time to chill

>sigh<

What a season. What I need is time to chill, and what I've got is freezing cold weather. I feel like I have been running ragged since October-—preparing for Halloween, then frantically trying to manage my increasing workload and the lead up to Thanksgiving, then maniacally trying to manage workload, social load, and family load leading up to Christmas and the Nashville vacation. Then I flew back, exhausted, with only a couple of days to prepare for the Annual NYD Black-Eyed Pea Chili Party, then there was that party, which was immediately followed by three weeks of work which was full of items waiting until "after the holidays."

I'm beat.

It seems as I get older, my weekends have less social obligations/opportunities than my weeknights. Thankfully, the first week of 2007, and this week, were four-day work weeks. And absent of social obligation, I have been able to spend my weekends recuperating and managing the backlog of home work. But when it comes to Saturday or Sunday mornings, the inertia can be debilitating. Knowing I have a list of to-do's for the day (clean up from the party, take down Christmas decorations, take everything out of the hall closet to get at Christmas storage and then shove it all back, return luggage to bottom of closet, clean kitchen, write thank-you notes, pay bills, fix things, clean everything else in the house, do laundry, edit photos, etc.) makes it very difficult to get out of bed. That, and being so wiped out from the week.

The first Saturday after New Year's was spent largely procrastinating, until Paul Day came over to hang out while I took down all of the decorations from Christmas and NYD. Barney had been attending a conference on the Parnassus campus, so walked downhill to join us for an afternoon of sitting around, drinking coffee and cocktails, reading trashy magazines, and watch the most wretched of cable soap operas: Dante's Cove.

Let's take a moment for Dante's Cove.

It's a gay, gothic, beach-side, supernatural drama with atrocious-to-passable writing and some really superb examples of superbly bad acting. And some nice soft-core sex scenes with full frontals of beautiful people, gay, straight, men, and women. To be honest, some of the leads can act almost as well as they look, but the cast of supporting/extra roles seems filled by the craft services or cleaning staff on Turks and Caicos where this is filmed (but not set— Why is everyone in the "hospital" speaking with crazy Dutch accents?).

It's complete trash and, taken from a certain perspective, entirely entertaining. There's plenty of pretty, but it comes off more of an unintentional comedy when the MST3K feel kicks in—best viewed with others.

Paul had dinner plans, and Barney and I were content with a quiet night of cheap eats and a movie. Bill and Jeff called asking if we would like to join them for dinner. However, beyond the idea of dinner, they had no plan. In absence of plan, I proposed adventure.

Now, love Jeff and Bill, but I would not set them in the madcap adventure camp. Not that I was proposing an adventure that was truly madcap, I’m just sayin’.

I did propose an excursion out of the City (gasp!) to the batshit crazy, enormously vast, industrial designed, sushi/seafood/hot food buffet in the new Century Theater Complex off the interstate in Daly City. Even though Jeff doesn’t eat fish, they were up for it.


High-larious. Our waiter looked like he had an after-gig as a server at Asia SF. And the four of us raised the number of white folk in the place to five. They offered us lobster “on the house,” which really makes no sense at an all-you-can-eat seafood buffet. What they meant is you had to ask for it and they had to bring it to you as they limited portions to one-half tail to a customer.


It was pretty nasty. It looked a bit scary, and was chewy enough that for a moment I thought I could blow a lobster meat bubble. Attempts to identify the covering substance were unsuccessful.

Bill headed for the salads, prime rib, and other items, Bill had a little of everything, and Barney and I just ate sushi until we were catatonic. Pretty good actually. Nothing to write Tokyo about, but good sushi. And the seared tuna fillets were delicious.

There was also, of course, a dessert bar, but I was afraid of the “non-dairy ice cream.” Can you call it ice cream if there is no cream? Our frozen dairy-like treat was tasty though.

It took us over 30 minutes just to get out of the parking structure.

Considering the previous three months, this was a very tame weekend.

But again, the mid-week proved busy, and I was grateful for another weekend without obligation, and a three-day weekend at that. It has been so brutally ass-cold no one has wanted to venture outside. Other than Sundance, my big night out was curled under fleece and blankets at Barney’s watching Sin City on DVD.

So Tuesday (yesterday) rolls around and I have plans to (1) not spend any more money and (2) start the must-drop-lbs diet.

It turns out to be a total crap day at work, and while the abuse continues, yesterday Shilpa bore the brunt of the blasts. Come 6:00, baby needed a bottle, so Amy Day and I walked with her down to Yancy’s for a drink. Another cold night, the place was empty. We needed a game of some sort instead of the video games there, and we didn’t feel like darts. I went next door to Tutti Frutti in seach of travel games. The shopkeeper asked me what I was looking for.

“We’re just drinking next door and wanted to play a game. What have you got?”
“How drunk are you?”

I wanted to say “this much” but we hadn’t started yet. The only game they had that was really of interest to me/us was a travel set of Scrabble, but Shilpa already had one and this model was pushing $50. A bit steep for a beer game and not in my “need to stop spending money” plan. I picked out a baby onezie for baby Leland (reading "Do I look like I was born yesterday?") and left with a travel version of Hungry Hungry Hippos, which was met with much glee.


However, this turned out not to be as much fun as expected as one of the hippos was bulimic.

You can also see how wretchedly cold everything is here. Even deep in the bar we kept on coats and hats.

Keeping with the “why am I out only on weeknights” trend, I failed in my (1) not spending money and (2) dieting plan by calling Kelly to join us and cabbing over to Martin Mack’s on Haight for pub food and trivia night, which featured lots of fried things, carbs, and beer.

Yummy, but a dangerous trend.

Tonight: more heavy bar food. MBA is hosting an SF alumni event at McCormick & Schmick’s in Ghiradeli Square.

Off there now…