seafood at anisette.

crossed.

finally sat down for dinner at anisette on saturday. we'd been to their bar before for some wine and oysters, as well as for brunch, but never for dinner. i adore the bistro feel of the place, and background chatter that was almost all french. we had half dozen oysters (kumamoto and malpeque) and half dozen littleneck clams, the saumon fume, roasted trout and moules frites. everything was excellent. i was also testing out a "new" lens - a 50mm f/1.8 that mike found for me. it's pretty great to take food photos with, especially in the dim dinner lighting.

sunday we had brunch at a new spot on montana called babalu, did some holiday shopping and watched a christmas carol, which had the how to train your dragon trailer before it. it was very exciting.

quiet, please.

hair-cutted.

things have been pretty quiet and uneventful. a couple of recent highlights include: allen's birthday dinner, ARTBOX at BOXeight gallery downtown, group bike ride down to manhattan beach.

it's too loud!

eastside travels.

thursday. arcadia to have dinner with the peas.

friday. pasadena to see NPR / chicago public radio's wait wait.. don't tell me!, a radio news quiz that dan's friend eva is a producer on.

saturday. hollywood to get a haircut at chroma studio; temple city to have lunch with the peas. new chiropractor - bloodletting involved. dinner at the yard in santa monica.

sunday. silverlake and los feliz for silverlake art crawl. west hollywood for sunday supper at eva with mike, juney&lucy and gerhard - ridiculous.

newblog.

so, i decided to start a new blog. i will continue to update this one as usual, with photos and mundane happenings, but i wanted to try something new. the new blog is called aujourd'hui je.. (or today i.. in french). basically, i want to try documenting one new, yet in some way interesting, thing that i see/hear/learn/do each day. i'm hoping it will force me to a) do new things and b) appreciate the small things i would normally overlook. who knows how long i'll be able to keep it up, or whether i'll even want to after awhile, but i figured i'd give it a shot.

halloween weekend.

"bloody" fountain at dreamworks.

at work on friday, lots of people dressed up and brought their kiddies, and even participated in a costume contest. the fun thing about this is that people aren't weirded out when you take pictures of them and/or their children.

[ dreamworks halloween photoset ]

on saturday, we biked down to venice to brunch at hash, then we got some coffee at intelligentsia (where on of the baristas had some awesome baseball tattoos - mets logo on one elbow, yankees logo on the other, bat on one index finger, baseball on the other.. and he said he was going to get both a brooklyn dodgers and a los angeles dodgers tattoo soon!!) and walked around abbot kinney for a bit. then we did some shopping at the promenade - i bought a couple books - before heading to the stetson house up in newhall. we did some trick-or-treating with asher (a ninja), owen (yoda) and their day care friends and hung out for a bit and then drove down to avidan's house party.

sunday morning we drove to will rogers state park to go hiking. we first tried to take the rustic canyon trail, but it was unmaintained and about half a mile into it, the path was covered in poison oak, so we turned around and took the friendlier inspiration point loop, plus an extra offshoot of the backbone trail. it gets up pretty high, and we ended up getting a great view of LA, santa monica and the pacific ocean. i brought my camera and took some pictures at the top of the mountain where we turned around. the fried egg sandwich from huckleberry afterwards was perfect.

[ hiking photoset ]

for dinner we made some fresh gazpacho (i forgot to mention i bought an oster blender that came with a food processor attachment) and pan-grilled sea bass with spicy corn salad. it was deeeeeee-lightful.