Salsafest!

Last Saturday was the long awaited annual Salsafest in downtown Redwood City. One of our friends, Mike, makes truly amazing salsa and last year he ended up entering in the City's salsa competition and ALMOST won!! Unbelievable that he didn't because it's THAT good, but that just made us all so much more anxious to help him with it again this year!

At the festival, each competitor gets a booth to decorate and all morning (from 8-12) to cook/chop/mix their salsa. Mike and his wife Trinette were well prepared with the supplies so some of us came early to help decorate the booth...

Mike & Joe

We had a little trouble with the power supply so the boys put their heads (and arms & legs) together to come up with a solution.

Joe, Trinette & Cary

We were all hard at work setting up. Trinette's mixing up ingredients, Cary's hanging the boat and Joe... well Joe's just being cute.

It's all coming together

 Capt'n Mike's Salsa! Best in town :-)

The Capt'n Himself

The secret... Fireroasted Tomatoes & Jalepenos

Booth Babes Lisa, Cary & Sarah

Front Booth Final Product :-)

Side Booth Final Product

Trinette created a hilarious Southpark Avatar for Capt'n Mike and we couldn't stop laughing at it.  So much so that we made two and cut our the face of one so we could get pictures with it...

Capt'n Baby Alex and Brewer!

Who gave those kids beer?!? lol

Sarah, me, Trinette & Cary

 The booth babes were hard at work serving up salsa samples to the voters. We couldn't hand out the salsa fast enough! (Probably because we were too busy taking pictures and goofing off)

Creepy Capt'n Joe 

 I told Joe to pose with the avatar on the boat... He pulls off "creepy" a little too well.

Me & Hubby (& my "Ahoy" face tattoo)

After the votes were all in, we all gathered at the courthouse square to await the results...

We're #1!!!

Quite the crowd!

Kevin & Joe - Killin' Time

 Someone gave Kevin a bubble machine and I had to capture this moment. Do you see the look of aim & determination in Kevin's face? Hahahahahah

Trinette & Baby Kendall

How cute are these two!?!? Anyways, I digress... The results came in and.... wah wah wah nada! We didn't win a thing! Such a let down, I have to admit. On the plus side, we all had SO MUCH FUN the entire day that nothing could stop us from smiling. At the end of it all, we went back to clean up the booth and realized that there were still GALLONS of salsa left. Literally. So we broke out the chips and got a little crazy...

Oh Kendall...

We'll get 'em next year sailors!!!

Lake Almanor 2012

Lake Almanor has always had a special place in my heart. Not only did Joey propose there two years ago, but I've been going there every summer of my life. My family has a cabin on the water that my grandpa and his dad built many many years ago and it's a very important part of my mom's family. After missing the cabin last year (due to going on our Honeymoon and limited vacation time), Joey and I were counting down the days until we'd be on our way. And to make the vacation that much better we would be celebrating our very first ever Wedding Anniversary!!! The trip went a little something like this...

Pit Stop

Givens Family road trip tradition ~ Fast Food Frenzy!!! This year's (and probably the best yet) combination? Burger King Chicken Sandwich, Taco Bell Crunchwrap Supreme, Carl's Jr Sweet Potato Fries, & Mc Donald's Fries, Nuggets AND Strawberry Shake. Heart attack on a dashboard, but fitting because it kind of set the standard of our week to come...

 Upon arriving at the Cabin...

View from the Deck

 Perfection. Joey and I unpacked the car after our 5.5 hour ride and after eventually digesting the fast food feast, we headed out the door to the local Pizza place Buffalo Chips.

Pizza, Beer & Giant's Game!

 The right half of the pizza (Cabin Fever) is possibly my favorite pizza EVAR. White garlic-y sauce, cheese, meat and avocado!!! I crave it all year long until this very moment. Deliciousness!!!

Monday was our actual anniversary and our wedding baker (shout out to Sweet Tooth Confections in San Jose!!!) baked us a complimentary anniversary cake!!! Chocolate with Peanut Butter Mousse and it was as amazing on our anniversary as it was on our wedding day!

Just so you don't think we only ate food on our vacation, let it be known that we also went wake boarding. Although the pictures make it look like a calm, spa-like experience, it was extremely intensive exercise and we burned at least five million calories doing it. Okay maybe not but after falling as many times as I did, I certainly felt like it and the next 3 days of advil kept reminding me.

Joey's strapping in 

Joey wakeboarding!

Yours truly, right before I ate it

Most of the other time at the cabin was a bit more laid back lazing around and looked a little more like this...

Dominos & Bud Light

Let it be known that I am a far greater Dominos player than Joey, mostly because he's not here to type otherwise. Later on in the week our friends came up to visit!

Drew, Me, Joe & Joan

Cornhole on the Deck

Joan & Drew Lounging at the Fire Pit

S'more time!

Joey & Drew - Domino Tower Builders 

Joey

Joey must have spent hours like this. Impressively though his back was not lobster red (thanks only to his SPF fanatic wife!)

The Dock!

Noodles, floaties and enough Us Weekly's to last a lifetime... So basically, my personal heaven.

One night we decided to have a slider competition so we all set out to the market, got our ingredients and came up with this...

Almanor Slider Taste-Off '12

Clockwise from top left: Turkey burgers with brie, carmelized onions & honey (Jen) - Lamb burgers with hummus & eggplant buns (Gluten-Free Joan) - Sloppy Joseph's Beef patty with caramelized onions, cheddar cheese & pickles (Joey) - Beef patty burgers with BBQ sauce caramelized onions (Drew). By the end of the tasting we decided everyone won, even though we all ended up with a serious case of the meat sweats.

The Girls: Addie, Joan, Me, Ali & Des 

Cool pic of Alison Joining the Lake Crew

Joe & Mike

And just to wrap up the trip, Joey and I re-visited the spot where he got down on one knee two years earlier to propose, just down the street from the Cabin.

Happy One Year Anniversary!!!

*Sidenote: everyone please notice Joe's shirt... "Bachelor Party in Mexico, What Could Go Wrong?" Classy.

What a vacation! Can't wait to see what next year brings and all of the anniversaries to come! 

Stanford BING Concert Hall

Not usually much to post about work but a recent site visit last week did particularly impress me, so I figured I'd share it with ya...

One of the projects I'm working on is the new Stanford BING Concert Hall. It's a pretty artsy building that's going up on campus and I'm working on some of the engineering for the audience walls. The audience walls are... well they're audience walls. They're the funky walls that separate the different levels of seating and generally no one even notices them. That is, UNTIL now! These things are pretty cool looking...

Wood Panel Audience Wall

Well I thought they look snazzy. If you look closely you can see the texture of the wall. It's built one piece at a time, which gets stacked up along the wall height. You can see the layers better here...

And what's holding those beautiful panels up? The metal studs of course! That's the grey support behind the wood in the picture above. And the material I engineer all day every day. It's an exciting and dangerous lifestyle, but I choose to live it.  One more moment of geeking out for me... Here's a shot behind the wall before it gets covered...

Behind the scenes

Amazed yet? OK probably not really. Probably not at all, but don't worry I took more pictures of the whole place under construction. 

The Pit

 Down there is the pit where the orchestra will play and the entire theater has 360 degree seating. Not a bad seat in the house!

This next shot is another piece I worked on. It's going to be a giant acoustic "sail" and yours truly got to work on the support design :-)

Sail A

Not a bad little site visit if I do say so myself :) BONUS is that it was inside and cool on one of the hottest days of the year :) I'm fully expecting season tickets once the theater is open so let me know if you'd like to come. OK totally kidding on that one. But if anyone DOES get tickets, I'd be happy to tag along!!!

Almanor Cabin Work Weekend

Every year (occasionally every other) my mom's family rallies the troops and trek's to our cabin up in Lake Almanor for the work weekend. Every summer the family divides and shares weeks of vacation up at the cabin, which happens to be my favorite place in the world, but before this can happen, the cabin needs to be worked on and readied for another season of fun. This past weekend was that weekend.

With approximately 5.5 hours of driving on our schedule, this certainly qualified as a road-trip for Joey and myself, which meant one very important thing...

Burger King, Mc Donalds & Taco Bell

Road Trip Multi-Fast-Food-Pit-Stop! Only three spots this time, but they were they solid. I chose Burger King Fries, McDonalds Chicken McNuggets & a Taco Bell Crunch Wrap Supreme. And some tums to finish it off. Joe's a big McDonalds fry fan so he got some and the verdict is in... Burger King fries are officially greater than McDonalds fries.

We arrived late Friday night and woke up early Saturday morning to this...

View from the front yard

Not bad motivation for a "work weekend"eh? So once everyone had about seven cups of coffee each, we all grabbed some rakes and started attacking the pine needles. All pine needles within 50 feet of the cabins are required to be cleared for fire safety so we had a lot of work on our plates.

Uncle Steve, Aunt Karen, Cousin Jack and Trent...  Not even the kids get out of work weekend!!

Uncle Mark, Joey & Micah

Joey & Aunt Jenny

All work and no play makes everyone cranky, so we made sure to add some play time to our weekend! Ever thrown rocks into a large body of water? It's kind of amazing how much fun it is.

Jack, throwing rocks

Trent, throwing rocks

Rubi, swimming after the rocks

View of the cabin from the beach

A long long time ago, my grandfather and his dad used to come to this site and camp before there was ever anything else here. Eventually they built this cabin which has become our entire family's home away from home.

Cousin Zach, clearly THRILLED to be here.

 For the record, I'm pretty sure I woke Zach up with this picture. He was napping with his eyes open :)

Incase you ever wondered where I got my laziness from...

All that relaxing sure did work up our appetites. Time for some BBQ!

That's a lotta meat, can we even cook it all?

Challenge Accepted.

Dinner is served!

I've been eating at this dining table since I was a baby being bathed in the sink that the dishes were washed in.

Sunset

As the sun goes down, the bats come out and fly around eating the mosquitos. Sounds super creepy, but it's completely awesome and cathartic.

And the new addition to the cabin? A fire pit! 100% s'more friendly! It was a big, big hit.

Possibly the single best thing that came out of this weekend? The discovery of making s'mores with Reese's Peanut Butter Cups as the chocolate. Insanely delicious.

Sunday morning we had some more work to do including dropping off the truck loads of pine needles at the local lumber yard. 

Joey & me

Everyone please note... photographic evidence that I did in FACT do something besides take pictures all weekend. I also took pictures WHILE wearing a hard hat.

Well that was certainly enough work for my taste, so once we got back it was time for more fun. And nothing says fun like building rockets and setting them off in the meadow! There are a lot of boys in my family... in case you can't tell.

Cousin Micah - the rocket master

Cousin Jack's rocket

 Micah knows almost everything there is to know about rockets so he set everything up. Unforunately the trigger/ignitor was not working properly due to faulty batteries so Micah hooked up the next best thing...

Who needs batteries when we have a fully functional CAR battery. Yeah, that really happened. Micah re-worked the wires to the car battery and we had liftoff!

Bigger Rocket

 My uncle mark summed it up pretty well when he said, "less is good. more is better". Which apparently holds true for rocket size.

Aunt Karen & Cousin Jack

My ruggedly handsome husband :)

Jack's smile was about a mile wide after all that rocketry. It was priceless. Even the drive back to the cabin was exciting when we were enveloped with a family of cows.

My bro Kev, moo-ing at the cows

Back at the cabin, the boys got the mini-tractor working and decided to look helpful...

I'm not sure what this had to do with the cabin chores, but I sure got a kick out of it. Joey's holding on for dear life while Micah tries to flip him off. Poor Joey married into this. I tried to apologize to him, but he just high-fived me.

One of the last things Joey and I did before leaving Monday morning was go on our walk around the block and take a peak over Hamilton Branch. 

Hamilton Branch

The last time we were in this spot (almost 2 years ago) Joey got down on one knee and proposed to me. It was so cool to come back and re-live the memory, something we get to come back to every summer of our lives.

 All-in-all I'd say the weekend was a success. The cabin is ready for summer, my family is exhausted, and I feel completely blessed for the family that taught me how to work, how to love and how to laugh at everything.