I'M BAAACK!

Be it ever so humble, yada, yada, yada. San Diego is simply divine. Spending time with precious daughter is perfectly delightful. Saying goodbye to her afterwards, when you only see her about three times a year, just sucks.

Here is what we did while there: walkwalkwalk eateateat shop walkeatwalkeatwalkeat shop eateateat walkwalkwalk eateat collapse.

We stayed at a great hotel this time - the US Grant. It's a beautifully refurbished historic building, right on Broadway amidst a plethora of restaurants, in walking distance to the embarcadero and ferry, and best of all, John got the room for half-price on hotels.com or some such site.

If you were to ask Alexis, John and I each what the best part of the vacation was, you would get very different answers. For Lex, I'm sure, it was just seeing our precious faces (right hon?), and maybe she didn't mind too much having to go out to movies and nice restaurants frequently, since she is eking by on a pauper's salary in one of the most expensive cities in the country. That soft heart still gets her in trouble though. At every restaurant we went to, she'd load up all the leftovers, thinking how much they would help stretch her food budget in days ahead, but somehow the sack would always end up in the hands of some homeless person, before the evening was over with.

For John, the highlight was frequent trips to Best Buy. It didn't seem to bother him at all that our daughter, who is an Interior Designer, has virtually no furniture or decor in her apartment (she just finally moved out on her own, after sharing with four other roommates for the last two years - woo hoo!). No, what drove him insane was that all her electronics were the same lame pieces she'd had since high school. He desperately wanted to buy her a nice flat screen TV, but she refused since, like me, she hardly ever watches the one she has. She finally caved in though, and let him buy some speakers one day, and a printer/scanner another, because we just couldn't take his pitiful face and heavy sighs any longer.

Now, I'm sure this will shock you, but my favorite day was Sunday, when we happened to stumble upon a fantastic farmers' market up in La Jolla. Or at least, it was wonderful once I got past the embarrassment of totally boogering up the pronunciation of said town (how was I to know it's pronounced La HOYA - I took French, not Spanish!) I tell you what, wandering the aisles of a huge outdoor market overlooking the ocean, when it's a breezy mid-70s out, instead of my usual upper 90s, is a delight beyond compare. Best of all, while there I discovered a copy of edible San Diego (only its second issue), by the same publishers as the edible Austin magazine I love so much. A quick thumb through led to the discovery, just in the nick of (lunch) time, that there was a new restaurant in La Jolla that is obsessed with using the highest quality ingredients from sustainable sources. It's called Whisknladle, and what a delight it was. They specialize in gourmet comfort food, with the firm belief that what goes into the pot, is what you get out of it. Not only do they source everything from local organic farms and ranches, they also use an old world approach in their kitchen, baking, churning, smoking, aging, curing and pickling everything in-house. We ordered from a limited brunch menu, and can't wait to return and try the full dinner menu.

So, as you can see, we all had a great vacation, but saying goodbye, first to Lex, then to John, is a bit tough. Thank goodness it's September, and we will soon be on that downhill slide towards the holidays, when we can all be together once again.