A very nice weekend

What a fun weekend!
First, I would like to happily report that my finger infection never got that bad.  The blood poisoning only made it up to my wrist and has already receded.
This is the first time that I have had this infection where it didn’t at least spread to my elbow.
The key was catching it super early this time, and not waiting to lance it.  I lanced it that very night when I got home and though there wasn’t much to drain out of it other than blood it gave me an opening to directly apply the peroxide and neosporin.
Sort of gives me hope that if I can always catch it that early maybe the days of urgent care and IV antibiotics are over.  🙂

Saturday was a very busy day for us but a good one.
Once a year, one of the vendors that Rob works with in San Francisco likes to invite us out for a nice lunch.  We usually split the distance and do it in the San Jose area.
This year we decided to meet up with another vendor that Rob used to work with that lives in the San Jose area and also visit his old roommate from college that lives in Newark.
Kind of a whirlwind trip and I wasn’t really looking forward to a whole day on the road but it ended up being a really fun trip.
We met Laurie(the vendor that Rob used to work with) in Campbell at a little Mexican place that she raved about.  I had met her once years ago when her son was playing in a band and we made the trek out to see them play.
We introduced her to the pups while waiting for the place to open at ten.
Given that we were having breakfast, lunch and dinner in relatively close time frames Rob and I had already previously discussed getting one dish and splitting it.
Laurie recommended the steak and eggs so we got that and it turned out fantastic.  Steak, over medium eggs, fried potatoes and beans with two warm fresh flour tortillas on the side.

Steak and Eggs!

It was the perfect amount of food when split between two people.  We ate and talked quite a bit.  I’m afraid Laurie and I dominated the conversation when the topic came to movies and I found out she was a Stephanie Plum fan.  Poor Rob got to experience what it sounds like when two rabid Janet Evanovich fans get together and discuss the series.
We ended up chatting so long we had to book it over to our next restaurant to meet Ming and Brian for lunch.
We met at a place called (name of place here).  It was in a strip mall but it was a pretty fancy Vietnamese place in Milpitas.

Salad

Neither Rob or I had ever had Vietnamese food so we left the ordering in the hands of Brian.  He started us off with what was called something like the 7 levels of Beef or something like that.  It was basically 7 courses of beef prepared and

cooked in various different ways.  The first course was a salad that I was sure I was going to hate but it turned out pretty tasty!

The second was rice paper, veggies, broth fondue and these little beef medallions that you cook in the fondue and then

Beef Rice Paper Roll Up thingies

assemble everything on the rice paper, wrap it up and eat it.  Also pretty good.

I forgot to take the pic before we tore this up.

Then there were these little beef long type things, three different kinds so that was three different courses that all arrived at once along with a sort of meatloaf cupcake. So that made a total of six beef courses so far.

In addition to the beef thing, Brian had also ordered some Vietnamese egg rolls, two Vietnamese Crepes and the catfish which I guess was their

My Favorite, the Crepe

specialty.  The egg rolls and crepes came out with the beef courses. While

the egg rolls were yummy the crepes were by far my favorite. A little bit of

Gigantic Catfish

meat and a lot of veggies inside this crispy shell.  Mmmmm!
The catfish came next and holy crap that thing was giant!  We all had multiple helpings and barely got into a third of it.
The final beef course capped off the meal with some nice beef

Beef Porridge

porridge.  It wasn’t my favorite but it was still good.
To say that we were full by the end of the lunch would be an understatement!
We all walked(slowly what with being weighed down with all that food) back to our car where the guys got to meet Pappy.  They had met Shilo the year before and just like the year before they came bearing dog treats for our spoiled little pups.  🙂
While we were at lunch Rudy had texted Rob suggesting we head over to his place after lunch and they can go to the Mexican store down the road and have some BBQ later that night.

Food was the last thing on my mind but I don’t think I had seen Rudy or Jade in at least a year and a half if not two years so I was eager to see them and their two boys and see how much they had grown.
We headed over there and unloaded the pups.  Their youngest son Dominic was immediately all over Pappy.  He had met him before both at our house and when we had brought them over to the house a couple of other occasions.  In fact we still have the two drawings that he did on our fridge.  One was of Pappy and the other was of our old dog Romie that has since passed.
This was the family’s first introduction to Shilo.  When we brought her in from the car she started going nuts, having no traction on the hardwood floor she was like Bambi on ice. She’d been in her crate for quite a while so she just wanted to run but we had her on the leash so it was like she was treading water on the floor.
Dominic took one look at her, then looked at me and said “Is she mean?”
I said no.
He nodded and said: “So she’s just crazy.”
I said “Yeah, pretty much.”  Hehe.  Kids!
We had an enjoyable afternoon/evening.

Pappy giving Logan kisses

Jade and Logan petting Pappy

Dominic and Pappy

Dominic playing some tunes

It turns out that Dominic had taken up guitar so he played us some tunes while his older brother Logan enjoyed Pappy’s company.

New BFFs!

The guys went off to see about gathering dinner so Jade and I settled in watching a really bad chick flick and chatting while Dominic planted himself in a chair with Pappy and just petted him.  He LOVES Pappy and wants a dog so badly but his parents aren’t sold on the idea.  It was just so cute to watch him just stare at Pappy and pet him, whispering to him: “Your fur is so soft!”  Adorable!
The boys came back with a boatload of food.  Everything to make burritos and then some.  I was still kinda full from lunch but when Rudy fired up the BBQ and I got a whiff of the carne asada I managed to choke down a burrito.  🙂
Around 7:30 all the food and excitement of the day caught up to us and my eyes started closing.  Rudy and Jade sent us packing with a 5 hour energy drink for Rob to keep him awake on the ride home.
Dominic had a hard time saying goodbye to Pappy and had to do it three separate times.  Adorable!

On Sunday I had big plans to go grocery shopping and get all kinds of ingredients so I could start my new project of making my own frozen dinners.
I woke up early and couldn’t get back to sleep despite being really tired from the big day prior.  The last thing I wanted to do was drag my butt into Mid Valley to the tiny Safeway let alone all the way into Carmel to the big Safeway that would actually have the ingredients I was looking for.
After perusing the pantry and fridge I made the executive(lazy) decision that I would wait one more week to start my project and just eat out of what we had on hand.  We had plenty of things, just not the stuff that I wanted to make.  We had lots of convenience foods like Lipton side noodles and rice packets.  Pasta and canned marinara.  We could make it through the week eating very generically.
A little while later I stumbled across this website where you can input all the ingredients that you have in your kitchen and it will spit out all the recipes you can make based on what you have already!  Brilliant!!!
So I was actually able to start my new project after all.
Of course most of the recipes were not low cal/low fat but any recipe can be slimmed down by just changing up the ingredients and/or substituting for the low fat version.
So yesterday I ended up whipping up three different meals that I then plated up and froze a partial amount of the portions.  All while Rob was napping.   I was pretty proud of myself.