"I'm a MARINE" (da-da-da-daaaaa)

Lots of updates since the last full blog....we're no longer sleeping on an air mattress, have 'eaten' at nearly 30 restaurants in the Gaslamp, played with Guns, caught some waves, and lots more. We'll start back 2 weeks ago with the Tastes of Gaslamp.

TOG is a 3 hour event where certain restaurants in the Gaslamp District (our neighborhood in downtown SD) give you a small sample of one of their signature dishes. Everyone gets a map to cross off the places visited, and then rate their favorites at the end. It was a great introduction to all the great places to eat for us, and we (more specifically Franny) were determined to hit them all. We ended up making it to 25 of the 32 spots, not bad. Matt bonked out by the last 3 because he was eating his full sample everywhere, whereas Franny went with the "less = more" strategy. Needless to say, both of us were feeling quite full by the end of it, but it was well worth it. Our favorite food-wise was the Dakota Grill, which served skirt steak, garlic mashed potatoes, and salsa fresca. There were a bunch more we're planning to go back to. Also, no food event is complete without a "Gevarter" spilling on themselves - Franny spent the last leg of the tour covered in a beef ravioli sauce.

After arising from our food coma, we went to see The Hangover. If you haven't seen it yet, go see it (unless you're our parents, probably not your type of flick). Hilarious movie. The pic above is a view of the movie theater on the corner, from our living room window.

Sunday the 14th we were awoken a few hours earlier than expected by the movers - but since we were anxious for our stuff to arrive it was a welcome surprise. We spent the day unpacking and organizing and our place looks great. Boy did we miss our bed! We love our apartment complex, The Lofts at 655, and our stuff fits in great here.

During the week we've been entertaining ourselves by finally watching The Shield. We finished season 1, and watched some episodes down in our building's home movie theater which was really cool. Great show...and it amuses us that some of the characters remind us of some of our friends (Mackey = John Helwig, Dutch = Bud). Once our season 2 DVDs come this week, we'll be making use of the theater again. (Can't wait to watch LOST in there next year!)

This weekend was another 3 day one for us, so we started it off Thursday night with a bike ride along Harbor Drive. Lots of amazing scenery and a fun ride....there's an album up on our picasa site.
Friday was actually kind of cloudy here...we know, everyone back East is saying "oh poor you". It was our first full weekend day of June gloom. So we went shopping at Horton Plaza, and then went down to Seaport Village for dinner. There were some cute little shops in the area, and we did what everyone else was doing in the hat shop - try on goofy styles and take pictures. Dinner at San Diego pier cafe was pretty good, although the price is definitely more about the location than the food. The setup reminded Franny of a mini Clam Hut from NJ.

Saturday we went to family day at Camp Pendleton with Greg, and got to see his vehicles, have some BBQ, and play with Guns. The flyer for the event that Allie sent us earlier in the week made us laugh, because of the emphasis on the guns....here is a real snippet from the flyer:

And here are some "kids" playing. It was hard to tell who was more excited, Allie, or the 6 yr old boy who proclaimed "Look, I'm a Marine!!!!" and then sang his own Marine theme song.

After that, Allie and Greg took Matt and I out for our first surfing adventure. 3 boards for 4 of us, so we took turns. Matt got up on his first attempt, but that was it for him. Franny kept getting stuck to the board since she was wearing Greg's wetsuit (the bagginess created a suction effect), so just settled for riding some waves without standing. But it was alot of fun - thanks Allie and Greg. Greg then hooked us up with some free dinner at an opening of a pizza place, and we somehow got the "artichoke is the special ingredient" menu of the random fixed menus. But hey, it was free. We ended the night with about 5 hours of DC Comics Mortal Combat on Xbox. There was alot of trash talking and hypocratic strategies.

Finally, today we enjoyed laying on the beach in Coronado, and went for another bike ride. Be sure to check out all the new albums on our Picasa photo site. And, since we like to end with a video, here's a little salt in the wounds for everyone getting poured on back home...it's hard not to have this song stuck in your head out here.

Happy Father's Day

We'll be posting a much longer blog later tonight to recap everything we've been up to in SD the past 2 weeks....but wanted to give a quick "Happy Father's Day" to our fathers - hope you are both enjoying the day.

Happy Father's day to all our friends and father's to be.....here is a special message that we couldn't resist posting for Dad-To-Be Gilmore....sorry Joelle, we think it's another sign of what's meant to be!

Farewell Tonic and Monkeying Around

The other day we received 2 emails. The first was called “Welcome to Yunkers Pub.” At first thought we just wondered where on Main St this new bar would be….until skipping to the next email “Tonic’s last weekend”. Yes, the bar who’s co-ed bathroom provided Matt with the perfect opportunity to throw out a pickup line like “want to go in front of me?” is no longer. Seems pretty fitting that we left Manayunk at the same time as Tonic.

As they always say, as one door closes another one opens, and in this case, we’ve been opening many doors…particularly ones that lead to lots of good food, because we’re still eating out every night. We’ll end up throwing in some restaurant reviews in these blogs, but since we’ve already tried so many we’ll just report on our first favorite find for now: Ciro’s pizza . Right across the street from out apartment, it became an instant favorite when we grabbed a few slices for lunch our first day here. One bite in, and we knew San Diego had Philly beat in the pizza department….definitely NY style. We’ve since made a number of returns, with one of our favorites being the veggie-boli. And after years of having to consciously think before ordering, Franny can now return to her natural tendency to order a “sub” or “hero” instead of a “hoagie”.

Our 3 day weekend was jam packed. We kicked it off with a building happy hour Thursday night at Stingaree where we met a bunch of other transplanted East Coasters. Friday, we picked up some office furniture for Matt so that he is no longer laying on an air mattress all day. We’re counting down the days until the rest of our stuff arrives.

Then we took the 20 minute walk down to Little Italy for dinner - it reminded us of our honeymoon, walking a ways to get some good food, only at least this walk was flat and not up and down a steep mountain. We’ll do a restaurant review of Trattoria Fantastica soon, but for now we’ll say it is appropriately named.

Saturday we drove over the bridge to Coronado for our first beach action. It’s gorgeous and the most amazing beach weather. Everyone here keeps apologizing to us for the “crappy” June gloom season, but seriously if it was like this year round I don’t think we’d ever realize this was “not the best” weather.


Sat night we had some Tapas before Allie and Greg met up with us for some drinks, and then they became our first over-night guests by literally camping out on our floor. Greg enjoyed some people watching from our large windows, we’re pretty sure he could sit there all day completely entertained.

Sunday morning we got some brunch with some of Allie and Greg’s friends, and were entertained by stories of older women playing match maker at Hotel Del Coronado. Then, it was off to the zoo! Greg found out he gets free admission to the zoo in exchange for his service to the country – we all agreed the least they can do for guys/girls who put their lives on the line is let them see some silver back gorillas at no charge. Zoo picture - they told us to pretend there were spiders in our hands, and if we bought this at the stand they superimposed the spiders, but it's just as funny without them.



All the rest of the pics from Little Italy, Coronado, and the Zoo are here: http://picasaweb.google.com/fmdigiulio/Week2LittleItalyCoronadoAndTheZoo#

One other fun story of note – there’s a frozen yogurt place out here called Yogotango , about 2 blocks from us. They give you the yogurt, weigh it, then you add your toppings. If you guess the exact weight after adding your toppings, it’s free. Sure enough, on our first venture there, Matt won his fro-yo…or in this case, free-yo. Of course, the fact that Franny went first served as a litmus test, but still impressive.

Next time we blog we hope to be doing it from our couch! Tastes of Gaslamp is coming up this weekend as well, so yes – there will be a lot more blogging about food in the near future.

Until then, some birthday shout-outs are in order: Happy Birthday to Big Phil and cousin Kim – hope you both had great days. Here's a little something we got one of the monkey's at the zoo to do in your honor:

Welcome Philly Fans

Hello out there. It seems most of our friends join the blog-o-sphere to document their adventures in pregnancy and babies (hello Bennett, Sean, and “Jerome”), but since a little DiGiulio is not in the works, we figured we’d move into this new virtual territory to coincide with our cross country move to San Diego. Check back in for updates on all the adventures we’re planning to enjoy over the next year.

For anyone who doesn’t know, or hasn’t figured it out yet from the blog title, we moved to San Diego for a 12 month job rotation Franny got with Lockheed. Matt will be working part time remotely from our awesome new apartment downtown in the historic Gaslamp district– and promises Franny will come home to a fresh cooked dinner every night. But for now, while we wait for all of our stuff to arrive next week, it’s picnics on the floor.

Our flight out was pretty nice - lack of headwinds made for a 30 mins faster than usual trip. Although the Captain kept saying it’d be smooth sailing, and then sure enough we’d hit a little roller-coaster patch. Matt made the mistake of using the bathroom during one of these “smooth” parts, and nearly inducted himself into the mile-high-golden-shower club. We also got a nice view of the Grand Canyon as we passed over it. After we landed, we couldn’t help but overhear a guy trying to run some game on the girl in the row behind him. She was into him at first, then when she asked what he did, he gave a 10 min long explanation about the research of forrest fires. “Smokey the Bear”, as we started referring to him, must be good at his job though - he successfully killed any of those sparks.

Our first night in San Diego was filled with something familiar form back home – the Phillies!
Something you wouldn’t see back home though, is a sign in Philly welcoming an opposing team’s fans (unless it was a trick to lure them somewhere they’d never return from).

Utley and Howard fulfilled Matt’s request for back to back homers in the 5th inning, and the Phil’s locked up the start of their sweep of the Padres. We went back for the final game on Wednesday too.

(Check out more pics at: http://picasaweb.google.com/fmdigiulio )

3 day weekend coming up starting Friday…we plan to do some exploring, and also pick up some odds and ends for the place……big day tomorrow, as Frank the Tank would say: