4 posts tagged “san francisco”

I have to admit, my life would be grand if I could just bake and eat, and bake and eat... and not get fat. As a result, I'm also a runner. So my life ends up being more like: bake, eat, run, repeat.

Not too long ago (mid-November of this year), I ran my first 10K in San Francisco with a few friends from UC Berkeley. We were representing our school (or alma mater, in my case) for the first annual Rival10 College Challenge in San Francisco. Proceeds went towards the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation and the participating schools. Getting up at 6 am was totally worth running the race, as the weather was beautiful by the time we started at 9 am.

Representing UC Berkeley in the Rival10 College Challenge

The course was equally gorgeous, taking us right near the Golden Gate Bridge:

Rival10 Course Map

Here I am in the last half-mile of the race:

Almost finished...

I finished in 1:00:33, much sooner than I thought I would! Here I am doing a cartwheel to celebrate:

Wooooooooo!!

Afterward, we went out to eat at Tartine Bakery in San Francisco. Words can't describe how delicious the food was, so I'll let the pictures do the talking.

Open-faced croque-monsieur with gruyère, mushrooms and tomatoes

You see those apples on the side? Yeah, we never got to those.

Hot pressed walnut bread and goat cheese sandwich

Morning bun

I couldn't believe how soft and flaky their morning bun was inside... I mean, just look at that!

The inside of Tartine Bakery's Morning Bun... SOO flaky and delicious

Lastly, we dug into their chocolate pudding, which I swear tasted so much better because it was served in a cup instead of a bowl.

Chocolate pudding in a cup from Tartine Bakery in SF

It was hard to refrain from inhaling the chocolate pudding in order to take this picture, but I managed:

Chocolate pudding from Tartine Bakery

Sadly, that is the end of my delicious Tartine adventure. Until next time?

1. If you like driving and would like to be part of a neat research project to determine traffic conditions using GPS technology, my professor is looking for volunteers to drive around with new Nokia N95 phones on a ten mile segment of I-880 in Union City, CA. You will be paid, and also have the chance to win one of the phones. To learn more about the experiment, go here.

2. For concert-going enthusiasts and music junkies, my friend Jerry frequently blogs about upcoming shows in the Bay Area: hey! let's go to concerts in san francisco. He does a really good job, so check it out!

I took a lot of pictures when I was on the green roof of the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park simply because it was SO COOL. We not only received a tour of the roof, but were also taken outside and around the building.

Here are PV (photovoltaic) cells that surround the perimeter of the roof on the building:

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Here they are up close, front and back:

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The circles are skylights. This dome on the roof had the most skylights because a rain forest will go underneath it inside.

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Here are anemometers (which measure wind velocity) on the other side of the dome over the planetarium. One reason it is important to know about the wind conditions on the roof is that if the plants are to be irrigated, the sprinklers need to be oriented correctly so that there is little or no over spray of water from the wind. It's San Francisco, and it's pretty windy--imagine turning your irrigation system on only to have all of the water blown away!

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Here is another view of the roof:

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We were told that there are 48,000 square trays with about five plants per tray covering the entire roof, plus added seed. Everything is quite heavy, and some of those domes are at a 60% slope. Everything is kept from simply sliding off by the usage of rubbery drainage mats and belt suspenders that can hold up to 8 tons.

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Here are most of the students in my class, marching in file as to not trample the plants. My professor is in pink.

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Can you guess how much this tree weighs? *

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Every week in this class, we go somewhere new; it's been such an eye-opening experience for me. If you are ever a student at UC Berkeley and are interested in architecture, landscape architecture, design or construction, I highly recommend taking LA 226 with Linda Jewell.

* About 40,000 pounds! Were you close?

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Every day since I have been here (Berkeley, CA if you weren't keeping tabs on me), it's been bright and sunny outside, breezy, and chilly and crisp in the mornings and at night. Every. Single. Day. I'm used to living in Iowa, where the weather brings rain, hail, sleet, snow, and basically all ranges of conditions from humid and hot summer days to winter days where cold winds blow through the thickest clothes and whip past your face. When every day here seems like one of the maybe 10 perfect days of weather that occur in Iowa a year, something just seems wrong. I hear it's hot and humid in Iowa. So I won't complain too much about having too many clear, 70-80 degree sunny, breezy days.

Previously I promised massive posts and tons of photos. I'll try to fulfill that promise, but blogging takes a lot of time that I haven't had much of recently.

Since my last CA adventure update, I've gone to a SF Giants game, to Santa Cruz and San Francisco to spend one last weekend with Greg before he went back to Iowa, to San Jose to spend some time with my mom visiting her relatives for a couple of days, and around Berkeley and San Francisco to spend some time with Brent.

At the SF Giants game (which was the first live baseball game I've ever been to), I shared some really delicious garlic fries with two other people which are pictured below. There was an insane amount of garlic and parsley on them, and they turned mouths into potential toxic weapons, but they were so worth eating (and paying for).

garlic fries

Barry Bonds didn't break his record that night, but it made for a pretty cool video of people at the stadium hoping to catch each potential record-breaking hit on camera that I can't post because I can't find a good free movie editor for Macs that will let me shorten the video to fit under the 50 MB video upload limit of Vox in the 20 minutes or so that I've spent searching online.

So... then I went to Santa Cruz and San Francisco with Greg in one day/night. We drove (well, Greg drove) to the top of a hill somewhere and this was the breathtaking view at the top.

Santa Cruz

Then, we drove to the beach. Beeeaauuuuutiful!

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At the Natural Bridges State Beach, we were a bit disappointed that two of the three natural bridges that used to be there had collapsed due to normal wear on the rock from the ocean. But here is the one that remains:

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There were also natural tide pools at the beach with creatures such as sea anemone, starfish, hermit crabs, snails, mussels, and tiny little fish. I thought these were so cool because each little tide pool was just full of colorful life.

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