Through A Glass Darkly

Today they look much happier after a night’s rest. :)

My Valentine’s Day flowers looked a little sad yesterday, but they had a lovely card. Isn’t he sweet to me?

Sunday we wandered around the Union Square area. There was an art show going on in the Square. I especially liked the display of cat paintings by one gentleman. They were very whimsical. We visited the Apple store, for no particular reason, other than to worship at the altar of Steve Jobs. We stopped at the visitor center, pausing to watch the cable car turnaround. The line was huge, so I wasn’t in the mood to wait around to ride one.

We saw a brochure for “the most unpretentious bar”, named Dave’s, so we swung by there. The food was pretty decent bar food. I had a well-prepared BLT and a delicious pear cider. I was a little dubious since I don’t like the pear cider from Woodchuck, but this had a very light, refreshing taste. The owner of the bar was apparently from Massachusetts, so that was cool. After lunch, we headed back to the hotel to utilize the high speed internet access. We were planning on meeting a friend for dinner, so we just bummed around the hotel room for the rest of the afternoon.

Dinner was at one of the many taquerias in San Francisco. These all seem to be very casual places serving Mexican food cafeteria style. It was very good and very filling. By 10 o’clock, the time difference had more than caught up with me, so we headed back to the hotel and to bed.

We started Monday bright and early, in order to take the bus tour of Wine Country we had planned. It wasn’t a bad way to go. Next time, I might prefer to drive and have a little more independence, but I didn’t have a particular winery in mind, so it wasn’t that big of a deal. Our bus driver chattered inanely throughout the trip, handing out trivia without any real structure to his speech.

The first stop, Kirkland Ranch Winery, seemed to be a pretty big operation. They just showed us the main building, which used to be a house. It was a pretty cool log structure that the family who started the ranch built. Our guide talked about the history of the place and then took us upstairs to do some tastings. We got to try three wines. The first was a chardonnay. It wasn’t bad. The second wine was a mixed wine, similar to a chianti. I really enjoyed that one. The third wine was a lovely sweet wine with a thick, honey and fruit flavor. I picked up two bottles of that for the holidays.

Dremel Pumpkin Carving Kit (Dremel has branched out into pumpkins. Too funny.)

I’m in San Francisco! I’ve never been to California before, so I’m excited. We rolled into SFO around 10 o’clock this morning, after lifting off from Boston’s Logan airport at 6:30. That was the longest flight I’ve been on since 1997. Also my first long flight over land. It was cloudy, but I caught glimpses of the Rockies and some weird brown landscape that I couldn’t identify.

We caught a van into the city that dropped us off at our hotel, The Inn at Union Square. Luckily, our room was ready, because we were ready to crash. After a few hours of sleep, I still wasn’t feeling too hot, so we hung around the room for a while and watched John Cleese’s “Wine for the Confused”. Where better to watch it?

Feeling somewhat recovered, not to mention ravenous, we headed out after getting a dinner recommendation from the hotel staff. Fino’s turned out to be a reasonable, delicious Italian spot. We were fortunate to grab seats at the bar, because the small place was packed. Reservations would have been nice, but it worked out well. I’d suggest this place in a heartbeat.

Now we’re back at the hotel, and I’m chilling comfortably after a long hot shower and bath, decked out in the bath robes the hotel provides. It’s a little small, but it seems like a nice place. The staff has been very helpful, and of course, it has high speed internet access in the room. Who could ask for anything more?

Today is my 25th birthday. That’s a quarter of a century. Five squared. A pretty cool number, really. So I feel like I should have some insightful writing to mark the occasion.

But I’m just tired. And a little depressed. I don’t the energy to do much of anything in the little time that I have at home after work. And even less time by the time my boyfriend gets home. I’m either going to work, working, coming back from work, or hiding from my boyfriend’s family.

I don’t know what to do. Right now, I guess I’m going to bed.

Salon.com’s Hilary Flower writes poignantly of the so-called “abridged” version of The Wind in the Willows and other favorites. Books made up a good deal of my world as a child and are still very important, so I shudder to read about the travesties the Great Illustrated Classics has wrought upon them.

Maybe I’m being too dramatic.

I hope you're going to make me out to be funny. (A well-written and intriguing interview with Tori Amos.)

Television Captioning Censorship (Apparently deaf people are much more fragile than the rest of Americans and need to be protected. They're not allowed to watch "I Dream of Jeannie".)

Under the Tuscan Sun spoke to me of sun-warmed fields, good food, and great companions. It made me wish that I was the sort of person who could drop everything and go live in Italy. The evocation of the country reminds me of Stealing Beauty, another movie with incredible imagery that grabs me, even without the story.

It’s fascinating to me that the movie is based on a book of the same name, which is a memoir based on author Francis Mayes’ experience of buying and renovating a villa in Tuscany. It is the book which brings us the vivid picture of the area, the house, and the people. Of course, a memoir would not make a good movie without a plot, and so there is a story nestled into it by producer Audrey Wells, with Diane Lane playing a writer, Francis, who finds herself in Italy after a staggering divorce.

I shouldn’t really mock Windows users, since I was one for years, and still am, to some degree, but this is too funny.

Sometimes Windows PC users just don’t get it about Apple Computer. If only this brave but crazy company would switch its marvellous software to their platform—thereby saving them the expense of buying a Mac—the world would be a better place, they believe.

Australian IT - Why Mac won’t open up Windows

If you’re a Mac user, you have to read this article. A bunch of Windows users bitching about how Apple should port iLife to their operating system. Silly, silly Windows users. They just don’t get it.

Besides, the world would be a better place if everyone would just buy a Mac. ;)

I started playing The Sims a week or so ago. Haven’t had much time to devote to it yet, but I did have enough time to remember how annoying it is to get them to go to work and make them happy without depriving them of sleep. It always seems like it takes them so long to do things. Half an hour to pee? Come on! No wonder they don’t have enough time to do stuff at night.

Then I started my first full time job in quite a while today. Suddenly, I find myself wanting to shake my fists in the direction of the sky at the all-powerful being who left me so tired.