Saturday I met up with Jen and Eleanor for lunch at a sushi bar and a visit to the Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park. Jen had invited me to come do something, and I suggested we invite Eleanor along, and the combination was a great success. We talked about work, and theater, and animal rights, and genealogy, and diarists, and feminism, and living in San Francisco. There was a goodly amount of laughter as we told stories and exchanged personal histories. We saw most of the Academy, spending a lot of time admiring the huge collection of fish at the Steinhart Aquarium, and went out for coffee afterwards. The time just flew by. We agreed to meet again soon and go ice skating. I was totally energized by the afternoon. Nothing beats hanging out with intelligent, witty women.

Sunday morning I called Sei to see if she was dead. I actually knew she wasn't, having exchanged email with her the week before, but I had been getting concerned queries from readers wondering if she'd quit since she hadn't updated her diary in nearly a month. She sounded pretty good for someone who is recovering from the vicious cold/flu virus that's hit the Bay Area pretty hard in the last month, and promised to console her readers with a short posting soon to prove she's still with us.

In the afternoon Janice Gelb came over for tea and gossip. I wanted to show her my photos from my DUFF trip in 1987 since I thought she would enjoy seeing twelve year old photos of everyone she met on her own DUFF trip last year. We drank herbal tea and ate cookies while she marveled at how young everyone looked. We agreed that the person who's changed most is Julian Warner, and the person who's changed the least is Mark Loney. At one point I went off on a rant about how dreadful all science fiction convention web pages are, and Janice said it's because the same three people keep volunteering, and they have really limited design sense and even more limited HTML skills. I was so incensed I decided to offer to handle the ConJose web pages, and John pulled up their site to see what was there. To our surprise, they already had simple but attractive web pages in good working order. So much for my fit of ire. But it's still true that most of the con web pages are user-surly instead of user-friendly. ConJose is a pleasant exception.

Sunday evening I went to Michael's for his 31st birthday party. I liked all his friends very much, as they were smart, funny, and pleasant people. Most of them were his co-workers at Apple, I believe, plus our mutual friends Bill and Julie Humphries were also there. Everyone talked about movies, and books, and comics, the usual stuff, and how outrageous prices are in the Bay Area, also the usual stuff, and there was cake, and music, and two cats to amuse us. It was a nice way to finish the weekend. He lives in Campbell, so I really covered a lot of territory in two days.

I'm kind of bummed the promised rain never showed up this weekend, only a windstorm that caused a fair amount of mischief among my plants. However, there was a cumulative wetting so I didn't have to break down and actually water. I'm happy to see all the early tulips and daffodils are showing, and the freesias are well along. I noticed a couple of iris breaking earth over in the iris beds, too. I am really looking forward to those first flowers. It's weeks away yet, probably nothing until March, but it's exciting to watch the progress. Every day something new pokes its way through the ground. Spring is on its way.

Past Life The Index Next Incarnation