A brief account of the last week.
I took Junipero Serra along the south edge of campus to Santa Cruz Avenue and cruised into Menlo Park, where I met Kate at the coffee shop we'd visited on our first date a month ago. She was doing reading for class. We made plans for dinner later. I headed home, took a shower, and returned, this time on my utility bike wearing fresh clothes. Dinner was good, at a Chinese restaurant near El Camino and Santa Cruz, and we took the bus home.
On Sunday we had breakfast together. I made cranberry-orange muffins from a mix. They were tasty. In the afternoon I went out shopping. I bought food for myself, plus ingredients for pumpkin pie. I took those over to Kate, since she'd promised to bake me a pie if I did. I spent the evening helping Tal getting his camera-readies finished for final submission, which was torture due to the amount of sleep I'd lost lately. Somehow I got through it and went home to sleep about 1 am.
On Monday afternoon Kate and I took the train into San Francisco to go to the auto show at the Moscone Center. Neither of us are very interested in cars, but it was fun anyway. We decided that we liked the Corvette convertible the best, even compared to the more expensive exotics like the Ferraris and Porsches and so on. On a more realistic note, the hybrids and electric vehicles look like they are practical vehicles these days, although it seems that only the Japanese are making them. The new VW bus is pretty cool, too: it has a little table in it and a pop-up top and it would be great for camping.
After we left the auto show, we ate dinner at Chevy's. We left for Stanford on the 8:00 train. We decided that we did like being in San Francisco, though, and that we'd go back together again when we got a chance.
Tuesday night, I made dinner and Kate baked pies. We ate dinner and had pumpkin pie while watching Buffy. I took one of the pies into the office on Wednesday and gave it out, and kept the other one. Everyone liked it. Wednesday night the two of us just went out for coffee.
Thursday was Thanksgiving. Kate flew to Los Angeles to spend the weekend with her sister. I went to the Graduate Student Council Thanksgiving dinner at 4:00 pm. It was good, with all the usual fare: turkey, potatoes, gravy, cranberries, squash, sweet potatoes, and so on. I didn't eat any of the pumpkin pie.
Today was Friday. I slept late and went down to Borders in Palo Alto in early afternoon to look for books. I came home with a pile of Terry Pratchett novels, not at all what I had been looking for, but welcome nonetheless. Later I went to Wal-Mart, then Target, and bought back a collection of miscellany: a bread knife, a belt, a sweater, underwear, pens. In the early evening my roommate Joris and I went out to Zao noodle bar in Palo Alto for dinner, stopped by Borders again, had a drink at Gordon Biersch, and came back. Then I wrote this, and soon I will go to sleep. Good night.