No decision on which set of operas to see, but Sei and I did score some free and absolutely ravishing dessert at Gordon Biersch last night. I accepted a ride home so she could see my house. No, no one else has been invited over since we moved in. Yes, I am going to have a housewarming party. Probably next month around my birthday, though not on my birthday as it falls on a Monday this year. The reason no one can come over (well, Denise has been over quite a bit, but she's family) is because I still have too many boxes and not enough hanging out space, and also I don't have enough chairs. I'm getting a sofa for my birthday, and then you can all come over. Honest.
I'm looking forward to that sofa. I need a place to sleep other than my bed. I need a reading perch with enough room for two cats. I need someplace to talk on the phone for hours to my friends. I need a place to sit and watch the fire in the winter. I need a comfortable space to curl up on while sharing the Sunday paper and drinking my first cup of coffee. Oh, it's going to be nice. I've missed my sofa ever since I moved back to the Bay Area in 1997 and left the enormous and unwieldy hand-me-down Couchzilla behind. It's time to get comfy again.
My other domestic goal is to hang up some of our three dozen paintings. The trouble is unlike most modern places this house was constructed with lathe and plaster walls. They're so solid I can't stick in a pushpin, not even if I use a light hammer on it. The pins just bend. I hammered in a sharp nail so I could put up at least one watercolor, but it wasn't fast or completely successful as some paint flaked off from the force of the pounding. Obviously, my usual technique of bunging some nails in, hanging the pictures, stepping back and critiquing, then rehanging everything isn't going to work. I don't want to have whacking great holes in my walls from changing my mind.
I got a classic phone call at work today, by the way, speaking of holes and minds. Someone asked me in all sincerity how much it cost to fly to Utah. When I asked which city she gently corrected me and repeated the word Utah. Yes, I said politely, I understand you want to go to Utah, but Utah is a state with several cities (pardon my poetic license) and thus there's more than one airport in Utah. She apologized and promised to find out which city her friend lived in.
I'm sorry, but anyone over the age of ten ought to know the difference between a city and a state. Oughtn't they? Am I wrong? Are travel agents the last people in America who care about geography? It's so depressing sometimes.
I think I'm going to reinstate my Test Your Geo IQ quizzes. I don't know how popular they were last year, but I think everyone was generally surprised at how little they knew about various destinations. I mean, sure, everyone knows where India is, but what about Mauritius? Samarkand? Bahrain? What's the capital of Tonga? What's the second longest river in the world? What's the first? All stuff that you think you know until you have to supply it rather than pick it out of a multiple choice question. I'm no geography genius myself, but I work with this kind of information more frequently than Joe Public so I tend to get three out of the five questions right, rather than one or two.
I'll begin next week. Meanwhile, the Online Diary History Project is open for business. Drop by and enjoy reading some of the personal recollections of early online diarists (including mine) and much more.
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