Tour de Californie

The world's top recreational riders, Andreas and Rachel, competed over a two-hour, 5-mile race on a route that included the densely populated Santa Barbara bike path along the downtown beach. The high performance racing machine both riders used is the must-have for the pro season 2008, a solid steel framed, 4-wheeled, convertible beach buggy. The two man breakaway, initiated by Rachel and executed by Andreas, took off early in the stage, leaving families, old folks and other oversized competitors behind, and helped the riders to an overall comfortable win of the tour. The official drug screening results are still outstanding, but both riders assure that a monster cookie sunday was all they used during training season. 

Bruski anyone?

Yesterday, Andreas and I drove down to LA for Oleg's surprise birthday party. It was at a Russian restaurant called Robert's Russian Cuisine (is Robert even a Russian name?). Being Russian, they were, of course, 20 minutes late to their own party and the guests rocked up even later (guests that were first generation Russian themselves). Figures. We walked into the joint, said we had a reservation under Karen and he tried to put us with a bunch of 40 year olds. This can't be our group, I was thinking... sure enough, had I said Karen's name in their native tongue (which I did after contemplating that other table for 5 minutes)- good thing I knew it was Karina-, we would have been shown to the only other empty table in the restaurant. So we waited 40 minutes by ourselves without being spoken to or looked at once by the servers! Once Oleg and friends arrived (with three huge bottles of pure vodka, which by the way, were completely finished before we left), I recounted our story. They all exclaimed, "yes, this is definitely a Russian restaurant!" Ahhhh, those Russians.

I've done it!

I've finally chopped my hair. Aw, sweet relief! And the best part is, I love it too!