Birthdays and Cherries

For my birthday, which was a very weird day but was also very good, I did a couple of things, including crossing something off my Bucket List. Incidentally, earlier in the week a friend had convinced me to get an iphone 4s so now I am in the world of smartypants phones which aren't really smart. But I have to say I adore the talk to text feature. Good thing I have unlimited texting - I think my volume has at least quadrupled since I got The Thing. Anyway, I treated myself to taking pictures on the way to work. Hence why the Japanese maple above, left.

I also chose the restaurant for my birthday lunch...I was treated by my coworkers. It was: Pink Door, in Pike Place Market.
The door really is pink.

Rating: 3.75 stars. Three of us got the Bolognese. It was pretty good. I thought, holy cow, that is a bird-sized portion. And I wished there was a little more sausage. The flavor was not overbearing, or bland...it was...flavorful. The dried cherry on the chocolate sampler we got was my favorite part of the meal though. The dark chocolate cake was good too (ordered for my coworkers, who love chocolate.) There was construction (not their fault) but it was really noisy, and the server took awhile to come to our table to take our order, and again to take the check. The birthday candle was a nice touch though. :)

Here is a hodgepodge of birthday-week photos. The photo bug has really bitten me - apologies for those of you who don't like so many pixels in blog posts.
Here are the aforementioned flowers my coworkers sent me for my birthday. The place they always order them from always puts so many green flowers in their arrangements - it's beautiful, but strikes me as a little odd sometimes. I guess when you arrange flowers all the time you don't want everything to be vibrant all the time.

Anyway, my birthday was excellent in a lot of ways. I gave myself lots of presents and received some presents, too - and the promise of future presents as well, to extend the general holiday feeling for those who weren't quite on time with the mailing process. Awesome. (No sarcasm - I really mean it!) I got off at 3 for Good Friday and went home and cleaned my apartment. It was like I thought I was going to have a party, when in fact by the time I got done with everything I was exhausted and it was late. Two friends who were going to dinner invited me to go and so we went to a teriyaki place on The Ave, which I can't remember the name of otherwise I would rate it. It wasn't the best teriyaki ever but it wasn't the worst I've had either. And then we went to Tango for dessert because M especially adores chocolate. Every once in awhile I just walk into Tango and as soon as we sit down I just say, "We'll have a Diablo. Thanks."

Rating: Tango. 4.5 stars. It's been almost 2 yrs since I had their tapas, so I don't feel qualified, though the bbq pork taco-ish things were really good. What I really love is the Diablo, which is like extra thick supreme mousse with a marshmallow melted lovely thing (it really is lovely and I usually don't even like marshmallows) with almonds dipped in cayenne pepper and a to-die-for tequila caramel sauce. The restaurant is really dark and can get really loud. Also, since it's a popular place sometimes the wait time can be a bit longer than desired.

 Then for Easter Dinner there was ham sauteed with pineapple, asparagus, raw milk and gatorade. And let us not forget Easter Jello, which has kind of a sad background but is a happy thing, as it reminds me of Special Occasions when I was a kid.

Easter Jello is raspberry jello with frozen raspberries and nonfrozen bananas in it with cool whip on the top. My mom's usually turned out as jello soup. I think I honestly like it better that way. Last year the jello turned out perfect but this year there was a slight hiccup. It turned out okay anyway.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Also on my bucket list is to see the cherry blossoms on UW campus. I had heard they were beautiful and wanted to go see them but didn't know when they would be out. My cousin, D, showed me some pictures on his phone but they a. didn't do it quite justice and b. whetted my appetite.

I have honestly never liked fresh cherries. I used to love it when my grandma would give my mom home-canned jars of cherries for us to eat. My dad really loved them. I loved their sugar-sogged used-to-be-fruit, but I liked even more playing with them in my mouth and then spitting the seeds out. I can still hear the small "ping" of the pit hitting the bowl as I "p-tooeyed" into it. Ah, memory.

Anyway, I wanted words to cleanse your eye palate. Although pineapple ham is moderately interesting in the best of circumstances when it is in picture form and not about to be in your mouth, this is truly eye candy, and I didn't want it to be sullied. I thought about maybe just creating an entirely new post just for these pictures but then decided that it wasn't going to be worth it since I already have so many posts going up anyway.


 Here are more:

The white thing in the air is definitely a frisbee.

 The bottom two are panoramic pics taken with my iphone.