2 out of 3 ain't bad except

...when the one which missed took up 80% of the day.

First goal was to get some stuff at Lucky's. BD alcohol swabs were at the top of the list, and for the fourth time in two days there were none of the shelf (at 4 different stores). SO I asked the pharmacist, and she said there had been a massive recall. She had a couple of boxes she could sell, and I bought one, which is about a 3-week supply.

The second goal was to find a Thai market in Berkeley. The printout I had I left home (figures) so I looked them up on the iPhone via Yahoo and Google. Drove the the Great Mall in Milpitas which has a transit center and plenty of free parking. Took the elevator up to what I thought was the new BART line, which I thought ran to Berkeley, only to find it was San Jose light rail, and did not go anywhere near there. At the transit center there was an express bus to Fremont BART which my Clipper card was good for, so I waited about 20 minutes for that. The weather was clear and only a little chilly.

I thought BART accepted the clipper card too, but it does not, but I carry a BART ticket, and it had enough to get me to Berkeley.  Looked at the first market's address, and it was only a few blocks away, which seemed okay until it started to get very cold and blustery, and I enlarged the map to see it was more like a mile. Got there and it was out of business. There was a lot of stock in the store, so it looks like they shut the place recently.

Next one was a few more blocks down the same street. Got there and it was no longer a market, but a recycling center.

By now it is raining hard,  the wind is blowing and it is cold. Walked most of the way back to BART, stopped for some soup at Plearn Thai. It was pretty good. This is a place which I'd discovered maybe 20 years ago as a hole in the wall very close to campus, but it had been forced to move  to make way for a Best Buy (this was at a time when Best Buy was a strange place, they kept all the stock in the back, and you picked it from catalogs up front). The move came when the Thai restaurant fad was in full swing, and they landed a posh location near the newly-opened BART station. Kind of sad to see them not doing so well anymore.

Anyway, back to BART, then the bus, which was a half hour wait this time.

Now that I'm home, I see the two Thai markets are even further down University Ave, not in BART-walking distance, and probably have free parking. But that's a trip I'm not going to take in the heavy rain predicted for the next few days.

While I was on BART, I got a call from a recruiter in LA who was putting my resume in for a contract at Cisco, then about 5 minutes later a 408 area code number calling, saying she was with that recruiting company, and wanted to know if the LA guy had contacted me lately and what the status was. This makes me nervous, because she should have known what her underling was up to. She called again a few minutes later but I silenced the phone. We were in a tunnel and I would not have been able to talk anyway. She did not leave a message.

Managed to get back to my side of the Bay in time to have a latte at Starbucks, and my final goal: to see the preview of Death of a Salesman at Pear Avenue Theater. It is a good production, worth seeing. I'm not sure what to say about Don DeMico's Willy Loman. A very difficult part, the character talks non-stop for 90% of the play, and half the time not coherently. I think I wanted more levels of emotion than I saw, but that's sort of the character too. Alex Shafer as Ben and Larry Raboy as Charlie took two small parts and made them big. The rest of the cast will improve over time, this was just a preview and while there is room for improvement the show definitely was ready for prime time.

The set is very strange, built to fit in the Pear's very small space and avoid time-swallowing scene changes. Some of it worked for me, some of it didn't.  They broke the 5th wall, which worked well with Ben's character but not the other times they used the trick of bringing in characters through the back of the audience.  The period kitchen was well equipped, but the cast and crew had problems keeping the fridge closed.

Larry Raboy has been a Facebook friend for a while now, one of the rare ones I had never met. He kept insisting that we had seen each other in various shows, but it was always a show I had not been in or had not seen. Now that I have met him, I know I have never met him before. Tonight he said he saw me at something at San Jose City Lights, but I have never performed there. Sigh.

Plans for tomorrow:
Not much. Lousy weather. Photo shoot in the evening.