The first story occurred as I was at the grocery store, leaving it actually, and heading for my car. There was a little old man working his way around a car, and he was hanging onto the side. I slowed down, since it looked like maybe he needed some help, and he saw me and gave a strained smile.

“It’s no fun being handicapped,” he said with a sigh, and I stopped.

“Can I help you with something?”

He looked embarrassed. “I need to go to the bathroom. My wife is in the store, but…I can’t wait. I really need to go.”

I thought about various options. “Would it help if I brought over a cart and you could lean on it?” I asked, thinking that maybe he just needed some help walking. But he shook his head, and it occurred to me that maybe there was more to the procedure, especially when he mentioned that he really needed his wife again.

So I asked if he’d like me to have her paged, and he looked so very relieved. He told me her name and I marched right back to the store and cornered the first employee I found – a young man restocking the carts. It took a few attempts to explain what I wanted him to do, but once it finally sunk in, he nodded and immediately went inside, hopefully to page the man’s wife so he could get some relief.

I thought about waiting, but I wasn’t sure what else I could do. So I told the man that she’d been paged, and wished him a nice day, and continued on to my car.

As I was pulling out of the parking lot I saw the young employee heading back across the parking lot toward the old man. I wondered if he’d been able to page the wife, or if she would have even heard her name over the usual ambient noise of a grocery store during the after-work rush. I wondered if maybe the employee would be able to offer more help to him than I could. I wondered if it all worked out okay.

The second story happened earlier. As I was headed off to a local coffee shop this morning to get some coffee, I noticed a woman with a funnel, carefully pouring something through one of the holes in a manhole cover – not into the sewer, but into the smaller covers that show up periodically in the middle of residential streets. I didn’t think much of it, until I came home a little later and found her doing the same thing to an entirely different utility hold cover a bit further down the street.

It was late morning and now that I had coffee I was feeling more polite and willing to be friendly, so I stopped beside her, rolled down my window, smiled, and said “Okay, I’m curious. What are you doing?”

It was like I’d put a nickel in a slot. She started rambling about how pouring water down these holes filled up a particular pipe, and when it was full, something was triggered. At first I thought maybe there was something to what she was saying, but then the story got more convoluted – something about how what was triggered was old bills that would then have to be paid, although I wasn’t entirely sure if it was the city that had to pay the bills or somebody else. She talked about how her whole family used to do this to every single one of these conduits on the entire city, and in all the surrounding cities, and then somehow Michael Jackson entered the rambling, and there was something about how when she paid her bills to the utility company she would print the letter G backwards and that would also trigger whatever it was that she claimed pouring water into the conduits triggers. Then she started leaning on the window sill and gesturing and I realized that not only did I have no clue what she was talking about, it was pretty obvious that this woman was likely not playing with a full deck, and maybe I should try to quietly drive away and leave her to her pouring her water down the conduit covers in peace.

Luckily at this point a truck was coming up behind me, so I motioned behind me, noted that I really needed to move my car out of the way, wished her a nice day, and drove away. When I left her she was staring back down at the conduit cover, clutching her jug of water. I have no idea how long she was there, or if she just kept moving down the
street, pouring water into all the conduits in the hopes of triggering whatever it was that she was so sure would happen. I though about calling the police but it was just water – nothing that wouldn’t’ go down those conduits in the rainy season anyway – and if that’s what kept her happy and occupied, well, why not. But still. Some stories have endings you want to know, and some stories maybe you were better off never asking about in the first place.

In my next life I want to be one of those people who can sleep late on weekends. This has nothing to do with the fact that I have cats who have developed such a fine sense of hearing that the sound of my eyes opening can make them come running. Nor does this have anything to do with the fact that as I have gotten older (sheesh, when did mid 30’s become ‘older’!), my bladder’s capacity to last through the night has seriously diminished. No, this has everything to do with the fact that my brain is so wired to wake up at somewhere around 6 am (because that is when we wake up on work days) that even on days when we can sleep late, it simply cannot handle any change in the routine. Oh, I might sneak in an extra half hour here or there, but none of this sleeping in til the luxurious hour of, say, 8 or 9. Sigh.

On the other hand, being wide awake at o-dark thirty on a weekend morning means lots more knitting time before we have to go anywhere or do anything. So that’s what I did this morning, when my internal clock decided that sleeping past 6:30 am just was not an option. I got up, fed the cats, and then went downstairs and did a full pattern repeat on the lace shawl.

Which leads me into noting that, oh, by the way, I have decided that I must now learn how to knit lace. I’ve mastered cables (did that early on with my very first knitting project, in fact – you long term readers may recall the adorable cable sweater I made for my nephew – the one that ended up not being able to fit over his head, sigh), I’ve mastered two-color slipstitching, and most recently I’ve mastered socks. Next up was either Fair Isle (those patterned bands of color you often see on sweaters, for the non-knitters among you. Think Scandanavian type designs, if that helps), which, while I fully intend to learn it one of these days, is not high on the priority list, intarsia (again, not high on the priority list), or lace. So even though I do not wear shawls, nor know anyone who wears shawls or ever *would* wear a shawl, especially a shawl made from yarn about the thickness of dental floss, I am making a lace shawl. It’s this one, in case you’re wondering (because I am sure you all were dying to know), and after the first few rows of dropping stitches and swearing (knitting is, after all, a ladylike art, so you know swearing has to be involved at *some* point), it all clicked. But it’s the kind of thing where I still need a quiet room and very little distraction. So if I had to be up that early this morning at least it wasn’t all for naught.

We’ve had a mostly quiet day. We went to church, mainly out of habit, and I sat in the back and made funny faces at a little four-month old baby with the most marvelous fuzzy patch of hair on her head that stood straight up and made her look perpetually astonished, and pretty much paid absolutely no attention to the sermon as a result. Afterwards, because I happen to be the chair of the Board of Trustees and therefore somewhat responsible for general building maintenance, I was handed a clipboard and a list of random maintenance and renovation tasks for the church and I and the two guys who know about construction and all that goes with it wandered through various rooms and even wandered outside for a brief moment, to discuss which items from the never-ending list we wanted to try to accomplish during the all church work week at the end of the month. Or rather, I made a few suggestions and then they would go off on tangents discussing how best to reroute electrical cables or something or other, and then I would interject ‘so about the painting’ to bring them back around, and somehow we got it all planned. Sort of. Or at the very least, we narrowed the list down to a more manageable number.

Afterwards, I sat in the sanctuary and worked on the lace shawl – which mainly entailed knitting one row and then quietly swearing as I undid the entire thing, timing it all so perfectly that I only had a few more stitches to unravel by the time Richard was done with his meeting. We pondered various lunch options, but then decided that the mature, adult thing to do would be to go to Costco and consume sustenance in the form of samples, and also see if there was anything there we could not live without. The theme of the samples today seemed to be all meat, all the time, but at least the trip was fruitful in that we scored a four-foot long folding table for me. I’ve been wanting a folding table to use as craft space for a while, and now that I’ve got the knitting machine (it finally arrived this week!), which requires a flat surface with square edges (and unfortunately both the dining room and breakfast nook tables have rounded edges), the need was a little more urgent. So now I have a lovely sturdy table, with perfectly square edges, which will fold up and store nicely into the closet with all my yarn and other crafting type paraphernalia (although if I keep this up we may have to revisit that random idea we once had about looking into expanding out over the garage – ha ha).

Richard went off to demo Linux to people at the Co-op in Davis and I stayed home and worked on the shawl a little more (this time without any swearing at all – yay!), and then he came home and made dinner because after he got those books yesterday he’s been quite motivated to try out some of the new recipes. Tonight was chicken with a spice rub with just a little kick to it, and corn on the cob that he put directly over the coals until it was just perfect, and it was delicious. I am so very glad that he likes grilling, and doesn’t mind being outside in the heat, standing over burning coals, dealing with the smoke and the occasional yellow jacket or other buzzy sort of critter, while I stay inside in blissful air conditioned comfort.

The last two days I have been very inspired to actually cook. The past few weeks have been marked with a distinct lack of enthusiasm for making something at home more complicated than a box of Kraft Mac and Cheese, or going out to eat, but yesterday, for some reason, it finally clicked.

Last night I made salmon cakes, by smashing up several salmon patties (purchased from Trader Joe’s so at least I can rest assured they were environmentally friendly chunks of dead fish) with some bread crumbs, onion flakes, egg, and seasoning. Then I spritzed a pan with nonstick spray, cooked them until the salmon looked like it was done, and served them with green beans and a side of brown rice. They turned out quite delicious, for something thrown together at the last moment. I tossed the recipe, such as it is, onto What’s for Dinner, because they turned out pretty well. Likely I will have to make them again in the near future to work out some tweaks to the recipe, but there you are. My very own recipe for salmon cakes. I am sure that it is extremely similar to everyone else in the world’s recipe for salmon cakes, but I couldn’t be bothered to go find out.

Riding on the success of last night’s dinner, this morning I decided that it had been far too long since I last made (or attempted to make) Paprika Chicken, and it was time to remedy that situation. I found this recipe years ago and have made it numerous times since, usually to rave reviews. But it is also the recipe I seem to be most capable of ruining. There was the one fateful evening I accidentally grabbed the wrong orange box from the cupboard and put in a tablespoon of baking soda instead of cornstarch (in case you were curious, baking soda and tomato sauce make an exciting, nasty smelling, bubbly combination which neither of us was brave enough to taste). And the last time I tried to make Paprika Chicken, I think I must have put in a tablespoon of cayenne pepper and 1/8 teaspoon of paprika, instead of the other way around, making the dish a wee bit nuclear, and also quite inedible.

This time, however, it turned out marvelously. I suspect we’ll be eating the leftovers for dinner tomorrow night.

Earlier this week Richard replaced the garbage disposal. We’d been kind of building up to this; we bought it on Sunday, thinking we’d have time to do it, and then we thought maybe we’d have time on Monday (but when we came back from the zoo we were too tired), so it had to wait for a week night.

I volunteered to help, but he didn’t need any assistance. So I figured the best way I could be useful was to go into another room and listen for any yelling, which might indicate injury (to either Richard or the disposal). There was no yelling, however; turns out he managed to install it with a minimum of swearing or problems – a much smoother foray into plumbing related house maintenance than when we replaced the faucet in the rental house, years ago.

It was good we managed to get the disposal replaced, since we had a full house this evening, which meant it was definitely needed. My parents and my older sister and her family came over for my belated birthday celebration. We’d purchased a huge slab of salmon at a weak moment earlier in the week, which turned out to have been a good idea, since Richard ended up cutting it into smaller and more manageable chunks and tossing it on the grill with some fresh asparagus and green beans and just enough teriyaki sauce. My mom and my older sister and I stayed inside the nice cool house with the little boys while all the men went outside to congregate around the grill. It’s one of those odd gender things I will never understand – why it is that men feel the need to go stand outside, in the heat, beside a big metal can full of burning things which is emitting clouds of smoke and occasionally a spark.

The boys found Richard’s K’nex set and the Legos we bought specifically to entertain small people when they visit, and spent a majority of their time having noisy fun with either those, or with Richard’s old cast iron train cars. These things are solid metal, extremely sturdy, and pretty much impervious to anything that small child could do. I am happy to report that wood laminate stands up quite well to two determined children and three extremely heavy iron train cars (each about a foot long) being rolled as fast as little boys can push them around and around and around the floor. They were a lot of fun to watch.

This year the general theme of my birthday presents has been all about enabling the knitting addiction. Richard’s aunt sent me a pattern book for knit rugs. Richard got me some marvelous knit pattern software, and a knitting machine (which might possibly be lost in limbo, considering how long it’s taking for the thing to be shipped). My parents got me needle organizers – one for circulars and one for double pointeds – which means, of course, that now I must wander around the house and figure out where I’ve managed to stash my slowly growing needle collection so I can now have them all in one convenient spot, next time I’m frantically searching for that pair of size 4 circulars I could swear I had. I also got a DVD of Monsters, Inc. from my older sister, which is one of our favorite funny movies.

There was ice cream cake from Ben & Jerry’s, and more talking and more careening around the floor of heavy train cars, which also meant there was a lot of laughing. The boys got their baths upstairs in our big garden window tub (where I am thinking we are eventually going to have to break down and put up some shelves because there are only so many devil ducks that any one bathtub can hold). Then everyone hugged their goodbyes and my older sister and brother-in-law took their freshly scrubbed and not-at-all-tired-just-ask-them little boys home, and we are now relaxing and I am pondering whether or not to tackle the dishes or leave them til later, and also whether there was any ice cream cake left, and thus ends another birthday period in our house.

Since we both had today off from work – it being Memorial Day and all – I decided I wanted to go to the San Francisco Zoo. The fact that today is my birthday just meant that it was going to be a birthday trip, but I’d have wanted to go even if it wasn’t.

We’ve managed to get to the zoo once a year now for the past few years, and it’s always a lot of fun. We’ve learned that the best way to go to the zoo, especially on a holiday when it’s more likely to be crowded, is to get there when they open, so that by the time it gets crowded, we’ve seen everything we wanted to see, and we’re ready to go home.

We went to see the lemurs first, because Richard and I are all about the lemurs. They were in fine form, lots of barking and meandering and – like anything vaguely feline in form and behavior – lots of lounging around , either singly or in groups. Then we got distracted by an extraordinary amount of noise coming from the rest of the primates. Turns out the howler monkeys and the simians had a LOT to say, and they felt the need to say it at the top of their voices.

Then it was on to the Africa exhibit, which was brand new when we went to see it last year. We saw a herd of giraffes, ostriches, and a pair of , who seemed to need to stay right next to each other no matter where they went.

As we were nearing the end of the meandering path through the African Savannah, we spotted a door to something else – a door neither Richard nor I recall being there before (so either we missed it last year, or it’s been added on since last time we were there). Inside a large netted area were a handful of additional critters, including some of the world’s ugliest scavenger birds, some extremely fat squatty birds that resembled either pheasants or chickens, and which were covered with a Escher-esc pattern of tiny black and white checks. And lurking in the back corner was one of the cutest things at the zoo – a dik-dik! It’s the tiniest little thing. I looked it up online and the info says they usually don’t get to more than about 8 pounds. It’s got a snout that’s longer than the usual deer-type critters, and the nose tends to twitch and wiggle as if maybe, somewhere back in its ancestry, some dik-dik had a passing fling with an anteater. Another distant ancestor had a thing for rabbits, if the hind end is anything to go by.

We spent a little bit of time watching the gorillas, since the large silverback was wandering around looking bored, and the younger (I think female) kept zipping here and there. It looked like one of the zookeepers was inside the building, so the little gorilla kept hanging out by the door, but she would hang out by sitting on top of a huge rubber ball and rocking back and forth. Then she decided she’d had enough of that, and it was time to go sit in one of the food bowls. All the while the older female did her best to move through half a dozen sprawl positions on a flat rock which was probably a lovely, sun-warmed spot to nap.

This time we finally got to see the bald eagle; most of the time it’s been so hidden behind the trees on its little island that we cannot see it. Apparently something happened to the penguins because there were a lot fewer than in years past – although we did get to see just how fast a penguin can swim, because as we stood there, one of them decided that it needed to do some speed laps Right Now, and took off, zipping madly around the pool, and occasionally leaping out of the water, dolphin style. It was amazing to watch, especially because all the other penguins seemed determined to ignore the speedy one completely.

It was a wonderful day. We saw a very lazy polar bear (don’t you just want to go poke those toes? Sleepy polar bears always look so friendly and harmless – until of course you remember that to polar bears, we humans are actually prey). I had to snap a picture of the snoozing zebra because I love the ‘zipper line’ stripe along the tummy. By the time we made it over to the prairie dogs and the meerkats, it was getting warm out, and most of them were staying inside their burrows. But one little prairie dog came over to the glass wall and rather abruptly starting leaping about and turning from side to side…it almost looked as if he was dancing with his reflection. Richard got a terrific shot of the ‘two’ of them that looks as if they are trying to hold hands.

We stayed longer than we have in the past, and by the time we headed out to the car, we were exhausted. Since it had been a bit chilly in the morning, we started the day wearing jackets, but then those came off, and it didn’t occur to either Richard or I that we might have wanted to put on sun block. So we’re both sporting sunburns on our arms and faces.

There’d been some discussion about trying to have all my family come over this evening for a birthday dinner. But my older sister and her family had plans for a cul-de-sac block party barbeque, and by the time we got home, we were so tired that I was glad we didn’t have to somehow come up with enough energy to entertain guests. So instead we stopped for dinner on the way home, and then came home and lolled on the couches in the living room and watched my new copy of Noises Off and I think a long soak in a hot tub might be in order later, to try to soothe all our tired aches and pains. But even though we’re both worn out, it’s been a fun birthday. Any day that includes a trip to the San Francisco Zoo is a marvelous day.

Yesterday afternoon my dad called to see if I wanted to do the organ and piano duet with him again. I didn’t have the music, so we met at the church so he could give me a copy and then we could run through it. Then I came back home and likely drove Richard crazy by playing my part over and over, and doing a lot of swearing under my breath every time I made a mistake. My dad has noted that this isn’t so much a duet as it is a piano piece with organ accompaniment; this is merely yet one more reason for me to learn how to play the organ so that the next time we do this, *I* can have the easier part. We played it this morning for the offertory and I managed to get through it with a minimum of (noticeable) mistakes.

We had great plans for getting things accomplished this afternoon – like purchasing and installing a new garbage disposal. Our old one died a week or so ago, and no amount of resetting, turning the blades backwards, or any of the other usual tricks would make it run again. We got it to run very briefly – just long enough for me to run some icky gunk down the drain, but then it died again and even the repair service of Dad and other Dad agreed that it just needed to be replaced.

But instead we came home and took naps, and then Richard ran off to the hardware store to at least purchase the new disposal and I stayed home to wait for his parents, who were coming up to take us out for my birthday dinner. They brought me lovely presents – a box of books and a DVD of Noises Off, which is one of my very favorite movies because if you are not laughing by the end of it there is something very, very wrong with you – and took us out for a delicious dinner.

However, prior to opening presents and going to dinner, Richard was still off getting the new disposal when they arrived, so in order to entertain them, we headed out into the backyard because it’s fun to occasionally see how far all the little fledgling plants have come since last time they were up here. For one thing, the blue star thyme creepers are finally starting to take hold around the path stones that surround the raised flowerbed we built, which means at least parts of that little walkway are starting to look a bit overgrown and pretty – just how I’d hoped. The thyme is literally covered in tiny pale blue flowers, and where it’s grown the most vigorously, it’s starting to creep over the edges of some of the stones, and is doing its job to hold some of the larger and more wobbly ones in place.

Just as we were about to go back inside, however, I noticed something extremely exciting! The pomegranate tree! Has flowers!

The pomegranate tree has, until now, been rather a bit of a disappointment. For one thing, it looks not so much like a tree as like a rather unruly and overgrown bush. And last year it had two little flowers, which promptly fell off and produced not a single pomegranate, and I was starting to get a little antsy. But this year it seems to be making up for the lack of fruit the year before. The whole tree is covered in gorgeous bright red flowers, which I find amazing simply because the outer petals of the flower are thick and leathery, and feel just like the outer shell of the pomegranate fruit itself. Plus, not only were there lots of flowers showing all their color, there were dozens more dark red buds, just waiting to open up and surprise me.

It’s rather fun to watch all the little trees slowly coming into their own, now that they’ve had over a year to establish. The walnut tree is tall and gangly, sort of like an awkward thirteen year old boy who can’t figure out what to do with his arms and legs. I have a feeling that I am going to have to go out at some point and give it a rather severe pruning, because experience (in the form of the walnut tree in my parents’ backyard) has taught that if I am not willing to prune, it will do its best to try to take over the yard (and then eventually the neighbors’ yards, I would imagine). But for now I am leaving it be because I think it is going to give me double the number of walnuts it gave last year – so we might be up to six of them by the end of the summer. We shall see.

I had to cull the white peach tree again this spring because even though we propped it up rather strongly, I still think if I let it produce all the peaches it wanted to produce, most of its tiny little branches would fall off from the weight. But still, this year I’ve left about a dozen of them on, instead of just a handful, because I think it can handle at least that much. The little tangelo tree won’t bloom for another few months, if I remember from last year, and the red grapefruit tree is so very tiny that I will not be surprised if this summer it does not bloom at all. But that’s okay – I can be patient for my grapefruit. I think I’m going to have more than enough pomegranates and peaches to keep me happy this summer and fall.

Today I finally gave up. I decided that when the sinus pressure gets so bad that I am not only throwing up at work, but then am incapable of keeping anything (even water) down afterwards, maybe it might be time to go see the doctor and beg for pills. I called and got an appointment, then went home early from work and crawled into bed and prayed for my head to stop trying to implode. The doctor, a friendly and earnest young intern, went through the usual spiel about nasal sprays (no thank you – the last time they put me on those I got these really nifty heart palpitations that took days to go away after I stopped the meds) and decongestants (pseudophedrine is my friend, yes indeed, but it only goes so far), before finally agreeing that antibiotics were the way to go. He noted that the last time I was in for my special brand of sinus infection hell was in December of 2003 – wow, it’s been a while. This only serves to confirm the fact that the allergy shots *are* helping, overall. Yes, I’m sick again, but hey, nothing is perfect, and maybe by this time next year it’ll be even better.

So now I have a bottle of horse pills to take twice a day for the next ten days. If things go as they usually do, I should start feeling better by the weekend (all fingers and toes crossed – well, except for one toe, that is). Richard’s got a doctor’s appointment tomorrow, at which he will hopefully be given giant horse pills of antibiotics as well, since he’s in far worse shape than I am. I have a very selfish reason for wanting us both to be healthy by the weekend – we’ve made tentative plans to go to the San Francisco zoo on Monday for my birthday and I’d really like to be healthy enough to go.

Richard’s little sister got a job with a local Gaslighter theater, playing a part in the matinee melodrama for the summer. So after a few false starts and rearrangement of plans, we finally made it down there this afternoon.

Because traffic in the Bay Area is unpredictable and timing a trip down to his parents is next to impossible to get just right, we ended up arriving a little early. The theater, however, is located quite conveniently next to a large store that sells, among other things, stone dragons and gargoyles, as well as a rather impressive selection of Devil Ducks (rubber ducks with horns. Don’t ask). And even more conveniently, we had just enough time to peruse the selection, pick out a little coiled dragon who looked like he would fit in perfectly perched on the wall of the raised flower bed in the back yard, and also rummage through their collection of ducks to pick out all the colors and patterns we did not yet have. I think, after today, we may very well have found them all. Richard is showing signs of wanting to expand into pirate ducks as well, though, and I’m not sure the tub in the master bathroom is big enough for that many rubber ducks. I sense shelf installation in the near future.

The melodrama was cute and a little haphazard, but that’s typical for this sort of thing. We booed the villain, who sported cape and mustache and leering grin, and cheered the hero even though he was quite obviously dumber than a rock, and we flung popcorn randomly at everyone (they encourage this sort of thing) and it was quite fun. Later, the group did a short variety show, with singing and dancing and the ugliest creature in the world (old joke, but this is was a kid’s show, so it still got laughs), and we all decided that Richard’s little sister would actually look quite cute with short dark hair (like the wigs they all had to wear). We went out for dinner and caught up on life, and chatted about Desperate Housewives and Lost and other trivial things, and Richard and I did our best to pretend that we were not really all that sick and we could actually breathe like normal people, and it was such a nice day that it almost worked.

I suppose it was too good to last, this avoidance of colds and sinus infections and all the joy that comes therein. With the way the weather has been swinging from cold to hot and then back again these past few weeks, the unseasonably late rain storms, and the resulting rapid growth and release of all manner of new pollens and allergens in the air to assault those of us sensitive to them, it was probably only a matter of time. Monday I woke up with an odd sore throat that felt almost as if I’d been swallowing too hard. By Tuesday I was exhausted and achy – all the signs of having a fever – and my nose was stuffed up. Wednesday I went in to work for a few hours, hoping that the cold meds might keep this thing at bay long enough for me to get through the day, but then gave up and went home. Yesterday I didn’t even try to go in; instead I decided to just stay home and see if this thing might finally go away. These past few days I’ve mainly spent alternately napping, or shuffling listlessly around the house, counting down until I could take the next dose of over-the-counter cold meds and make all the annoying symptoms go away.

I was supposed to have today off as part of the new flex work program in our company, but after being gone so much earlier this week, and knowing how much work was piling up in my absence, I decided since I was feeling a little better I really should go in. Okay, and one of the main reasons I went to work today was because after sitting at home so long I was starting to go a little stir-crazy.

It’s frustrating, being exhausted and sick at home. There are a million and one little chores that I could be doing with all that free time, but simply shuffling downstairs to feed the cats wore me out. Yesterday I had a little more energy, so I camped out on the sofa downstairs and knit. I picked something fairly easy – an open mesh bag meant for farmer’s markets and other types of shopping – which had the added benefit of using up some yarn that’s been in my stash for quite some time. So I suppose that was at least vaguely productive.

It hasn’t been all hacking and wheezing this week, though. Tuesday (which was before the worst of it hit) Richard and I met a lawyer in Davis and finally got the ball rolling on setting up wills and durable powers of attorney and advanced directives, establishing who would be the executor of our estate, and who is given responsibility for assessing whatever cats we might have at the time we both kick off to figure out who can be adopted and who should probably be put to sleep (that may sound harsh unless you knew some of our cats, since Zucchini, for example, is so terrified of everything and everyone that to try to put him in a shelter or another home would be cruel). We left with a bit of homework to do in terms of names and lists and that sort of thing, and it exhausted me completely, but I wasn’t willing to give up the appointment just for being sick. It’s something we’ve needed to do for quite some time, and even though it still isn’t done, at least we’re a lot closer than we were before.

I came home from work early today – but then so did everyone else in the office because I’m not the only one who’s lately been sick – and I can feel this settling in my sinuses. I am popping decongestants in the hope that I can stave off my yearly trip to the doctor for antibiotics, but I’m beginning to think this, too, is inevitable. I am doomed to suffer from a nasty bout of winter ick at least once a year, even if it had to wait until it wasn’t technically winter anymore to hit.

The latest offering of the Davis Musical Theater Company (which we saw Mother’s Day weekend) was “Don Quixote”. It’s a play I’ve never seen before, and I wasn’t exactly sure what to expect, since it’s been a few years since I read the book. Unlike most plays, all the action takes place in exactly one set, so for a change they’d actually created quite a nice one (lately their sets have been a little sparse and uninspiring). The play requires a number of good singers, and for the most part, they succeeded. The guy they had playing Don Quixote was marvelous, and the woman who played Aldonza/Dulcinea was marvelous. She usually ends up playing the ditzy blonds (and quite well, too), so it was nice to see her get a chance to play someone a little less blond and a lot more intense.

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This past week Richard mentioned in passing the name of a restaurant in Davis that neither of us had been to in a very long time. I’m not sure why we never think to go there – maybe because it’s tucked away in the not-so-nice part of town next to an abandoned grocery store. But for whatever reason, we both immediately thought of it when we decided to go out for dinner Saturday night. So off we headed for some Greek food at a place called the Symposium.

As I said, it’s been years since either of us has been there, and in that time someone decided to paint the entire little run-down shopping center in a palette of extremely unfortunate shades of orange. The grocery store is still abandoned, but the little ethnic food store (where I used to occasionally go to get huge samosas when I lived in Davis) is still there, although some of the other stores have been replaced by a series of second hand shops. The restaurant is at the very end of the little strip, looking rather unrestauranty in its sheer orangeness, but once we opened the door and walked inside, everything looked just as it should again.

They were very nice and gave me a chair on which to prop up my stupid possibly-broken toe. We ordered an appetizer which was a wedge of some kind of vaguely parmesan-like cheese lightly breaded, spritzed with lemon, and then set on fire because when the waitress described it I knew I had to give it a try. It was divine (although how could anything involving lightly breaded flaming cheese *not* be?) – in fact everything was wonderful. We ate far too much and couldn’t finish our dinners, yet still ordered desserts (pear torte and Kailua cheesecake) which we couldn’t finish either, but had to at least try.

It was a lovely dinner (although with the richness of the food it’s not something we should do very often – alas), and it served as a little reminder to us that we have lately gotten into a bit of a food rut, only going out to the same small circle of places when we’re in the mood to go out to eat. Our usual selection is at least a varied circle of food styles (sushi, Indian, Mexican, Chinese, Italian, and lately Korean because a new place opened in town that’s pretty good), but there are other things to try and places to go. There’s a new little Afghanistani restaurant in Davis that we passed when walking around town recently, for example, yet we continually forget that it is there when having the rather predictable discussion of ‘what do you want to eat? I dunno, what do you want to eat?’

It’s good to expand our horizons every now and then, especially if the opportunities are right out there within driving distance. One never knows what one might find.