christmas bliss

hope your christmas was as full of love and laughter as mine was!

home again

there are many things i love about coming home -- potbelly's, the toll road, the outlet mall, silver diner, and not having to rely on gps -- to name a few.  but what i love most about coming home is this:

Zenyatta Appreciation Day at Hollywood Park

vick and i are at the 1:53 mark. see if you can find us;)

cupcakes and the counter

one of my all time favorite restaurants is a place in vegas called burger bar.  i LOVE a good burger, and i love the ability this place gives me to choose my patty (type of meat, size, etc.) and then customize my burger with some unique toppings as well as some traditional ones.  and let me tell ya, me and burger bar make a mean burger.

it's the only thing about vegas that i really enjoy, and when jami and i made plans for dinner a couple of weeks ago, she mentioned that there was a burger joint that had come highly recommended by a mutual friend of ours.  what i didn't know is that the concept at the counter is similar to that of burger bar.

in this case you're given a clipboard and a pencil, and you fill out your own order form before handing it off to the waitress.  i was pleasantly surprised to find that the choice of toppings far exceeded that of burger bar, and while we waited for our meat to cook, we passed the time sharing the. best. fries i. have. ever. had. so, if you ever find yourself at the counter, the parmesan fries are mandatory.  more than mandatory. you have not lived until....well, you get the idea!

when our burgers arrived, we found that they were every bit as tasty as we had hoped.  in fact, there was only one area in which the counter fell short of the burger bar, and i can't hold them tooo accountable for not having a nutella milkshake since i've never seen it anywhere else.

but after the delicious and savory dinner, we were craving a tasty treat, and with sprinkles just around the corner, it sounded like the perfect choice...until we realized it had closed five minutes earlier.

now, there are a lot of naysayers who will tell you that sprinkles cupcakes are overpriced and 'not that good,' and they're just plain wrong.  well, about the 'not that good' part, anyway.  don't let anyone try to convince you otherwise, some people just insist on anti-establishmentarianism (is that a word?), but they are del-i-cious.  and ever since then, i've been craving cupcakes.

when someone off-handedly mentioned this weekend that there was a great cupcake place in long beach, i hied myself to the frosted cupcakery to pick up a dozen for myself and my team.  and with flavors like chocolate peanut butter, chocolate caramel buttercream toffee, vanilla nutella, and chocolate peppermint, my mouth was watering long before i took my first bite.

my co-workers and i agreed that they were every bit as yummy as they sounded, and my favorite turned out to be the chocolate peppermint (but i'm kind of on a peppermint kick lately). the frosted cupcakery was just the antidote to my cupcake craving, and also made me a hero with my staff!

zenyatta the queen

it's no secret that i have a love affair with horses, and when i heard that one of the greatest race horses of all time would be making a final at appearance at her home track - a local track - before heading off to kentucky to become a breeding mare, i did the only thing i could do. i called vicki.

in front of the scoreboard...and the crowds

vicki's friend tim, if you recall, was the one who gave us the inside track (no pun intended, though quite appropriate) at opening day at the del mar racetrack in july (the site of the fateful knee injury), and he also happens to work the starting gate at hollywood park.  vicki had already mentioned he'd been trying to get her up to the track, and i'd told her we should go sometime before the year's end.  that was week's ago, so when i heard that hp would be holding 'zenyatta appreciation day' i knew it was the perfect opportunity.

and they're off!

i wanted to see that horse in a bad way. when they are still talking about her twenty years from now, i wanted to be able to say that i had seen her and that she really was that magnificent.

we arrived just before the first post. tim met us and escorted us to the backside of the track, where we watched the starts for the first three races.  what is so great about visiting the track under these circumstances, is that it's an experience a 'regular' ticket holder would never have.  for example, we literally walked through the staff kitchen (where all the staff, jockeys, etc. eat during the race day) to watch those first couple of races, and our spot was shared only by track staff.  it's pretty cool.

vicki and i on the backside

after the fourth race, tim took us across the track (it sill makes me giggle a little to be walking ACROSS the track) to the grandstand area, and we found a great spot just above the winners circle to hang out and watch the next couple of races until they brought zenyatta out.  ironically, though i wasn't betting, every horse i picked was a winner.  of course, if i HAD bet, there would have been different winners, 'cause that's just how my luck works:)

following the sixth race, zenyatta was brought out of the barn and into the paddock before being led to the track, and the winners circle, and you know what?  she really WAS that magnificent.

zenyatta is like the michael phelps of horse racing (without the drugs).  she has done things that a horse just shouldn't be able to do, and things that no other mare before her has ever done.  and she has created an excitement about racing that hasn't existed in a very long time.  racing is a dying sport and race tracks all across the country are struggling, but this is a horse that people who had never watched a horse race in their life were setting their dvr's and chanting 'horse of the year' to anybody who would listen.

i'll be honest in saying that i have mixed feelings about the sport.  on one hand, there is just something about watching the athleticism and beauty of a group of horses running, that just awes me.  on the other, i know there are unethical and even cruel things that happen in the sport.

the beauty of the sport

maybe because i know that (thought i try not to think about it), one of the more moving moments of the day for me, was when one of the other gate crew made an off-handed comment about how zenyatta  had ended up with exactly the right people.

our host

when i probed further, he told me how much those owners, and that trainer, and the hot walker, and the groom, and the other close staff were such careful and loving caretakers.  it was obvious that this is not always the case, and i can't help but think that it has been a factor in zenyatta's fantastic career.