Yawn

Back from Santa Cruz. Had a wonderful time with cousin Renee, she's a good person, fun, and living her dream. She's a drummer with two jazz groups, gives private lessons and teaches  a music class at a school. She's learning guitar to help in the latter job. And she has the most incredible steel gray eyes. Just like my great-grandfather's, according to my mother. Which is not surprising, because Renee is descended from him.

We went to Sabieng, a Thai restaurant on Mission. Very good food, but the service was a little spotty. We ordered three main dishes, but only two arrived. It took two tries to get the soup, so that ended up being dessert. It was excellent, though. The staff all chatted with me in Thai, one of the waitresses came out special to ask if I had ever been to "Esan" - the northeast - where she is from. She was thrilled that I could name several towns there. The owner came by and chatted, he told me he'd been in the US for 22 years, and was surprised I remembered so much Thai after 30 years. I joked and said he spoke Thai very well for someone who had been away for 22 years, and he answered that he spoke it every day with the staff in the kitchen, and he mostly ate Thai food so that helped his vocabulary.

After dinner we drove to Pacific Ave and parked by Kinko's, and took a walk all the way to the start of Pacific and back again with a short stop at Peet's for Renee's coffee habit. And then to the Saturn Cafe for their excellent mint chocolate chip mud pie. It's small as mud pies go, but super tasting, served with two dollops of whipped cream, with an oreo crumb bottom and semi-sweet chocolate frosting. Yum!

Back to her place, I helped take her drum set in from the car, and then drove home. She left her doggy tub of curry and rice in my car (we knew we would both forget) but she's playing Wednesday night in Sunnyvale at Taragon, so I'll wrap it in a valentine heart and bring it to her there.

I was thinking of staying in SCruz overnight and driving up Hwy 1 to Pacifica tomorrow to see E's play, but realized it was better-faster-safer to come home tonight and take 280 tomorrow. But when I went online to make reservations, I discovered there is no show this Sunday. Just last Sunday and the 18th. E said she was going to the cast party after, so maybe she didn't know there was no performance, and will find a cast party instead. Or maybe there is a performance, but it's a special booking for some group. That's not uncommon.

Anyway, not Pacifica tomorrow. I have no idea what to do with myself. Netflix time, I guess. 

Chores

Did a lot of stuff I had been putting off at home. Went to Target for a small upright vacuum (the cannister doesn't do it in my small apartment) and kitty litter and mixed nuts. Also picked up a nice non stick 2 qt saucepan by Cephalon for $34 (their usual is $100 more than that). Then to Safeway for milk & seltzer & limes. Limes have been getting bigger lately. Then to Petsmart for some aquarium gravel & plastic plants. The live plants I bought last week became a molten mass of stinky dead stuff in the bottom of the tank in about 3 days. That's with a gro-lamp. Bettas don't need oxygen in the water (they breathe air from the surface) but the females need shelter from the male.

Got all that home, assembled the vacuum and used it. It works fine, but the bag-less crap catcher needs to be emptied way too often, and it's messy because stuff gets jammed into the filter fins. Emptied the aquarium of most of the decomposed plants and all but an inch of water, and put in fresh water with conditioner, waited for that to settle and then washed the gravel (I actually got river pebbles) and put those in a handful at a time, anchored the plastic plants in the pebbles, then dumped in five small bags of blue marble-like objects (they are not spherical, more like glass pebbles). It looks a whole lot prettier, so do the fish.

At the start of my shopping trip I went to the cleaners to drop off my silk clothes and leather jacket, but they were closed. Probably will do that Tuesday as long as I'm up early to drop off the cats.

Tried to burn the La Mancha DVD but Roxio insisted that the disk I had in the machine did not match the ISO image. So I plowed through the settings and found there were three, not two, places I needed to check in order to make the image match all the attributes I wanted. I had told it to make the video 8 mbps, and to set up for a dual layer DVD+R disk. But I had not checked the box in the project which said how many GB the target disk capacity was. So I've done that, and am burning a new ISO image. Maybe by the end of the day I'll have a decent quality DVD of the show. And a template for the rest of the captures I want to do.

Am trying to figure out what kind of tree abuts the balcony. I'll scan in a sprig from it, anyone know what it is?
 
( Images behind the cut )

Time to break out the Netflix DVDs.