We are fa-mi-ly...

...I've got all my cousins & me!

Well folks, Cousin Convention 2007 has come and gone and boy, am I exhausted! Jon, Stacy & Kayleigh spent the last weekend at Casa Exploseph so it was quite a full house - us, one brother, two cousins, two cats (one bathroom).

Their trip started out a bit rocky, with their original flight being cancelled (gee, thanks Midwest Airlines). I've never had a flight cancelled (knock on wood), but I'm pretty sure it sucks. At least Kayleigh got a trip to Vegas out of it (albeit, a short one)!

We packed a bunch into our short time (and we have the pictures to prove it)- SF Museum of Modern Art, Chinatown, shopping, Fisherman's Wharf, Lombard Street, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Palace of Fine Arts, Marin Headlands, and on, and on. Oh yeah, lots of Song Star and Guitar Hero too :)

SFMoMa

One of the things I've been meaning to do since we moved to San Francisco was to visit MoMa. Here we are 3 1/2 years later and I finally got around to it.

They currently have two temporary exhibits we were interested in seeing. One is a Matisse exhibit, focusing on his sculptures. It was pretty neat to see his sculptures, as I'm more familiar with his painting. He drew a lot of his styling from the sculptures of Rodin and Degas.

The other exhibit, which I absolutely LOVED was the photography of Martin Munkacsi. We all know how much I love photography so this installation was right up my alley. There were over 125 photos spanning from the 1920s to 1960s in his very interesting photo journalistic style. I was in heaven.

The permanent collection was pretty impressive as well. They even had my absolute favorite piece from Braque (Violon et compotier (Violin and Fruit Dish))! Jonathan even found a piece he liked, Roy Lichtenstein’s "Mirror".

It's my party...

For my birthday, 18 of our nearest and dearest joined us at Malibu Grand Prix down in Redwood City. Out of the city fog and cool, we roasted in the hot California sun (who knew there really was such a thing?!?!) as we competed in mini golf and on the race track.

Paul, ever the competitor, had to go and win both the lowest mini golf score AND the fastest lap time on the race track. No - it was not rigged! Paul even won 100 tickets on the Deal or No Deal game! I guess he's just lucky (well, duh, he married me - I'd say that's pretty lucky).

After all the fun and games we headed to Khan Toke for some yummy Thai food. It was Kayleigh's first foray into Thai and I think she survived. 17 of us sat around one fo their low tables and stuffed our faces in the sauna of a room they had us in. From dinner the cousins, Jon, Paul and I headed back home for a few rounds of Song Star and Guitar Hero. Yep. Still obsessed with Guitar Hero (Paul got me the new Encores: Hits of the 80s version for my birthday).

Fisherman's Wharf and other sights to be seen

Monday (happy birthday to me!) brought our sightseeing to Fisherman's Wharf, Lombard St. and the Golden Gate Bridge. My usual stop at the Musee Mechanique was our first stop where we took our fun "old timey" photo booth pictures. Someday I'd love to own one of those things, they're so much fun!

From there we worked our way down to Pier 39 (I was a tourist for the day!) where we checked out the smelly sea lions and rode the merry-go-round. We had fun in the Krazy Kaps shop where we had a good laugh trying on zany hats. A hot dog hat? Really? People actually buy these things??

Isn't there supposed to be a famous bridge or something?

Our adventure next took us to the Golden Gate Bridge (or what we could see of it).
San Francisco?
Sunny.
Marin?
Sunny.
Bridge directly between the two?
Covered in FOG.
Welcome to San Francisco summer!

We headed over to the Marin Headlands to see if we could get above the fog and maybe see the top of the bridge. Alas, it did not work. This is what we would see on a nice day:

Instead, this is what we saw:

So, who's coming to visit next?