My 32nd Birthday

Of course, by "my" 32nd birthday, I mean "I, Clay," am writing this post, not LL, who is much, much younger (with our age difference, I'm surprised our wedding was even legal).

I've mentioned this to a few people, but 32 is a significant birthday. It's a power of 2, meaning it's a binary milestone (I just went from 011111 to 100000). Of course most 10-fingered folk like to celebrate a little extra each time you travel around the sun a multiple of 10 times, but base 2 is certainly a much more universal concept (5-fingeredness isn't even a dominant trait). 32 also happens to be the freezing point of water, but that's about as non-universal as you can get (arbitrary in every way, right down to the "Standard Temperature and Pressure" of planet earth). Anyway, I'm pretty excited about 32. I don't get another power of 2 till I'm 64...we'll see if I'm celebrating then.

So to celebrate the fact that I now require a 6-bit number to record my age, LL took me to dinner. On the recommendation of my friend Henry at school (or, "Dr. Nho," as he will be known in a few months), we drive over to the town of Pescadero on the ocean side of the Peninsula. The restaurant is called Duarte's, and Henry has been raving about their pies for months. Mmmm...pie.

Anyway, here we are on our way out to the restaurant. It's an hour drive along the twistiest road this side of Dramamine. The sun had just set on the Pacific when we stopped at a small cliff overlooking a sandy beach. The colors in the sky were still pretty and we struck a quick pose. I guess I could have shaved for my birthday. Oh well.

Here's Duarte's. I actually took this pic when we left (that's why it's so dark compared to the previous one), so these shots are a little out of order.

This is inside Duarte's. It actually has a bar section and a restaurant section. This is part of the restaurant section and you can see back into the kitchen. The bar area was also really cool, except that there was no music at all. I guess some people like a really quiet bar. The bartender was possibly 100 (not in binary). I think I could see myself as a regular here if we lived nearby (and if I had no ambitions beyond drinking at a familiar bar).

So here's me tackling the Dungeness Crab Cioppino. Cioppino is sort of like a crab boil in Louisiana, except that it's not spicy and has more of an Italian seasoning. It's really good! But the mechanics are similar to a crab boil...you pretty much have to rip the thing apart with your bare hands to eat it (only instead of serving it on a giant picnic table, they give you a dainty little bib. I didn't wear the bib). One other difference with a Louisiana crab boil is that these things are HUGE. The bodies of them (not counting legs) can be 8-10 inches across. Eating one of them will fill you up!


Here's evidence that I made short work of the giant crab. You might also notice that I have a full beer (Guiness). That's because my hands were covered in delicious crab juice, which I did not want to soil my beer glass with. I'm classy like that.

Everything was delicious. I didn't mention it, but for an appetizer we had some killer fried oysters...perfectly done. And for desert I got an olallieberry pie (sort of a cross between a rasberry and a blackberry), and LL got a blueberry pie...both a la mode. We call this the Beach Diet.