good time to do it. As is normal around Chinese New Year in the Bay Area, the rain *poured* down, but even so, we had a great turnout, including people like Fengyi & Alex driving all the way from Davis. The food was great, Gordon dug into his chinese cooking book and made a delicious spicy eggplant dish, spicy noodles, curry crescents (yum), smoked chicken. We also had pork and chicken that Fengyi and Alex brought, along with a green bean cake, made slightly sweeter than normal by Fengyi for dessert. Siegrid also brought the obligatory watermelon. And lots of people brought wine! There were a lot of empty winebottles at the end of the night. Siegrid brought the Bus B3 photo, plus the Great Wall photo plus some prints of other photos to share. It was also a nice opportunity to meet family members who weren't on the tour, Dara, Zach and Aidan (who wasn't even born at the time!) and Malaika's boyfriend Eric.

We had a great time. More photos are posted on my flickr site. Click here to see them.

Chinese New Year Run

Helen at Chinese New Year Race

Today, Aisling and I did a 5K run in Chinatown in San Francisco. It was the annual Chinese New Year run. It's the year of the rat. We had to get up at an ungodly hour to get in to register before the 8 a.m. start. We registered, got our numbers and t-shirts, and were at the starting line on time, though. The t-shirts are very attractive. There were a lot of people, probably 3000 or so. It was really well organized, it got started on time, and the traffic control was great. The streets were open to cars on one side and runners on the other.

It was cold in San Francisco, the fog had not burned off, which is okay when you're running I guess. It's all on pavement, and there were a couple of hills. We tried the running some and then walking some to keep our pace where we wanted it. We both came in at about 32 minutes, which is a little slower than I'd like, but considering the hills and the crowd, which also slowed us down, so it wasn't bad. After the race, and some water and coffee, Aisling played at the Portsmouth Square playground for a while, and we were home before 10!