Been Busy

Been getting out a little. Wednesday night was a dinner with my Peace Corps friends, the guest is an anthro professor visiting Stanford this year who is an expert on Iran, and he showed some interesting pictures using his Sony laptop. The restaurant is called Cuccini, is Iranian, and had so-so lamb kabobs. The speaker is about as fluent in Persian as the average Peace Corps volunteer would get, though he wasn't one. He looks like a bigger, 40-ish version of me. An unexpected fringe benefit was the belly dancer who was there for a birthday party in the other wing of the place, and she was amazing. Tall redhead, perfect build for belly dancing, in her 20's, I'm guessing Irish ancestry. Superb dance skills. The topper was the Chinese character tattooed on her lower back. No, wait, the topper was the waitress/co-owner gave me her card, and when I got home and read it, her surname is Jewish.

Cuccini is located behind 71 San Pedro in San Pedro Square, San Jose. You walk through the restaurant at 71 to get to Cuccini, which has the mythical address of 72 Almaden.

Thursday's adventure was going to the Mountain View library for a presentation on tenant rights by the city's volunteer mediation service. It was a packed house, the city had done a good job of advertising. The speakers were not boring, but their slide show was amateurish and they hadn't practiced enough to know what was coming on the screen the next time they hit the button. And they kept answering inane questions from the audience, where the right thing to do would have been to plow through the presentation after telling folks to see them afterwards (or phone them in the morning) for any specific landlord disputes.

Today I was all prepared to have a cortisone shot and maybe surgery on my left hand during my appointment with Kaiser's plastic surgery department. But I got nothing. So much for having an excuse to play hookie from work and enjoy the sunny balmy afternoon. The doctor explained that she's only allowed to give 3 injections per finger per patient per lifetime, and I'd already had one and it didn't last. Surgery was messy, and an artificial way to correct the symptom, so she suggested Plan C, immobilizing my thumb for a couple of months, should do the trick. So I have an appointment for next Thursday to go to the physical therapy folks and have them make a splint for me. I'm mostly ambidextrous, so this is going to be a challenge. At least I know I can bowl with my left thumb in a splint. But many day-to-day things, like zipping a zipper, tearing open a food wrapper, doing my shirt buttons, pulling up the covers in bed, are things I do left-thumbed. But not after next Thursday.

The good news is I had both hands available for a singles dinner. Four women who usually meet for lunch in Mountain View posted that they are looking for men to join them for dinner at Cabana Hotel in Palo Alto. It was an interesting evening, two of the women are Japanese, the other two have New Yawk accents. The men who joined us were a black man from SF, three Asian guys, and four caucasians, though one of them bailed as soon as the odds got higher than 1:1.

Saturday afternoon I'm expecting to go to a house filk sing. I'm bringing macaroons, since some people were complaining they couldn't eat the usual snacks on Passover. I gave up that lunacy years ago, but I happen to love macaroons, and they were on sale at Albertson's.

I'm looking forward to Sunday. I sure hope it's sunny in SF because at 12:30 pm, Howard Street at 12th gets turned into a street fair. The Howweird Fair. Nice of them to name it after me, but no, I spell my moniker with one "w". For details, see this here web site