See Saturday in NorCal, here.

By the time I woke up, showered and went downstairs at Diana’s house on Sunday morning, everyone else was already watching the Cowboys-Vikings football game. Dardy and I had talked tentatively about where to watch the game (he was watching at his place and invited us over), but since Diana had Tivo’ed it, everyone (Eric, Diana, Mr. W) settled down in her living room to watch on delay so they could skip the commericals. We made plans to meet up with Dardy at Pizz’a Chicago after the game. He texted grimly that we’re not missing much; the first half had sucked. Mr. W discovered the “skip ahead 7 minutes” button on the Tivo remote, and watched the rest of the game that way. We braced ourselves for a very bummed-out Dardy (huge Cowboys fan) at lunch. He met us there and seemed fine, although disappointed. We ordered a couple of pizzas and watched the Chargers-Jets game there. Eric had money on the Chargers and they started out strong, but waned…and never recovered…and lost. So nobody’s teams won that day. I found out that Dardy didn’t eat cilantro, as we ordered a Great Chicago Fire pizza half regular (Italian sausage, sport peppers, fresh garlic & cilantro) and half no cilantro at Dardy’s request. He’s only the 2nd ever person I’ve met who doesn’t like cilantro!

After lunch Dardy went to his friend’s house to finish watching football, and the rest of us went back to Diana’s. Diana and Eric cozied up on the couch (where she ended up taking a nap to sleep off the carb coma) and Mr. W and I went to explore the new shopping areas of her neighborhood, which was under construction but had really interesting stuff. Late afternoon, Mr. W and I went to Mike and Christi’s house to meet Kyden and Koda for the first time. They made a fresh sushi dinner for us and I got to play with the first baby boy to come in my immediate friends group.
Here’s Kyden with mommy.

And here’s Kyden with daddy.

I thought it’d be weird that some of us actually HAVE one of these, but the two parents are complete naturals. It was weird how UNweird it was. I’m happy to have been a fan and admiring spectator of their relationship from the beginning, to their wedding (you can see my collection of posts surrounding their Hawaii destination wedding, which we made into one of our vacation trips, here), to the development of their family thus far.
Mike and Christi knew me well, and busted out what they knew I’d been dying to try…DJ HERO!!!

It was harder than I’d expected, less intuitive than Guitar Hero or Rock Band, although my cousin Mark disagrees. Then again, he DID use to DJ with a turntable.

Monday was time to leave. Diana stayed home from work that day, and the three of us went to a local restaurant in Sunnyvale for breakfast. Eric ditched out on a morning meeting and met us there. We said our goodbyes, and Mr. W and I started the long drive back to SoCal. We avoided the inland freeways and did the coastal route, which was a good thing, because due to the rainfall, the Grapevine would have likely been snowed out and closed. We stopped at the famous Cannery Row in Monterey for lunch at The Fish Hopper. The portion sizes are unbelievable.

(his)

(mine)
The restaurant had a gorgeous view of the water, and there were sea otters frolicking and rolling around the sea kelp on the waves, but when I went out to get a closer look, I FROZE to death.

I couldn’t even pretend to be a character from John Steinbeck’s novel “Cannery Row” cuz I was too busy trying to thaw out my fingers. Some hot crepes with Nutella on our way back to the car helped, though.

I don’t remember much about the drive back. I waited too long to blog this trip from mid-January.