Thursday

Nov, 1, 2001

new month

Slugged the bed again. No workout.

FFP asked for my help on a WEB thing right when I was ready to go to work. I'd already done a bunch of e-mail stuff for work. But I was later than usual actually going there.

Then I was in a meeting. Sometimes it's hard to get customers back to reality once they've decided how their life should go.

At lunch, I decided to go to Jason's. I thought I'd pop into the high end stores near there and see if they might have a purse for my mother. (Yeah, what was I thinking?) Anyway, yeah this center (Arboretum Market) has all these high end stores: Coach, Saks, Harold's, Ann Taylor. With some beauty supply stores, Clarksville Pottery, Williams Sonoma and Jason's and Starbucks thrown in. So, I see right away in Harold's that this isn't territory where the elusive navy handbag lives. Right. But the line in Jason's is forbidding.

So I look in the rest of them anyway. They don't seem very busy except women in Saks are shopping for makeup. Women, alone and in pairs, come and go in their BMWs, Mercedes, Jags. Women who lunch? Women who don't work?

The line goes down at Jason's and I get a turkey muffuletta quarter and a little bowl of chili. It was too crowded and it wasn't very satisfying but I ate all of it anyway. At the table next to me a couple of guys talked about selling software.

"The difference is minimizing risk."

"We have to err on the side of caution."

Yeah. Things have changed in the last eighteen months.

At work I have one of those phone conversations where you wonder if you are doing any good but you soldier on. I wrote an e-mail to advise a more senior guy about a conversation he is to have with a senior guy in another company.

After work, I go home. I'm a little late. FFP says the bookkeeper and another friend are coming over to watch tapes of the Monday night TV. He has told me to invite SuRu. When I get home, the kitchen is like a restaurant kitchen and Gayle is bustling around boiling and baking. I clean off the tables and set up. "Let's see there will be seven people..." Huh? Oh, the other friend is bringing someone and Gayle invited someone else. SuRu comes over with Zoey. We start drinking wine. Even for seven, there is lots of food. Gayle says she wants some of this cajun rice left over. Smells good. The place smells better when she bakes these bleu cheese, pecan crackers. We open more wine. Gayle's friend comes. She brings some elaborately decorated eggs she's made. She is out of work, but I never quite understood about the eggs. SuRu and Gayle talk about a multi-media art class they are both taking only SuRu had to miss the first class.

The meal is a potato/crab/shrimp galette with leek in the crab mix and some kind of sauce. With the bleu cheese crackers. And the cajun rice. Delicious. We eat in the big room and FFP starts the tapes.

I've seen Boston Public and Third Watch. I don't like Ali. So I wash up the dishes and put away the food and throw out the wine bottles. There are too many plates and things for the dishwasher and I always do pots, pans, dessert plates (Gayle brought a tarte), and wine glasses by hand. So I'm washing, drying, scrubbing up for a while. I don't mind cleaning up kitchens. Even when they've had elaborate meals cooked. I would have done some cleanup during the cooking but it's hard when the sink is also being used for prep. (We make a mental note to have a dish sink and a prep sink, several butts apart, in the dream kitchen!)

I'd initially been taken aback by the elaborate dinner party we were having, but it was fun, really. Watching Gayle cook is like watching one of those TV cooks who reaches right into the pan to arrange food. She's a pro.

People head home before and after Third Watch plays and we start watching the end of what appears to be a Yankee defeat. But, no! I try to wake up FFP, dozing in his chair, to tell him that it's tied. Then I fall asleep and when I wake up those Third Rock from the Sun reruns are showing and I have no idea who won. I'll find out tomorrow. Seven games would be good for the economy.

I'll spare you a diatribe about safety, terrorism, tyrants and the plight of women in most of the world. If you missed it, that was yesterday.

transportation in Austin, Halloween 2001

"We are all born originals - why is it so many of us die copies?"

Edward Young, poet (1683-1765)

Meta:
Business as usual here as much as you can ever say that.

JUJUST TYPING
Days unfold.
What.
Happens.
The result of a small OK.