A couple of weekends ago we went to Japantown and stumbled through the Sakura Festival! This is where you can drink beer, watch traditional dance, and most importantly, eat your own weight in various things ending in "-yaki"! First we picked the longest line we could find. Alex asked the girl in front of us "Is this the line for takoyaki?" and she said "I'm not sure!". THAT'S HOW FUN IT IS! People will stand in line forever for random fried things if they have a beer in their hand. We had to wait about 45 minutes for these tasty doughy octopus bites, but it was totally worth it and made WAY more entertaining by the awesome multi-ethnic cover band on stage (performing such hits as Christina Aguilera's "Ain't No Other Man" and Gnarls Barkley's "Crazy" - how cultural!)

Alex had never experienced the awesomeness of Hawaiian shave ice with red bean paste in the center, and I'd never had it with ice cream, so we went all out and got one with both. Here it is, roughly the size of Alex's head.

# posted by Pete Ellison @ 8:34 AM

Some of you have heard, our awesome cat Dante has had some health problems since I've moved to San Francisco. I guess my moving into the apartment caused him to get stressed out and stop eating for a few days (!) which caused him to get Fatty Liver Disease (I'm not linking to any pages about that and I advise you don't look it up, because it's not fun!). So, 3 vet visits and a trip to Kitty E.R. later, he now has a feeding tube through his nose and he has to wear the dreaded cone. Alex and I have an elaborate and time-consuming feeding tube ritual we have to perform for him 5 times a day. The good news is, its been 1 week since the ER visit (late blog post, sorry) and we seem to be doing a lot better. Today we start him on some appetite stimulant and start encouraging him to eat actual food again. I have high hopes! The vet seems to think he will recover just fine.

It really is the saddest thing ever. I think the cone really sucks. He runs into things all the time, and he can't clean his face. We thought about trying to get some awesome designer cone to make it more fun (maybe one that looks like a daisy or something, with Dante's face in the center), but can you believe such a thing doesn't exist yet?

# posted by Pete Ellison @ 8:21 AM