A Tina and Jerry Extravaganza

This will be the last post of its kind for a while. What great people to end our Winter vacation posts on!

Tina and Jerry flew out to visit us on Super Bowl weekend. Tina beat me to writing about their trip by weeks. You can read her rendition here. In fact, go read that one first. I am going to supplement Tina's post here with some extra photos and comments, rather than reiterate the blow-by-blow.

We met Tina and Jerry in July at Adam and Mariah's wedding. We were set up on a couple's blind date. Adam and Mariah thought we would make nice friends, and they were right.

T&J went to Virginia Tech with A&M and now live in the DC area. Tina is an economist and Jerry a geologist. Each of them dedicated public servants (thank you!) We've been keeping in touch via the Internet since July. Tina is a core member of my mini blogosphere, keeping me on my game by sending me comments and writing her own good material on their traveling adventures. We encouraged them to come out and visit us. They took the brave move and booked a flight out here and I am very excited they did.

Jerry is the designated photographer between them, and he took lots of pictures in Monterey and Oakland. He digitally sewed together the 180 degree view from our balcony. I think this is totally cool. It is the most thorough image we've got of our view yet...

Click on it to see the bigger version: it's worth it.

They flew into Oakland and scooped Apollo and I up for a trip down to Monterey on Thursday night. We stayed in a great little motel by the sea...

On Friday we went to the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Tina mentions the poop-sniffing portion of the otter exhibit in her post. I'm going to elaborate because this is up my media-loving alley.

It was a creepy coincidence to stumble upon it because Tina and I had just been talking about incorporating smell into museum media. Smell is a powerful medium, like sound, that has a wonderful ability to influence us. If television and film producers were able to thread smells into their work, believe me, plenty would. Musical scores that give us goosebumps have nothing on the emotional-trigger power of smell. I was wondering out loud to Tina why museums don't use smells like this since they are interactive literally just as I was approaching my first ever encounter of this very phenomenon. Unfortunately, it did turn out to be marine mammal shit. Alas.

My camera batter was on the fritz that day, but here are some cell phone shots I took in the musuem...

(I couldn't take pictures of moving things because my cell phone is restricted like that. I encourage you to check out Jerry's jellyfish. )

We did zero cooking while they were here, which I regret to some extent. But, it was so exciting to go out to eat because we got to share part of our repertoire of tasty vegetarian places. Plus, Tina is vegan and thus so rarely gets to enjoy meals prepared with her diet in mind. While they were here we went to Millennium in SF, Cafe Gratitude, Mimosa (my fav breakfast place in our neighborhood), and on Sunday we went to my fav out-of-town breakfast spot, Rudy's CFC. I took some pictures there:

We had a truly wonderful time hosting these two. It was really awesome that two people we hardly knew (but had a really good hunch about) could just hop on a plane and come and spend four super-fun days with us. Now we have two more people to add to our national network of high-quality friends. In this age, when I am a click away from chatting with anyone at all, there is no reason to limit our good friends to one city. I'm already planning our trip to Virginia in my head. I wouldn't want to turn down an invitation to Vegan Thanksgiving, would I?

Thanks for coming, you two. You rock.

The rest of the pictures I took from Tina and Jerry's visit can be found here.