Anniversary and Birthday Update

The beginning of August is always a fun time for us. First we have our Anniversary on August 4th and then a couple days later we get to celebrate Jeff's birthday on August 8th! 

To start out, on our FIVE YEAR Anniversary, we had planned to go up to Santa Barbara, where we honeymooned. That got to be a little too stressful to plan, as all of the good places were over $400 a night or sold out. We looked at VRBO.com to try to book a beach house, but most of the ones we were interested in were also booked that weekend. So without any plans, we decided at the last minute we would just spend the whole day together and stay local. 

Since we are early birds, we woke up at our usual 6:30 on the weekends. We got ready and headed over to the Zoo. We were there about 45 minutes before the Zoo opened, so we walked over to Balboa Park and took a little stroll around. We walked over to the Japanese Friendship Garden where we got married and saw all the progress they are making on their expansion...which is looking REALLY GOOD!  We also got to listen to someone practicing the organ at the Organ Pavillion next door. They were playing Phantom of the Opera, which was really cool...except they kept stumbling and having to stop. But it was still fun to hear! 

Finally the zoo opened. We renewed our annual pass so we could go any time we want to. It was the perfect time to go to the zoo, because there weren't that many people there. It was like we had the zoo all to ourselves. 

We saw this giant peacock just walking around the parking lot when we got out of our car. That was pretty cool!

This was the first animal we saw. A big ol' black bear!

All of the large cats were very active, which was also really neat. They are fun to watch. Some of them just pace the entire cage. 

Mountain Lion

Elephants

Luckily the lion was sleeping and we didn't have to heed this sign's warning!

Ridding "The Buckets" over the zoo back to the entrance. 

After our morning at the zoo, we were starving. Going to the zoo is a great work out because it has so many hills! So we decided to try our luck down in Old Town. Surprisingly it wasn't too crowded down there either. We went to Cafe Coyote and had breakfast foods for lunch. It was really good! 

Jeff had been wanting to get me some bling for our anniversary, so we went across the street to The Diamond Source...just to browse...and we ended up coming away with a new pair of earrings that I just love (although not as much as the person who gave them to me). What a great husband!

We then went home and spent the rest of the day just hanging out. We watched a documentary on architecture that Ben recommended, and then took a nap, and then watched a little TV. It was  a really nice day, to just have no plans and be with each other. That night we were pretty stuffed from lunch so we had a very late dinner at the pizza place on the corner, called Mazara's Pizza. We split a sandwich and I got some soup and barely had any...so we had some good leftovers!


Fast forward to Jeff's birthday...

We didn't have much planned for Jeff's birthday. I bought him some clothes, which he opened when we both got home from work.

We then went out to dinner in Little Italy. We didn't really have any particular place in mind, we figured we would just go to the one that smelled the best ;-)

So we ended up at Cafe Zucchero by Bussalacci, which was excellent! We will have to go back there again. Both of us loved what we ordered. We had to park a little ways away from the restaurant, so it was kind of nice to walk around Little Italy a little bit.

Then we got home and had some birthday cake!!

I made Jeff a carrot cake cheese cake with cream cheese frosting. It was really good, but I realized that I much prefer the cream cheese frosting over carrot cake or cheesecake combined :-)  We ended up snacking on that cake over the next week and successfully polished it off!