At 6am we woke up to a call from Rook’s work, so he spent the day in emergency debugging mode. I worked on my school stuff, the very last of the paperwork and “self-assessment” and “goals”, and then right as I was about to leave, Moomin’s school called. He was crying and feeling sick to his stomach. He got home without barfing and even calmed down in the car; then went to sleep within about 10 minutes with a microwaveable pillow on his belly.
Off to school with my printouts! Everything was super smooth and in fact I did way more than I needed to. My advisor chatted with me for a while. I want to stay in touch… I told him my summer goal: 50 rejection slips. It was cool to see him have an epiphany – good payback from all the teaching and advising! I was all dressed up for dinner out, and he was in shorts and a scruffy tshirt when usually he is all prepped out.
As I drove off I had this wistful feeling as I passed the mall. I could get new converse sneakers… all my old ones have holes… maybe they have some good colors and I could be fancy for Wiscon. Instead I bought some mac lipstick and a ridiculous, ridiculous belt from Hot Topic with rainbow colored metal studs. OMG! It’s silly! The Hot Topic cashier asked for my ID, just in case I was stealing my mom’s credit card, and then did a double take as she saw the age and I was a little embarrassed.
To dinner with A. and Chula to celebrate Chula’s novel. We had an extremely delicious fancy dinner at Delfina. The guy next to us was listening, totally, as we talked about raunchy incidents from our pasts (“And then the prof was snorting lines off her butt!” “Oh yeah well my old prof was making his girlfriend shoot ping pong balls out of her coochie for the whole class over at his house!” such was academia during the culture wars, early 90s) and all kinds of gossip about science fiction writers and whether Mars is closer than Venus. I said Mars’s orbit is closer. (Obviously which planet is closer at any given time depends…) We made fun of many writers and of the idea of “hard” science fiction. We speculated on who we were going to hit on at Wiscon. Then we tried to think of all all possible stories about Mars.
OMG the food. We had some sort of pureed mullet crostini with not-caviar on it… you know… sort of almost caviar… And arugula… and some sort of other fish puree thing with cod, ahi with the fanciest most perfect lemon aeoli, and perfectly cooked medium rare… capers and lentils and “fennel-glazed baked fennel” which, damn. And polenta, and wine, and other stuff. Really good. The chocolate dessert thing was warm and gooey with creme anglaise.
Afterwards a little bit of messing about with blog code, but what we tried didn’t work and would clearly take a couple more hours at least of messing around and testing. It became clear that we need to do a complete site redesign (not this blog – a different group one) along with the upgrade. Then we read all about “neuticles” and laughed hysterically!
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