California Internship - Week 4

4 weeks in, 13 left. Wow. Feels like any day now it will be halfway to done. This is where it's at right now:

I'm watching "Alice in Wonderland" out of the corner of my eye, the laptop is so hot that I have to prop it up on a pillow and tomorrow morning I will be going for pancakes with some of the interns. This week was different than the last three because now there are about 20 interns. The big batch (9 from Carnegie Mellon) landed last weekend, including my roommates. So things have been hectic.

I spent all of last weekend away from the apartment. On Saturday I drove down to Santa Cruz to go wine tasting with Hannah. We hit about 6 different wineries and I got to taste a lot of wines and even experienced a futures barrel tasting at Soquel.

My favourite winery was Bonny Doon mostly because of their really beautiful labels and artistic leanings. Other wineries really couldn't compete in that area - they tend to have one template for all their labels and only change the text as needed. You can see an example of a Bonny Doon label in my slideshow, but also I would encourage people to look at their website, it's pretty awesome. I bought a few packs of their leftover labels to stick all over my computer.

After the wineries, Hannah took my past the Santa Cruz surf museum where there is also a rock covered in seals. Mesmerizing....as I adored the seals, Hannah told me a little story about when she lived across the street:


With a couple of bottles of wine in the trunk, I headed up to San Francisco to meet Joey post-work. We had an easy night of watching movies and eating the most intense pizza I have ever had. It was 3 inches of melted cheese on what seemed to be a deep-fried crust, if such a thing is possible. Um, I shouldn't know that this kind of take-out exists, it's dangerous to a melted cheese lover such as myself. You can see a picture of it (a small!) in the slideshow:



On Sunday morning we picked up Sam and Anna Joy to drive up into Marin and go to Bass Lake. There is a nice little 3 mile hike which takes you to the lake. Since it's inland a bit, there's not too much of a crowd, and certainly nothing resembling a public beach. Watching out for poison oak, we wandered in to the furthest depths where there's supposed to be a rope swing. Just as we arrived, a park ranger was talking to some guys about a recent death in the lake and he proceeded to cut the rope off right in front of us!



Next time we go there, we'll bring a new rope. It wasn't conclusive that the rope swing was involved in the death, the park ranger was just being a keener and taking out anything that could be dangerous.

Still game to swim, Joey went down the steep slope first and got herself psyched up to jump in. I've discovered what makes Joey take action if she hesitates:



Monday was all about card playing and teaching Kim, Naomi and Hillie how to euchre. I'm always happy with hours spent playing cards. A perfect long weekend all around.

This weekend I hope to do some quieter, at-home stuff like reading and then also on Sunday taking the Caltrain to SF and then biking back here. It's about 36 miles, and will take about 3 hours. That will be good practice for the triathlon I'm planning to do in August.

Time for bed.