Betta Breakers

Spent the last hour+ playing with the flash's wireless remote feature, thinking a dual flash arrangement would make for better fish photos. It didn't. Instead of one flash burst on the tank glass I got two. The better solution was to shoot from above and to the left, with the big flash on the hot shoe. Imagery coming sometime in the future.

Got all my chores done, and decided to go downtown Mountain View for dinner. At 8 pm everything was packed. You would think the economy was booming, for all the people out for a Saturday evening meal. There are at least six new (as in the last 3 months) eateries, and both the Buddha lounge and Monte Carlo had lines of dressed-up people waiting for the bouncers to let them in. And way too many people were hanging around in front of places blocking sidewalk traffic. Not only people waiting for a table, but people just hanging out. Insert Consideration For Others rant here.

I had the mixed grill combo plate at the little Greek place. Somewhat disappointing. No hummus, no tahina, no pita. Ranch dressing instead of the watery dill stuff. No falafel. No dolmas. Two silver dollar sized pieces each of grilled chicken, sausage patty, dry overcooked souvlaki.  A shredded lettuce "salad" filled half the plate. at least the rice was authentic, fried before being boiled. The baklava in the showcase looked excellent, but I'm on a diet. And it cost extra.

Now I know why, when almost every other place is packed, this one is not.

Took a walk most of the way to El Camino, parked at the Starbucks and read for an hour and a half. Some excellent eye candy. Matter of fact, the whole walk featured lots of women dressed to maim.

Walked back towards the car and had two WTF moments. The first was while passing the two new-ish bars, and at 10:15 on a Saturday night they were closing up. The other was my detour to the post office to pick up & deposit a vacation hold notice. They didn't have any. They had all kinds of other forms, including two stacks of P.O. Box applications, voter registration forms and draft registration forms. But no vacation hold forms. Gotta remember to get one Monday.

Plans for tomorrow are sparse. Hop on the bike and ride to the nail place and have my nails done. Yeah, just did them last week, but since i'll be out of town next week, I'd rather do them again early than walk around with 3-week-long armor plated nails. They shatter if you try to trim them with a nail clipper. It needs a Dremel-type grinder tool.

After the nails I will try to ride the bike over 101 via Rengsdorff and poke around the Google neighborhood, which is very bike friendly. The Starbucks at Shoreline & Pear seems like a reasonable half-way stop. They have a bike rack.

I guess I need to install the Tivo/Sonic app and make DVDs of the stuff I am slurping off of the Tivo in the background here. And there are those Dr. Who episodes to watch.

BASFA on Monday. I'll have shiny objects for melchar and will give jadecat9's to kproche & bovil to give to her at their earliest convenience. It will give them a chance to ogle the shiny objects, too.

I wonder if I could make any $$ selling the good star sapphires at cons. Hmmmm.

If...

..it's July 30th, then it's Ljournalist extraordinaire, author and new Seattlite cmpriest's birthday. Happy happy!

I've never met her in person, but loved her books Four and Twenty Blackbirds (which kept me company in Thailand) and Wings to the Kingdom which I may take with me to Seattle next week on the off chance we find ourselves in the same place at the same time, for autographical goodness.