I had an action-packed weekend for a change. Friday night I was ready to come home and conk out after a difficult day at work. Instead, I grabbed a bite of pizza and headed for the door after changing into bench-sitting clothes: it was the first home game this year for the Stanford Women's Volleyball Team, and we have season tickets. My butt was numb after two games, so I begged John to invest in a seat pad. It helped considerably. I'm not really much of a sports enthusiast anyway, but going to games in gyms hasn't appealed to me since high school. Those damn benches are uncomfortable. Your knees stick into the back of the person in front of you, and you get it in the shoulders from whoever's behind. People shriek and gibber at the players, hideous mascots cavort on the sidelines, the band blares out bizarre renditions of popular tunes, and there's a constant stream of people trying to get past you so you have to stand up to let them by. It's basically horrible. However, I really like women's volleyball so I put up with it. Stanford played pretty well, although they made a lot of inexplicable serving errors. They beat USC who had a good team, including a setter who was 5'2" and looked like a dwarf among the giant 6'3" blockers.
Saturday, enthused by the beauty of the day, I tackled the Eldritch Bush which has strangled everything in my garden where allowed to grow unchecked and which I am slowly eradicating. The last uncropped section had tangled itself into a top-heavy menacing mass of foliage. I clipped and snipped and yanked and swore and got lots of cuts on my hands and was innundated by the mass when I chopped through the final branch. This disturbed Dixie's slumber to her disgust. Now the pile lies drying out in the center of the pavement where it will provide an amusing fort for the cats until I locate the proper bags in which to recycle it. Pathetically, half an hour of intensive clipping overworked my forearms and I could barely lift my glass of water afterwards. Nonetheless, I worked in a visit to Nordstrom's to purchase a new backpack-style purse. I seriously considered buying a Donna Karan purse for about 20 seconds, which is how long it took me to find and read the price tag. $225 for a yard or so of plastic? I don't spend that much money unless it's leather, Italian, and handmade. I bought a spiffy grey ("This year's black," remember?) purse for $21 instead. It's going to do my spine a world of good to not have a heavy object hanging off one shoulder.
After lunch, John drove me to Oakland and dropped me off at Doug Faunt and Lyn Paleo's house to visit while he went used-book hunting in San Leandro. It was very pleasant to sit on their front porch and look at photos of their recent trip to Bermuda aboard the Rose, a full-rigged tall ship. It wasn't exactly a relaxing vacation; they had to work night and day, pulling shifts every eight hours and sleeping where they could. Among other delights, I believe they learned to mend sails, swab the decks, tie knots, and climb the fo'c'sle but it was hearing about the intense 69 knot winds in the storm they sailed through that convinced me I'm not a sailor. The cats frolicked in the sunshine, Lyn worked in her garden, Doug and I discussed fandom, and I enjoyed a short walk to the local shops to buy freshly baked bread and imported cheese for our dinner. The houses in that part of Oakland are stupefyingly large and gracefully beautiful, most of a turn of the century vintage with many Craftsman bungelows among the Victorians. It's always a pleasure to walk through their neighborhood.
Sunday I awoke at the outrageously early hour of eight o'clock on purpose. It was time to go to the annual soap box derby over on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park. We took the dog with us and found a good spot to watch the races. We weren't there for the races, though. The derby was going to feature the world's largest accordion orchestra playing "Lady of Spain" at nine o'clock, and that I absolutely had to see and hear. I brought my camera so you could share the moment, at least, as much as you can share a moment of utter hilarity without actually hearing 100 or so accordions playing "Lady of Spain" in unison. It was fabulous, it truly was. They gathered around the start of the course, playing two choruses in perfect time, then marched down the hill led by a bandleader in a pith helmet and a woman dressed in Spanish finery. Check out those shoes! The further down the hill they got, the further out of sync everyone got, until finally at the finish line it was every accordionist for themselves honking out the classic strains with great enthusiasm.
Fully satisfied, I went home and chopped away at the Eldritch Bush some more, accrued moral superiority by doing some chores, and fell asleep at noon. John woke me up in time for the game against UCLA, which Stanford won, and the evening has been spent doodling around on the computer. I finished Sorcerers of Majipoor this weekend, and I thought it was good but the only book in the series that's really wowwed me has been The Majipoor Chronicles. I still haven't read the first book in the series; it's on back order from Amazon. I spent a good two hours somewhere along the way alphabetizing my Regency Romance novels, a tall order since I own about 300 of them and they were wildly jumbled in the packing. I'm suspicious about a few books that still haven't turned up. I'm sure I had the most recent Carla Kelly, and I know I haven't seen the first two Lindsay Davis Roman mysteries since I got here, and I really want to consult my Mystery Science Theater 3000 Episode Guide but I've absolutely no clue where it might have been stashed. Still, I'm pleased about wrestling my books into some semblance of order.
It was a swell weekend.
