This past Saturday was my birthday. Mary gave me the complete 4-season set of one of my favorite animated series, Samurai Jack. To celebrate further, I played basketball on Saturday morning as usual. I was rewarded with a pretty decent turn out. It was the first time we had 5-on-5 for a long time. In the afternoon, Mary and I went to Don Edwards and the surrounding area of Alviso to look for raptors. I was rewarded once again since we had some nice sightings of red-tailed hawks, northern harriers, barn owls and cute little burrowing owls (see above). We also went to downtown San Jose to look for peregrine falcons, which we haven’t seen for a while. As luck would have it, we spotted Espie on City Hall!

That night I went to dinner with Mary, Ashish and Matthieu. We went to a high-end steak place in Cupertino called Alexander’s Steakhouse. The steaks are huge. Ashish brought a nice bottle of Cab to share. After dinner they gave me a small dessert on a nicely decorated plate (see picture on the top left). Of course, it was not so pretty after we had at it (see picture on the right). I reviewed some of the dishes on dishAdish. I had the T-bone, Mary had the “All 4 Love”, Matthieu and Ashish both had the NY steak and we all shared the side dishes. It was a nice dinner. Thanks to Ashish and Matthieu for sharing the evening with me!

On Sunday Mary and I had dinner with her parents and her brother, Peter. We went to Claim Jumper in Fremont. It’s a pretty nice place, one of the nicer family restaurants around. It has a bit of a ‘49er gold rush theme. My favorite dish there so far is the Chicken and Buttermilk Biscuits. They also gave me a birthday dessert, Cookies and Cream Mudd Pie (picture on left). I liked the dinner better than the dessert.