More Bay Area

Food find: Going off another excellent recommendation, we set out to find the Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Factory in the middle of San Francisco's Chinatown. The way the factory location had been described (and confirmed by the fact that my dad's only knowledge relegated it to lore) put this place pretty close to an urban legend. Basically, the instructions I initially received to get there were to "wander around Chinatown...walk through all the back alleys...and eventually you should find a little room that's a whole cookie factory." We had an address, but it was just "Ross Alley." But luckily, the power of the internet helped us narrow the quest down, although the instructions were still pretty much the same. We parked on the outskirts of Chinatown, and weaved through the stores, all selling identical Chinese crap (slippers, two dollar t-shirts, wooden umbrellas, Chinese finger traps), until we got to this sketchy, possibly smoke-filled alley. One of the doors opened to the cookie factory, which was seriously four ancient Chinese ladies folding the cookie discs into their shapes as they came off this gigantic steel machine that took up most of the space (albeit a five by forty or so room). There was a nice man who gave us free samples (essentially just hot discs), but pictures were fifty cents. We bought a bag of throwaways (discs that didn't make the cut, since they were too small, fused to one another, etc.) and a bag of adult fortune cookies, which mostly have bad, quasi-sexual puns. The best has been "Sultan who has ten wives, nine of them have it pretty soft," which isn't to show you how high quality the jokes are, but more how dismal the quality is. They just don't make adult-themed cookies like they used to.
A Bad Joke: Since this morning was dominated by Chinese stereotypes and offensive accents, we'll keep it up "Confucius say man who go through airport security sideways is going to Bangkok."

So perhaps the highlight of this Bay Area trip came yesterday when we went to visit one of my dad's oldest friends in Los Altos Hills. The explicit purpose of the trip was to see the vineyard he'd planted in his backyard, but mostly it was just to see all the surrounding craziness. We toured his house, which was more like three adjoining buildings, as he told us about his extensive plans to knock out bathrooms and bedrooms to create a bigger living room, dig under the house (which was built pretty unstably onto a hillside) to put in more bedrooms and an office, and other pseudo-whackjob renovations. He took us out to the vineyard (complete with a beehive to pollinate of course, which also happens to yield 25 pounds of honey a year), which was about nine months old, and yielded a handful of grapes this season. Mostly, it was a bunch of three foot-or-so long vines hanging in a big pile of foot high grass. And of course you can't grow wine in such a shabby lawn...so he had a whole family of goats to take care of it. He had originally bought a pregnant female and a nasty looking ram six months ago, only to find out that the female simply fat and not pregnant (isn't that always how it happens...). But luckily, she just gave birth to four goatlings, which are about two weeks old. These guys can't really do anything except bleat and scamper, so needless to say they were pretty incomparably cute. We played (read: cradled) with them for thirty or so minutes, saw the vineyard, and then managed to find our way back to the goat pen to play with them some more. If anyone has the opportunity to get some baby goats, you're really doing yourself a disservice if you don't. Although the main downside seemed to be that the mother and (especially) the father were the antithesis of cute, being grumpy and ugly and not at all interested in us. These goats were really just another part of his plan; every time we turned a corner there was a new idea, from building a wine-tasting gazebo to fixing up an old Porsche and a Mustang, to knocking out the entire driveway to build a cul-de-sac. And of course, we all left with business cards for the wine company so we can someday buy his locally grown and pressed