This has been a singularly useless day. It began to go awry at ten in the morning when I embarked on making clove cookies for the Northern California Online Diarists party which was the day's social event. I faithfully followed the recipe in the cookbook, but discovered halfway through that the little bottle I thought was vanilla was, in fact, orange extract and we didn't have any vanilla. Nor did the store across the street. I tossed in the orange stuff and dubiously spooned out the goopy dough. Alas, the book lied and there was not nearly enough flour in the recipe. I took a wafer-thin sheet of orange and clove mess out of the oven, and could only scrap out a few ragged strips of cookie from the center of the cookie sheet. The rest had firmly adhered to the sheet despite my greasing it. I cursed a blue streak and decided the group could live without cookies.
Good thing, too, since there were easily ten kinds of cookies, fudge, and brownies on the table when I arrived at Rachel's. It took me forever to get there, one hour to drive from Palo Alto to Berkeley proper, and 20 minutes to find the tiny street in the maze of hills above Berkeley. I greeted Beth and Jen, with whom I was previously acquainted, and talked to them a little. I enjoyed meeting Eleanor, Mimi, and Karen, as well as several other very nice people whom I had fun talking to but never really figured out which journal they did. There was much in the way of laughing and gossiping and reading diary excerpts, and it was a pleasant afternoon. I stayed almost three hours which was later than I'd planned, and so missed the daylight which I consider essential for picking out Christmas trees. I meant us to get ours today, and that made me cross.
I also had a raging headache, which I blame on drinking an indifferent merlot at the party. John was sweet to me and went off to buy Chinese food for dinner while I took some ibuprofen and attempted to chill out. I had hoped to get a bit of Christmas shopping done today, too, but that was right out in the mood I was in. By time the Advil kicked in and dinner was over I was so sleepy I could barely stagger back to the bedroom. I promptly conked out for three hours, thus blowing my evening as well as my day.
I remember now why I never go to the East Bay. It's not worth the aggravation of getting there.
[The Temporal Revision Dept. would like to amend the above commentary with the information that the author woke up the next morning with a violent head cold and now blames her headache, and mood, on that.]
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