How We Spent Superbowl Sunday

Yesterday was Superbowl Sunday, a practical holiday in the US. An estimated 117 million people tuned in. And beforehand they mobbed stores to buy drinks and snacks, such as guacamole. Oh, wait, avocados are embargoed because Mexican drug cartels are taking them over and threatened a US inspector. Watch out for blood guac!

Superbowl Sunday is a time when I do anything but watch sports. Ditto for Hawk. So we planned a day with not-in-front-of-the-TV activities. Our first activity was to Get Out! We got out to Santa Cruz.



It was a great day for a drive with the top down in our convertible. Temps at home peaked at 81° again (27° C). Out at the coast it was cooler, especially around 10 or 11am when we arrived, but it was still a beautiful day. Once again we were dressed in shorts and short sleeved shirts... and dabbing on sunscreen... in mid-February!

In Santa Cruz we walked along the sidewalk and various trails along West Cliff Drive. It's an old favorite of ours for visiting Santa Cruz, though the last time we did it before this weekend was a few years ago. So it's good to get back there! Usually when we do this walk we start a few miles from downtown and walk to the boardwalk and back. This time we walked in the opposite direction— to Natural Bridges State Beach and back. More pics to come soon!

We wrapped up our hiking around 12:30 and headed back over the hill to Silicon Valley. Traffic headed out to the coast in the opposite lanes of winding Route 17 was getting backed up. We were glad we'd chosen to get an early start, even when we thought the Superbowl would reduce the number of beach-goers!

Once back in the San Jose area we had another Superbowl Sunday mission to accomplish: Shopping.

We'd been talking about replacing our dinnerware (plates, bowls, etc.) for a few days. On Saturday we'd suddenly seen a style we both liked on a chance visit to a Home Goods store. The challenge is, Home Goods is mostly an overstock store. The plates we like are from an established European manufacturer but they're a canceled product line. That means the inventory is hit-or-miss as remnants of the last production filter into these stores. We visited 4 stores Saturday evening after hiking at Las Trampas and another 4 stores Sunday, scooping up whichever pieces we could find at each store.

We tired of the hunt around 6pm and headed home for supper. The hunt's not done; it's just that we were done for the day. 😅 Traipsing around to so many stores in one weekend is tiring.

At home we scrounged for dinner. I reheated the leftovers of pizza I'd made on Friday. Hawk made a bowl of nachos. "Our avocados are getting ripe," I pointed out. She sliced one over her nachos. Although it was bought a few days before the embargo we don't know if it was a conflict-free avocado. She might have eaten... blood guac. 😳😨🤣

Valentine's Day. New Plates!

Today was Valentine's Day. Hawk and I put little stock in traditional expressions of it. It's a made-up holiday, anyway; a consumer event crassly promoted by greeting card companies, florists, and candy makers. That said, we try to do something a little special to mark the day, even if it's something we do often enough anyway, like go hiking.

This year Valentine's Day fell on a Monday, so we didn't travel anywhere. We almost didn't do anything out of the ordinary; but then I remembered this afternoon that I could cook something for dinner. I made ziti.



I've been meaning to make ziti for a while. My last batch was in August 2020. I used to make it more often in my college student / grad student days. Maybe that was because with more people in the house it got eaten faster? Alas, that's the challenge with the ziti recipe: it makes 8 filling servings.

This time around I figured I'd cut down the portions, primarily by not using a full container of ricotta cheese. I'll use the rest of the ricotta making calzones. I used about 2/3 container (10 oz.) of ricotta here and scaled down everything else in proportion.



If this were an everyday dinner I might just bake the dish of ziti and call it done. But since it's Valentine's Day we decided to go all out, matching it up with green beans and oven-warmed sourdough bread. Then there's the bottle of good red wine.... Well, I would've opened that Valentine's Day or no. 😉

Also in this picture you can see the new plates and bowls we bought this weekend. Yes, these are the plates we went to 8 or 9 different stores looking for. They're dark cobalt blue with light flecks.