Busy Saturday - Lazy Sunday

Saturday morning, Tom and I decided to take a trip to the beach (one of Banjo's absolute favorite places) and to stop by a pick-your-own strawberry farm that we've visited almost every year. We took the most direct route to the beach from our house, which takes you through some crazy turns as you wind up and down the peninsula ridge. Unfortunately, we discovered that a big dog food breakfast and windy roads make for a carsick Banjo.

The day looked up for everyone once we arrived at Phipps Farm. We spent 15 minutes or so trying to taste our way to the sweetest part of the patch, and then settled down and picked three buckets full. Banjo enjoyed himself, too - he got to eat two berries and meet some of our friendly picking neighbors. He also had a close encounter with a hyper yorkie whose owner (retroactively) said - "he's friendly..... just not to other dogs". Grrr.

After picking, we went to Bean Hollow Beach for a picnic. We saw some crazy folks actually swimming in the ocean, some cool starfish, and some beautiful water-washed rock formations. Unfortunately I didn't have the camera then, but I'll take some pictures next time we go. We took a short hike and Banjo spent some time trying to drink the ocean and chasing his tail happily. He's quite the trooper on the slick rocks - anything we can do, he can too.

We hustled home for a quick shower and then scooted out the door to meet some of my co-workers/friends for a "friendly" exhibition soccer match between Chelsea FC (known as the Yankees of the European premier league) and Club America, which is from Mexico. It was quite an experience. The 40,000 person Stanford Arena was almost full of screaming fans. The Chelsea side staged elaborate cheers and odes to beer, while the Mexico side shot off vast quantities of illegal fireworks into the stadium (15 minutes worth of bottle rockets followed by 2-3 major 4th of July type exploding fireworks) and unfurled an ENORMOUS Club flag that covered several sections of seats.

The soccer game was quite fun, too. The underdogs Club America scored early on a hard deflection off of one of the Chelsea players. We saw some great dribbling displays and amazing ball handling by both sides, but no more goals were scored in the first half. Chelsea dominated the second half but just couldn't find goal. In the last 15 minutes, Chelsea finally snuck a shot past the CAs keeper and we thought that we might be headed to overtime. But 5 minutes later, a long looping cross was crisply headed into the back of the net by Chelsea. This did not seem to diminish the spirits of the Club America fans, however, who promptly set off another volley of fireworks despite stern warnings from the stadium announcer.

Today, so far, we've... slept... woke up... wandered around in our pjs... took the dog for a walk... wrote a blog... put some strawberries in the freezer and food dehydrator... learned a new video game... and read. Tom has the playoffs for his softball league this evening, which should be good fun, and we have a couple other tasks for the day, but relaxing has been given priority one. Hope everyone out there had a good weekend too!