TC has graduated and is college bound!

I still remember the day she was born...

fast forward to yesterday when TC graduated High School....

Vampire Penguin, Sacramento

TC remembered seeing this dessert place in Berkeley (which has since closed as of December 2017)...

since there was a Vampire Penguin near our hotel...

Sunset Ice Shack

Our dessert would be in the neighboring community of Tierrasanta...

we would be going to this community tomorrow for the Prof's wedding...

but for tonight, we were headed to the Sunset Ice Shack...

Ice ice baby...

After traversing across the Bridge of Death Spruce Street Suspension Bridge,

 we backtracked to Hillcrest for an icy treat...

Of course, this could only be...

The Balcony

The night was still young and we were not in a hurry to get back to San Diego.

Here's the view from the second floor right above 85C. Bon Epi and Chae Banh are on the other side of this complex. 

Tea Garden and return to Pangea

TC and I wanted to go to Pangea again (this time with Bert) but before doing so, we checked out the place right next to it, Tea Garden...

This turned out to be a bad decision...

Donut Star again..

After our lunch at Nijiya, we headed over to Donut Star to meet up with Darlene and Paulin their 'hood.

They had a goodie bag from the Comic Con to give us along with a few other items I asked them to purchase for me.

Return to Donut Star for Shave Ice

After our "afternoon tea" at Shakespeare Corner Shoppe, believe it or not, these girls still had room for dessert! We had a few choices - gelato down the street at Gelato Vero Caffe, or up the hill for Shave Ice at Donut Star, or to Mariposa in Normal Heights for homemade ice cream. Guess which won out?

TC and I learned from last week's lesson that the LARGE cjup size was way too big for one person to finish, although it is a better deal at $2.99 as opposed to $2.49 for the much more do-able Small.

This was the younger girl's shave ice - I don't even remember the flavors she chose but the colors blended quite beautifully didn't they?

This next one was the TC's cup - pretty as well! I'm pretty sure the blue is blue raspberry. The other blue choice was blue bubblegum.

This was the older girl's shave ice...

And this last one was mine - not so colorful eh, but hey, I had mango, blue raspberry and pina colada.

All together now! They were also happy because they got to sit in a booth by themselves, away from me, the adult. So yeah, whisper whisper and all that. They had a good time and I had a chance to relax by myself with them still in my sight.

The older gentleman wasn't there that day; instead there were two women there. Not sure if they were his daughters or what. The small Shave Ice size was definitely a better choice!

Shave Ice at Donut Star

Did I already mention how damn hot it was?

What better way to beat the hellish temperature than with something icy cold and sweet?

Darlene's post on Donut Star piqued my interest to try this place out (Plus, she has more info and better pix of the interior than I do). And another bonus,this place was right up the street from M-Theory where I just scored a two-fer, so fkn' A man!

My mouth was watering like Kang and Kodos just looking at this sign...

There's the bottles for shave ice flavors as well as a big fridge full of beverages.

There's donuts on the far end. They also serve breakfast items, boba and smoothies (including taro flavor! Ooh yum!).

The large shave ice was $2.99. Not knowing how huge they really were, I ordered a large for EACH of us. Man, the owner must've thought we were pigs or something. He went to the back and emerged with a thickass puck of ice before placing it in his industrial strength ice shaver. This machine certainly beats the crappy one we got at Seafood City for $6.99! For one thing, this machine shaves the ice very very fine and there are no crunchy ice granules like the kind you'd get in a "snow cone".

Here's a closer look at that sign:

TC was very smart. She chose three different flavors that were three different colors: Blue Raspberry (blue), Kiwi Strawberry (red) and Watermelon (green).

The resulting effect was a rainbow of shave ice heaven - the colors melded beautifully into each other like day old chicken adobo sauce on rice. On the other hand, my three flavors (Pina Colada - yellow, Mango - orange, and Tiger's Blood - red/fruit punch) were too close in the color wheel to make the rainbow effect. I was originally going to get the Passion Orange (reddish orange) flavor but changed to Tiger's Blood at the last minute just so I could get a more vibrant color in there, but also because I wanted to have a "gory" sounding flavor.

Despite our rather valiant efforts to conquer this mountainous conconction, we were only able to polish off the top mound. The thought of trying to finish this off was just too much for both of us.[Note - TC's bag is my old Tokidoki - Fall 2008 LeSport Sac; print pattern "Trasporto"; bag style "Graziosa" messenger bag. Lucky her, I gave her my old bags when I got a few new prints earlier this year]

I remember when going to Hillcrest was an "adventure" back in high school. The movie theatres were an empty dirt lot. Corvette's was still there and so was the skanky men's clothing store, International Male. Ralph's Hairplace was also on University (between 4th and 5th) and was a cool place to get an edgy haircut. Times has changed over the past two decades!

Quick story about International Male - One of our friends' dad was a mailman who used to "borrow" (and not return) catalogs and magazines. Those included Victoria's Secret (featuring a very young pre-Axl Rose Stephanie Seymour) and various Playboy issues. One catalog that I remember was International Male. I remember going through the catalog and realizing the clothing was geared towards gay men. There were lots of beefcake featured on those pages modeling skimpy articles of clothing like the "Onion Skins" shorts (tiny short running shorts that leave nothing to the imagination, like really thin Daisy Dukes for men)!!! So yeah, there used to be two locations of International Male - one was in Hillcrest and the other was in Point Loma on Midway near Aaron Brothers. Both are now gone but the catalog lives on in the internet...

I couldn't leave Donut Star without getting a few donutz so here are three that I chose - the pink sprinkled one was for TC (I called it the "Lardboy" named after a similar looking donut in "The Simpsons"), the Chocolate Old Fashioned was for Bert and the broken Old Fashioned was mine. These were waaaay better than the shitty one's we got at KD's DoNuts (I still haven't put up that post yet).

I'm so glad we tried this place for their shave ice! Can't wait to go again!

And a few last words from our sponsor:

I loved it when the Devil sliced off Homer's nose and mouth and placed it into the "Hot Dog Meat" pile!