books on the water
Not much to report on today. I went to Steamworks after work yesterday. It was all right. Most of you don't want the details about that. I keep things that personal separate from this blog, personal as I often do get here.
I had leftover spaghetti when I got home. Watched the final episode of season one of Lady Dynamite, which was delightfully bizarre, with its talking and singing pugs.
I figured out that I actually finished reading Marc Maron's Waiting for the Punch in ten days. For me, that's really fast. The library allows you to check books out for three weeks and almost invariably I return them late. With the exception of Everyone's a Aliebn When Ur a Aliebn Too, which hardly counts since reading that in two days was easy due to it being a rather short graphic book, I've taken roughly a month to read nearly every book this year -- even the David Sedaris book, which I loved. I did read Carrie Fisher's The Princess Diarist in only one week, but that was also a shorter than usual, easy read -- mostly excerpts literally from old diaries. Probably the most comparable book of comparable length (it even had a relatively similar structure) that I read in a comparable amount of time was Kathy Griffin's Celebrity Run-Ins, at the end of last year. I read that one in 12 days. That one wasn't nearly as good as Waiting for the Punch, though.
Anyway. Last night I read the first couple pages of Al Franken's Giant of the Senate. This is the third book of his that I'm reading, although the previous two I read were years ago: I read Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them (which I have an A-) in 2003, and The Truth (With Jokes (which I gave a B) in 2006. I'm reading another one of his books eleven years later. I got two pages read last night. I was asleep by 10:00.
I just had lunch with Karen at the Six-Seven restaurant at the Edgewater Hotel. She had to cancel the last lunch we had scheduled, and even the previous one had been rescheduled to a Monday, so it was four and a half weeks -- thirty days, actually -- since our last lunch. On October 9, the weather was still cooperative enough for me to have my bike it work, and I had been biking down there to meet her for lunch more often than not for some time. Those days are done for the winter now; I had to walk.
It was a nice walk, anyway. Even though it was rainy and kind of cold. I had my umbrella.
I actually thought while walking there about how likely it was to be slow because of the weather and the time of year. Shows what I know! When I walked in, Sterling -- who is Shauna's youngest son and works there -- saw me and immediately pointed to Karen sitting at a table in the bar. The dining room was actually full. I could hardly believe it.
At one point Karen was convinced she saw the back of a while right outside the window. The Edgewater is literally built on pilings over the water -- there's a famous photo of the Beatles fishing out their hotel room window in the sixties. She did concede it may have been a dolphin or sea lion, and it was perhaps too close for it to have been a whale. But she was thoroughly thrilled and excited. I was facing in, though, and didn't see anything. Too bad.
She didn't want the truffle macaroni and cheese today. I guess it's just as well; I've had more than enough pasta lately, what with that massive amount of spaghetti I made. We split the flatbread, which made it far less expensive than usual. I spent like eight and a half dollars.
[posted 1:14 pm]