This was taken in Big Bend National Park, on our way to go rafting on the Rio Grande. I just love the mysteriousness of the scene.

We learned that the next morning, someone else hit a mountain lion on the same road, at the same time of day. Thankfully, the animal was not hurt.

Busting a move on the roof-top of our friend‘s new loft near downtown Los Angeles, two days after we left San Francisco.

It’s been almost 3 weeks since we moved out of our San Francisco apartment on Pine Street. We’ve done so much since then, it feels like such a long time ago. Justin has been so great at updating what we’ve been up to while I was taking a bit of an internet break.

We very much loved our apartment in SF. It was the first place we picked together, we made it ours, decorated it, made cheese in it, had parties in it. On the last day we were there, I wanted to capture a few details that made this apartment interesting.

Our bedroom door, which we closed only in presence of guests, had very cool textured glass. That made me think of France.

The pocket doors which we also used only when we had over-night visitors had these very neat little handles to pull them out with.

Our kitchen window looked out in the in-between-buildings corridor.

Our pantry door had some interesting features as well. It had a door within a door. The door chain attached to the big main door while the small door had a very wimpy lock…. ahem, super secure.

This is the very wimpy small door lock. It looks a lot mightier than it really was. I just loved that it was even there.

And we of course had awesome hard wood floors and bay windows. Very San Francisco.

Good times.

En Juin dernier, après le mariage du frère de Justin, on a pris une semaine de vacances pour faire la route entre Salt Lake City (Utah) et Spokane (Washington) pour visiter les Parcs Nationaux sur le chemin. Le mariage avait été émouvant et nous étions également épuisés par le travail à l’époque, donc prendre ces jours de repos était vraiment un coup de génie. On a pu vraiment se resourcer.

Je ne sais pas où on était, peut-être sur la route vers le Parc National Grand Teton, ou quelque part sur la US-287 entre Yellowstone et le Parc National Glacier, mais on a commencé à se demander à voix haute… et si on pouvait faire ça plus longtemps? “Ça” étant un mélange entre voir défiler le paysage, voyager, être loin, avoir du temps et stimuler les sens avec des nouveaux environnements.

Ce n’était pas la première fois que nous avions parlé de la possibilité de voyager à plus long terme, mais c’etait le debut de queqlue chose de beaucoup plus sérieux. Après de nombreuses conversations (et des calculs sur un bout d’envelope), on a convenu qu’on se donnerait un an. Le temps d’économiser, le temps de planifier, et le temps de penser a tous les details.

Maintenant, on est ici. Un an plus tard. Et on est prêt.

Le (ou autour du) 7 Septembre, Justin et moi allons monter à bord d’un navire porte-conteneurs, le Cap Cleveland, à Philadelphie (Pennsylvanie) à destination de Auckland, Nouvelle-Zélande. On s’arrêtera aux ports de Savannah (Géorgie) et de Cartagena (Colombie), avant de traverser le canal de Panama.
En tout, nous serons sur le bateau pendant 28 jours — la plus longue période en mer étant de 18 jours entre le Panama et la Nouvelle-Zélande.

(Cap Cleveland photo © Knut Helge Schistad)

Le voyage est certes une aventure en soi, mais ce n’est que le début d’un plus grand voyage autour du monde. On n’a pas de plan après notre débarquement à Auckland, sinon d’explorer les deux iles et peut-être visiter certains fromagers. Après la Nouvelle-Zélande, il y a plusieurs autres pays qui piquent notre curiosité, dont l’Australie, le Cambodge, le Népal, le Kenya, et la Turquie, mais nous n’avons pas l’ombre d’un itinéraire. Juste un désir brulant de découvrir où la route du monde nous mènera.

Qui sait, on peut aller quelque part, tomber amoureux de l’endroit, et ne jamais partir. Ou bien on pourrait se lasser de la vie sur la route et rentrer aux États-Unis après deux mois. C’est ça le plus beau. On est complètement ouvert à toutes les possibilités. Et on est prêt.

Since I said goodbye to my scooter, I’ve been walking a lot more in the city. I love walking to work. But do you know what I like even more? Taking the cable car. And so, for the first time in 3 years, I bought a bus pass that enables me to take the cable car regularly… especially uphill.

When I ride the cable car I feel as much of a tourist as any other foreign (to SF) passenger, which makes me want to take pictures. Recently I also got hooked on a nifty little iPhone app called ToonFX Paint. It pretty much cartoonifies any image you take and you can colorize it later.

You then get neat little effects like this…

View from the cable car, up California St.

I preferred to keep the images black and white.

Looking down California St. towards Financial District.

Cable Car wannabe’s (yep, they’re buses).

Looking out on Jones st.

What a fun ride home.

In my cheese-making experiment lineup, I wanted to try to make a cheese with “eyes” (or holes). The kind of cheese you would see in cartoons to lure a mouse into a trap, but the mouse would outsmart the ambush and end up savoring the piece of the yellowish cheese with large holes.

The piece of cheese with eyes is pretty much the universal symbol for representing the idea of cheese in general. If you were to play a game like Pictionary and draw up a piece of cheese, it’s likely you will end up with somewhat of a triangle wedge with holes. If no-one gets it, you’ll draw a mouse and point at the cheese. At least, that’s what I would do… maybe I watched too many cartoons as a *cough* child.

I knew that making a cheese with eyes required a culture called Propionic Shermanii. I went and got that here and flipped through my favorite cheese making recipe book to figure out which type I would make. I needed to start easy (with mild ripening necessities, aka no brushing the rind for months and months, for example). So I settled with Jarlsberg.

After a fairly easy washed curd cheese-making process and a couple of months to ripen, the result is pretty darn great. Starting with the way it looks:

I know Jarlsberg as being (quote from Wikipedia): “mild, buttery, nutty and slightly sweet. It is an all-purpose cheese, good both for cooking and for eating as a snack. It has a characteristic smooth, shiny-yellow body, and a creamy supple texture. ”

And my Soleil Jarlsberg ended being “mild, buttery, nutty and slightly sweet. […] It has a […] smooth, shiny-yellow body, and a creamy supple texture. ”
Incredible! Success! Hurrah!

I could just eat the whole wheel as is (ok… with other people too) or I could use it in things like quiche or potato gratin.