new bakery coming to bernal!!, originally uploaded by tiki.robot.

Someone sent me this info about it

Introducing Sandbox Bakery, the latest sliver of a corner spot bringing together the best of a Japanese deli and French bakery, opening next Monday in Bernal Heights.

Brought to you by ex-Slanted Door pastry chef Mutsumi Takehara (who also baked at La Farine and Chez Panisse), Sandbox brings an East meets West, morning-to-afternoon, bakery-and-deli lineup, complete with Ritual Roasters and De La Paz coffee that’s extracted through a cone-shaped single drip filter-the way they do it in Japan.

Once a motorcycle repair shop, this crisp take-out counter in front of the sizable working kitchen has a vague likening to Mt. Fuji, with a flinty stone wall and gleaming white subway tiles. And from the crack of dawn, the fresh-baked aromas of buttery chocolate croissants and Swiss dill biscuits wafting through the neighborhood will lure you to the automatic sliding-glass doors at the corner of Cortland and Gates.

In case French pastries get you in the mood for a little Japanese street food (when don’t they?), the Yuzu-Sage Tart and the deli-style Teriyaki Chicken Rice Burger (that’s two pieces of griddled sticky rice instead of a traditional bun) will be yours for the taking.

may

• Juno – better than I expected.
• Saawariya – the first ten minutes were so bad we turned it off.
• Once – we saw it in the theater and liked it. still good, but this movie is best watched once.
• Sopranos – Season 5 disc 4. They all blur together. I can’t watch any more of these for a while.
• No Country For Old Men – Good, but far too violent to watch with Jess and the parents.
• Someone to Eat Cheese With – Much better than I was expecting.
• Planet Earth on Bluray – We got this to test Bob’s sweet new home theater system. The encoding quality was disappointing. The places where you can usually hide quantization noise (foliage, high-freq areas) were encoded very poorly. It was sad to see panning shots across the forest exhibit so many compression artifacts. These guys need to use an encoder tuned to such scenes. Note: don’t ask a video codec engineer to review encoding quality of Bluray discs unless you want to get an earful..
• Be Kind Rewind – Slowish, neat plot but could have been much better.
• Congorama – Whoa. Unexpectedly, my favorite KenFlix so far!
• War – dunno. Only Bob watched it.
• Wave Twisters – Great, but Bob hadn’t seen it, and the DVD wouldn’t play. Oh well.
• Futurama: Beast with a Billion Backs – Disappointing. We had such high hopes!
• Eastern Promises – Very intense. Good, but good thing Jess didn’t see this one.
• Stray Dog – Japanese noir. Kurosawa is always good.
  

Bob & Jess, anything to add? Did I forget any?

Wildfires visible from bernal hill, originally uploaded by tiki.robot.

- bob

So anyway:
(11 hours open per day) * (30 days per month) / (2 hours per movie) = 165 movies a month!

The deal: $20/month for unlimited rentals, one out at a time.
Advantages of KenFlix: No waiting for DVDs to arrive in the mail. Video nerds can get 30 rentals a month if they go to 4star every day..
Disadvantages of KenFlix: 4star DVDs usually play in my player, unlike Netflix discs, which usually start to skip about half way through. This means whenever we pick a bad movie, we’ll actually have to watch the whole thing.

Here is a strange thing with feathers, in a window display next door to Red Hill:

It was cold night! Even Zara needed a scarf!

SoCha is a cozy cafe in Bernal that just opened up 2 weeks ago. The food and coffee seem to be standard cafe fare but some nice things about this place are:

1. live music almost every night! Here’s the schedule. I’m sitting in the cafe right now and a couple guys are playing the cello and piano.
2. free wifi…and magazines to peruse
3. a large back room with cozy bench seats.
4. a small beer and wine list.
5. movie night on wednesdays
6. unlike Ritual further up the street, it’s not totally packed. There are lots of tables!

I think there’s also a brunch menu on the weekends so we should come here for brunch one day!

(click play to start) (link to other sizes)

Here is an earlier video of Zara learning how to catch a floppy puppy disc.

via b0ingb0ing