Tag: dynamo donuts

out & about

V-Day

Nina Penalosa7 Comments
Nerd love.

I used to like Valentine’s Day… y’know, in elementary school where we’d take an hour off towards the end of the day and have a party with punch, cookies, and pass out Valentines to all the classmates. When that stopped happening and I realized that Valentine’s Day is really just a holiday for couples to express their love for one another (don’t even try to tell me that it’s not just for romantic love, but all kinds of love, because that is bull), I became quite bitter. None of the boys ever had a crush on me in school, therefore I never received any Valentine grams during 6th period (except for that time my mom sent me one and signed it as Jon Bon Jovi :(), and my track record with dating damn near doesn’t exist.

But alas, this year was not the same! I actually got to do disgustingly cute things because I haz a man now! Tim and I agree that it’s still a silly holiday, but since this year was our first one together we decided to go ahead and celebrate. Before we left for San Francisco, we exchanged presents. I made Tim a mixtape, which I will blog about this weekend because I forgot to take pictures of it and it’s too rad to not blog about (I’m super proud of it, okay?), a picture frame, and an Ellie badge from Up. Tim got me a couple of boxes of Godiva chocolates and some super awesome Minnie Mouse headphones!!! He also wrote me a sweet letter that made me cry because I’m weird like that.

My Valentine’s Day swag.
I was super excited when I saw that Tim was wearing a purple tie — it totally matched the Ellie badge I got for him!

We kicked off our festivities at Dynamo Donuts (I’ve blogged about them before here). Their customer service is always awesome, but yesterday was outstanding! The guy who helped us complimented our snazzy outfits and let us sample some beer flavored ice cream that a nearby ice cream shop made (it was from the last batch and a customer from earlier that day brought them a scoop). And he was super helpful in telling us about certain donuts they had available for the day, and even suggested I don’t get the powdered gluten free one since it would mess up my outfit. Dynamo Donuts never ceases to amaze me. Seriously. I can’t get over them. Dude with the bowtie, you’re awesome!

Heart Beet donut.
Matchy-matchy. This was pure coincidence.

After we ate our delicious donuts, we went downtown because I wanted to look at the Disney Store. The upper floor has a little kids table in front of a screen that plays musical scenes from different Disney movies, and we saw that there were crayons and coloring pages ready to be colored. We sat there for a good 30 minutes. One of the cast members even came by and told us we were doing a good job. Haha! 🙂

After I finished coloring my princess page, I helped Tim finish coloring his Winnie the Pooh page.

After coloring and oogling at the adorable huggable stuffed Disney characters, I suggested that we go to the Ferry Building since Tim told me he’s never been there. When we got there, we saw a gaggle of pillow clad people. I kind of forgot that SF has this annual pillow fight every Valentine’s Day. It looked kind of boring to me, to be honest. I was talking to my boss about it after my shift (yes, I work now!) and she said that maybe the point of the pillow fight is to let out aggression. And then I said maybe it’s for single people who really hate Valentine’s Day. o,0

The annual Valentine’s Day pillow fight in SF looked kind of uneventful.

We were going to try and find a place to eat dinner around Embarcadero, but the place I wanted to eat at was closed! Tim suggested we eat at Sanraku, a Japanese restaurant that my family and I really like, but it was a 23 minute walk away. Since it was in the area where we parked our car, the trek there was worth it. By this time, it was effin’ cold and windy and I cursed at myself for wearing a skirt, but I knew that sweet sesame chicken and miso soup were in my near-future. I often craved Sanraku’s sesame chicken when I was in high school. I had eaten there a few times with my aunts from the area. To this day, I still think it’s the greatest sesame chicken I’ve ever eaten. Dammit, I’m making myself hungry!

After dinner, we made quick little shopping trips to Rasputin and Nordstrom.  And for dessert we got strawberry cream puffs from Beard Papa (which is their GREATEST FLAVOR EVER) and orange cream soda.b

Needless to say, my first Valentine’s Day was A M A Z I N G!!!!! 😀

geek style

Thoroughly Modern Millie-ish

Nina Penalosa6 Comments

On Saturday Tim and I had a day-long date in San Francisco where we ate Dynamo Donuts, wandered around Yerba Buena Gradens, Westfield Shopping Centre, Union Square, and ended the day watching Sara Bareilles at Bill Graham Civic Auditorium. HELLA EPIC! Technically we ended it by eating In-N-Out.

Anyhow, I wanted to wear something fancy, but I had a hard time putting outfits together. Everything was either too casual looking or it required my pink slip dress that wasn’t anywhere to be found. Half of my closet found its way on my bed. RUGH! But I settled with my modern flapper girl outfit: my maroon felt bucket hat, cardigan, and pink frilly dress. I ditched my t-strap heels for obvious reasons. Ever since I saw that 100 years of London style video back in August, I’ve been wanting to put together a 1920s inspired ensemble. I think I came up with this outfit in October, but couldn’t think of an appropriate place to wear it until Saturday.

Before I headed out, I threw on my furry paw scarf. Fashionable women in the 20’s wore fur stoles, so I thought it made sense.

And now I’m going to finish off this post with tons of pictures of our day!

Pumpkin Chocolate Chip, Maple Bacon Apple, Passion Fruit Milk Chocolate, and Vanilla Bean
We always eat our donuts at Dynamo Park.
Fancy bear masks at the Zeum store. I ended up getting the horse one pictured in the background.
I'm an Ood!
We stumbled upon an anime meet-up. And there was a dude dressed like the 11th Doctor! I didn't take a picture of him though. His bow tie was all wrong anyway. x__x
When I went to SFSU, I liked going to Yerba Buena Gardens a lot as it was my favorite thinking spot. I showed Tim around since he's never been there.
Union Square! Tim took a picture with this crazy ass looking street performer.
We passed by Tiffany's and I had to stop to take a picture of their window display. I LOVE carousels!

I’ll be putting up my next post later today which will be all about the foul mouthed goddess: Sara Bareilles. 😀

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outfit details:

  • hat: ?
  • cardigan: Mossimo
  • dress: M
  • necklace: Grouse and Badger
  • shoes: Madden Girl
  • scarf: Lake Tahoe Treasures/Wild Spirit Animal Hoodies
out & about

EPICAL EPICNESS: Part 1

Nina Penalosa4 Comments
I’m tired of these mother effing snakes in my mother effing park! Oh wait… no I’m not.

Yesterday Tim and I went to San Francisco for an UBER EPIC ADVENTURE! First we went to Dynamo Donuts in the Mission, then headed to The Walt Disney Family Museum, and then watched Drive. More on Disney and Drive later. Let’s talk about donuts for a minute, okay? Yeah, that’s right. I’m talkin’ ’bout food again! I’ve always wanted to try a maple bacon donut ever since I saw the Maple Bacon Bar at Voodoo Doughnuts in Portland while watching the Travel Channel (or was it Food Network?). A little while after that, either my sister or my aunts told me about Dynamo Donuts in San Francisco and how they had a maple bacon apple donut and bunch of other fancy schmancy flavors. I drooled over the menu on their site and finally went for the first nearly a year ago with Tim before we watched Broken Bells in Oakland.

This is the face of a very happy man.

I don’t know, there’s just something about these donuts. I’ve only been there a few times since the Mission was a bit of a ways away from my [former] house in Daly City. Tim and I had been talking about our withdrawals from Dynamo for the LONGEST time. And we finally made plans to go yesterday! It was a journey that was long overdue.

Passion Fruit Milk Chocolate is one of my favorite flavors. *drool*

Every time we go, we take our goods to the park next door and run around the giant mosaic snake, which we have named Horatio. There were tons of little kids in the park yesterday, so we couldn’t go ape shit like we normally do. And we also learned that there’s a water fountain that you can run through in the middle of Horatio! Crazyness.

The first time we played there, there were only a couple of kids and one dad went up to us and said, “Are you here with any children?” Tim told him, “No, but we’re kids at heart.” The dad totally didn’t go for it though. He basically tried to kick us out since we were 2 twenty-somethings running around and jumping off of a giant snake. I mean… we were upstaging the kids in the fun factor. They were just sitting there picking their noses. Okay, maybe they weren’t. But they most certainly didn’t look like they were having as much fun as Tim and I.

Sometimes I like to take toys with me to document the places I go.

I pretty much had a food orgasm when I bit into my Apricot Cardamom donut. Why can’t donuts like these be made available everywhere?! F*ck Krispy Kreme and Dunkin’ Donuts! Actually, I’ve never had Dunkin’ Donuts, but I’m willing to bet all the money in my bank account (which isn’t much) that Dynamo Donuts is way better than them.

I don’t know why I’m smiling, my donut is damn near gone!

I wrote a more detailed review of Dynamo Donut for Imaginary Battles, including my favorite flavors and how you need to get yo ass there early! If you want to know a bit more about these holey pieces of awesomeness, you can read my review here.

Part Deux of EPICAL EPICNESS is coming up in a bit, stay tuned…

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outfit details:

  • pullover: French Kitty
  • jeans: ???
  • shoes: Blowfish Malibu
  • necklace: thrifted