A seething mass of turgid drama.

We went to Coronet Saturday. We probably wouldn't have if not for the job, which as I have mentioned before was one of my motivations for taking the job. We had a good time. The fighting seemed to go fine, my job was accomplished without any real stress or problems, and loads of good chattage. Hirsch got a deserved award for all the history and awards stuff he continues to do.

Afterwards we went out to the same Mexican restaurant we visited two weeks ago. My garlic shrimp wasn't as good as the chile relleno, but it was still decent. The drive home was a bit long due to highway construction and if it had been much longer I would have swapped driving; I was fighting exhaustion for the last leg of the trip, but it didn't seem worthwhile to change when we only had 10 miles to go.

We day-tripped Crown this last weekend. ( Read more... )

All in all we had a decent time and enjoyed chatting with friends.

Miss Beatrice is unhappy with the restoration of circadian rhythm time - aka "roll back from jet lag time" - because it means her food dish rotates an hour later. So she's been running all over the bed trying to get us up. That combined with the cool-and-rainy morning meant I got up ten minutes later than usual. I decided to skip my morning coffee so I could get out of the house on time.

And then the bus was five minutes late.

Monday we flew to LA for a quick vacation.
( Read more... )

And now back to catching up on work.

This week and last I have been missing the early bus by 30 seconds or less - I am up the street from the bus stop as it pulls away. Most of those times I might have made it had I jogged quickly or dashed, but I have not wanted to.

This morning I made a specific effort to get up 5 minutes early. I made sure I would get out the door a couple minutes earlier. Aaaaand... the early bus was 5 minutes late.

After the TooGood Whole Fuds unhappiness, I gave the app another try. We reserved a dim sum package for dinner last night from a local hole-in-the-wall. Getting there was not terribly convenient; the pickup time was 6:45 (they close at 7, so understandably the restaurant is getting rid of end-of-day food) and it's in the Mission so the area is always crowded. It's only a mile walking, but a couple miles driving and of course quite busy at that time of day. But the trip was not difficult and after a bit of a wait, I was handed a couple plastic bags of leftover dim sum.
We got two of each:

• vegetarian egg roll
• veg rice noodle roll
• siu mai
• large fried meat dumpling
• egg custard tart

Of course they weren't as good as hot out of the fryer/steamer, but they were fine and I didn't expect anything different for $6. The meat dumpling was the best; the egg roll and noodle roll really needed some soy sauce/ mustard/ chili crisp to punch them up. The egg tart was fine but I would of course been much happier with a sesame ball.

Not what I want to do very often, for transit and fried-food reasons, but not a disappointment this time.

I lay awake for an hour early morning. This made it hard to get out of bed and I was a bit slow in my morning prep. I had a pile of work waiting so I decided to not make my standard cup of coffee so I could catch the early bus and get to the office earlier, and then catch up with mediocre coffee in the work lounge. I don't want to make this a habit as I am trying to ignore the free work coffee, but it seemed a worthwhile thing for today and it wouldn't be a second cup after all. That worked; I walked to the bus stop one minute before it arrived, and then my BART transfer was near-instant. BOOM! Nice prioritizing, me.

When I went to the lounge, the coffee machine was out of order.

For my birthday, we went to see an Irish sketch comedy troupe that was in town. We saw them around the same time last year and apparently their tour was successful enough to 1) do another one; 2) play larger venues, including Carnegie Hall. In SF they booked the Warfield and it seemed mostly full.

We drove to the area - I didn't want to deal with getting a late-night Sunday cab - found some sketchy parking (it's all sketchy around there; we should have used one of the hotel lots), and went to a regional Italian pizza place for dinner. They call it "pinsa", and it's more flatbread-based. Think the '80s Stouffer's pizza... but much better. Plenty of customers even on a Sunday night. If it was local to us I could see hitting it for happy hour.

This year I was able to get better seats for the show. We were in the second row, about 10' from the stage. This did mean a bit of neck-craning but also meant we were in the interaction zone. The show was good - mostly short sketches but they started with some audience questions that they mined throughout the whole show. Early on they started making fun of San Francisco for having multiple names: "You use Frisco!" and we all booed. "And San Fran." We booed again. "What do you use as a short name then?" "The City." "Oh, that's not pretentious. But you do hate Los Angeles." We cheered.

I did yell out one thing during their last skit that was a callback to one of their questions, and got smirks as they incorporated it.

A fun evening, but we didn't get home until 10:30 so I am listless today. I should probably fortify up with a second cup of coffee.

I met the wife near the office after work. We had a drink at a local bar, which was fine. Not outstanding but fine. The bar pre-pandemic was very finance-bro frat boy environment. It shifted after re-opening; I read a review that called it "Harry Potter-themed" - in reality, it's more classic English pub, brick and dark wood. Get your references right, kids. And get offa my lawn.

We then went to a local dim sum restaurant that is one of the few to still use carts. Sadly, when we got there we found out they were closed and aren't serving dinner! (Despite what their website said.) After some back-and-forth debate we went to a bayside seafood restaurant and had some overpriced oysters and a crab cocktail. They were fine, but not what we had our mouths made up for so it was still a bit disappointing.

The wife's feet were hurting so we called a cab instead of taking the bus home. Unfortunately, their dispatch has been unreliable; three of the last four times we called, they have sent the cab to the wrong address. (They are still better than many other cab companies, and I don't use Luber from lingering spite.) So our commute home took 20 minutes longer than it should have.

I fell back asleep this morning after turning off my alarm. Not for very long - but I got up about five minutes late, and couldn't make it up before leaving. (Not acceptably, anyway; I would have had to forego my morning coffee and I wasn't in that much of a rush.)

Since I left the house late, I decided to take the later bus to BART. Unfortunately that bus lived down to its flaky timing and was also later than expected. I caught BART right away, but then we sat at one of the stations for ten minutes due to "an incident" at my final stop.

No one is going to care or notice that I got in late, but it sets a tone for the day.