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It’s been awhile since we tried a new restaurant, but Cafe Gratitude has been calling our name since we first heard about it after moving here a couple years ago. This restaurant is completely vegan and mostly raw, so it’s definitely a unique dining experience. On top of that, all the dishes are named in the following way: “I Am _____” where the blank is things like “Renewed”, “Charismatic”, or “Golden”. So, when you order, you end up describing yourself. It’s a little weird, but fun too. Here’s what we got:

I Am Honoring: Nachos with spicy sunflower unfried beans, guacamole, salsa, sprouts, and flax seed chips. This one was very spicy (uncomfortably so), but the guacamole and salsa were very flavorful.

I Am Treasured: Smoothie with coconut milk, avocado, pineapple, and lime. The combination may sound wild, but this drink was amazingly good. The avocado mellowed out the citrus and the glass was empty way too soon.

I Am Mahalo: Hawaiian pizza with pineapple, avocado, and marinara sauce. The nutty crust was cool, and the “pizza” was certainly filling without being heavy.

I Am Cheerful: Pumpkin seed and walnut burger with house made ketchup and macadamia cheddar cheese. Very, very good patty. This one was tough to eat because it kept falling apart, but still super good.

I Am Bliss: Rich cacao and hazelnut cream pie in a macadamia crust with coconut meringue. Definitely the best dish of the evening.

If you’re in the Bay Area and looking for a crazy, unique dining experience, take a look at Cafe Gratitude! (And don’t forget to take us with you)

Long posting drought = too much to cover in one post. I’ll try anyway.

In the last 4 weeks we took a trip to Disneyland and a cruise to San Diego…

and Mexico (great pharmacies!)…

then spent a day in Santa Cruz…

followed by the prologue of the Tour of California…

the lunar eclipse…

and, most recently, a powdery day of snowboarding…

Today, on its last day, I hit up Macworld ‘08 to see the latest in the world of Apple. Sadly, because it was the last day (I think), there was a noticeable lack of free stuff. Taking pictures is free, though, so here is my take on this year’s Macworld:

This is where we picked up our passes last year - I guess this year there was a bus convention instead!

Yes, that’s the MacBook Air. Amazingly light and low profile, it’s a really solid-feeling machine. I think $1799 is quite a premium to pay, but on the other hand there is certainly no other laptop quite like it available anywhere else.

They hung these Airs (or cases, at least) on a cable. It looked like a wind chime, something you might hang on your front porch, and a piece that would feel at home in MoMA all at the same time.

I have no idea if this company was serious or not, but this is a flying car that runs only on electricity and also conveniently charges all your mac gadgets while enroute. Could be the future of transportation…!

4.57 is the number of miles we walked today to begin our training to do a few 12k races (Bloomsday in Spokane and Bay to Breakers in SF) later in the spring. Today turned out to be the perfect day to walk as it was almost 70 degrees, but it did take us an inordinately long time to walk this distance. We certainly weren’t in a hurry, I guess. Next week we’re going to drive somewhere and then walk, just to keep it interesting.

42-20 is the final score in the Seahawks-Packers snowfest. Very sad.

This week the playoffs get real, and I can’t wait to see it. As much as I’m hoping for the Seahawks to win tomorrow, I think they will get beat in Green Bay by Brett Favre and Ryan Grant and the weather. Still, I hope I’m wrong, and I’ll be wearing the 12th man green hat tomorrow in support. My other predictions are here.

Not sure why I ran across this today, but I love this car. It’s the hillbilly hybrid. Except the owner did it all to reduce Cd, the drag coefficient, which doesn’t sound like a hillbilly approach. And he gets 95 mpg at times, and averages over 70. Here’s the full story, if you’re interested.

Separately, here’s a somber article about the future of computing/society/the world since we’ve entered the age where we trust the internet to answer our questions.

It’s time for the playoffs, and I’m ready to post my predictions. Last year I did really well during the wild card weekend but terrible after that. Hopefully this year will be better, and hopefully it starts off with a Seahawk win in a few hours!

We got some serious rain today. Today’s storm was supposed to be the biggest one since 2005 (which we experienced from 15 feet below the waterline in Sacramento), and I think it lived up to its expectations. We woke up sometime around 3:00 this morning to huge wind gusts and driving rain blowing onto windows on seemingly all sides of the house. It pretty much rained nonstop for about 13 hours, I guess. The Bay Area in general was hit pretty hard. Our area seemed ok, although we headed out to Whole Foods earlier and had to take a different route because a power line was in the middle of the road. I went out and took some pictures of the creek that’s about a block from our house. I have never seen it with more than a trickle, so I think it’s pretty high right now. I’m not sure if it’s abnormal, or if this happens every winter. Anyway, here are some interesting pictures…

Then, at the end of the day, the front finally passed and the sun came out!

In the spirit of election fever (because a few people in Iowa are going to have a large effect on national politics today), here’s a cool site I found that will tell you which presidential candidate is in most agreement with your views (based on their public statements, and, where possible, their voting record). It should take less than 5 minutes for you to do the quiz, and it’s pretty cool to see how current candidates stack up against your viewpoint.

The site is glassbooth. In case you were wondering, the candidate who most agrees with my (Joel’s) views is Mike Gravel (D-AK). Who’s yours?

Also, we just came back from a great trip to the Northwest over Christmas, and pictures are here if you’re interested.

I guess it’s been almost that long since I last posted. This usually comes about for one of two reasons: either we haven’t been up to anything noteworthy, or we’ve been crazy busy. This time, it’s the latter. To be brief, we…

That last one happened just last night, and I have no idea why we waited so long to go there!! It was probably the most high-end restaurant we have ever been to, but it was pretty awesome that we could order whatever we wanted on the menu since it’s all vegetarian (vegan, actually). The flavors were rich, the food was filling, and the presentation was amazing. I think I’m not overstating it to say that this restaurant just catapulted to the top of our “favorite restaurants” list. It was the real thing.