“Oh, I’ve been in a hotel before,” Tom said, “but usually it has a ‘6’ on it.”
On Saturday, I was planning to take Golden Gate Transit to
You have to flag these buses down; they don’t stop at every stop. But since I wasn’t expecting it for two more minutes, I wasn’t even looking in the direction from which it approached, alas. Home again I went, where my long-distance service informed me I had three minutes to explain the situation to Carol Joy.
She hopped in her car and came to see me instead, which was great of her. She met Hammett and admired his beauty, and then we had lunch at the Ethiopian place around the block, followed by lemony desserts and coffee at Tartine.
She had to leave about 4 p.m., leaving me plenty of time to go to Rainbow and do my weekly cooking. In the evening, I found myself strangely nauseous—I would blame the Ethiopian place, but apparently food poisoning can take 24 hours to set in, so it’s not fair to finger the last place you ate—and went to bed early.
On Sunday, Bill R. and I went to see Casino Royale, preceded by lunch at a Chinese place on Polk, as Chai-Yo was closed.
Sunday evening, Tom and I had dinner at We Be Sushi and went to Lost Weekend Video to get watchables only to find they had closed early, so we watched one of my two DVDs instead, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, which was part of my inheritance from my grandmother. (My other DVD is four episodes of I Love Lucy, which I found in my Christmas stocking last year or the year before.) I wasn’t sure Tom would like My Big Fat Greek Wedding, but he did.
In order to watch a DVD, I must haul my itsy-bitsy TV out of the closet and hook the DVD player up to it. It’s a lot of work to watch a movie on a very small screen, so I hardly ever do it. In theory, I will get a new PC one of these days with at least as large a monitor and watch DVDs on it, at which point I can give someone else my DVD player.
However, as an environmentalist, I feel obligated to keep my current PC until it dies of its own accord, as many (probably most) discarded computers end up in some other country where poorly paid workers get cancer extracting various materials from them and where lax safety regulations allow poisons to end up in the water we ultimately all share.
Oh, by the way, I am reading Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash, by Elizabeth Royte, but I knew that about the Chinese computer recyclers before. One thing I had never thought about was how we mix our own poop with nice fresh water (in our toilets), and then go to tremendous trouble and expense to clean the water again!
One fellow describes his self-designed composting toilet, which is so odor-free that it doubles as a table in his bedroom. His friends come over and set chips and salsa on it and then reach over for refreshments without the faintest idea what the snacks are sitting on.
I have recently finished John Crawford’s The Last True Story I’ll Ever Tell: An Accidental Soldier’s Account of the War in Iraq, which describes his and his fellow soldiers’ absolute disrespect for both Iraqis and women, from answering friendly remarks with hostility and obscenities, at one end of the spectrum, to murdering unarmed Iraqi children, at the other. Then he hints that the end of his marriage is some kind of inexplicable injustice. Gee, I can’t understand it, either.
I also finished Veronica, by Mary Gaitskill. She is a unique and talented prose stylist, but I realized after I finished it that I hadn’t cared one bit about any character.
I was in bed by about 10 p.m. on New Year’s Eve, where I slept soundly and concluded the next day that it had been an unusually quiet holiday.
But when I talked to Tom, he said he had been kept up well into the wee hours by the racket and was incredulous I had slept through it. “You didn’t hear the fireworks? The gunshots? The police??”
Maybe I’m not a light sleeper anymore. This bodes well for even more recreational sleeping in the future.
Hammett’s diarrhea is back once again. We will see Dr. Press this afternoon.
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