About a birthday, amazing weather and how to throw the perfect barbecue!

This Saturday Andy - our house mate - celebrated his 27th birthday. Good weather had been announced so Taylor saw an opportunity there to suggest a barbecue to celebrate the event. All of us did some last minute shopping ... mostly groceries and a lot of booze (as in a big bottle of rum, coke and lime to make Cuba Libre and a (large!) keg of beer!) and ice. But Andy also wanted a special piece of grilling equipment allowing you to shove a can of beer into the chicken's a*!# which indeed makes the grilled chicken very juicy! It was a cool party with lots of sun, very nice people, great food and an introduction for us into beer pong! Check here for a couple of pictures.

Sunday was yet another sunny day (thanks to East wind blowing desert air over SF). Will and I took advantage of it by going for brunch with Lukas, one of Will's geeky friends. In the afternoon we had a visit from Mohammad - who moved last year from Belgium to San Jose a bit to the South of SF - and spent some time with him in our backyard enjoying the sun, ice cream and apple juice. The day was concluded with two episodes of the original Star Wars movies ... Taylor had managed through Craigslist to lay hands upon four or more boxes full of VHS tapes! ;-)

Other notable events of the past week include us hosting our first dinner at the house, discovering the public pool two minutes walking from the house, me attending my first dancing class and registering for City College only to find out after that that I'll have to pay as much here to attend one class for six months as in Belgium for all of my classes for an entire academic year!

Oh yes, and we've met up with the cavers on the other side of the Bay from the Diablo Grotto. They're a nice bunch as well and their meetings are easily reachable by BART and somewhat less formal than those of the SFBC (although I don't mind the formality that much and they seem to have interesting talks at the SFBC meetings; about some kind of Mars research next time!) We've also managed to sign up for the Thanksgiving Lava Beds trip from November 27-30th! Our first appointment with actual "caves"!