A Day with Ceej and David
As you might guess from the title, I spent Saturday with Ceej and her husband David. We hooked up to go hiking and hang out.
Getting up there was the challenging part, mental-state-wise. I was still feeling pretty rattled from Friday's events, and also overslept. So I got on the road a little late - and got partway up route 85 before I realized I'd forgotten my jacket. It was supposed to be windy that day, and since we were heading up into the hills I figured I'd really regret not having it. So I turned around and headed back - and of course hit every single light between the freeway and my apartment. Gah! I did have the presence of mind to phone that I would be late, and I also took time out for a little cat-petting, which is usually calming.
Anyway, I arrived about 45 minutes late, and things improved considerably from that point. CJ and David are both great people to hang out with - although I think David and I feed each others' warped senses of humor, which I suspect is a mixed blessing at best for CJ. In many ways I think they epitomize what is best in the computer geek 'model' as far as their intelligence, attitude and diversity of interests goes (although I admit that it probably helps that their overlap mine to a fair extent).
Plus, they have Yorkies. Yes, little balls of dog-energy running around their house. Spike and Pixel seem to have taken a shine to me, and spent much time sitting on my lap at various points during the day (and Spike spent much time running in counter-clockwise circles, despite our best efforts to get her to turn clockwise). I am not a 'dog person' per se, but if I had dogs, Spike and Pixel would be good ones to have.
Anyway.
(I must confess that I am a bit self-conscious in writing about CJ and David. I know CJ reads my journal, and I don't want to embarrass/offend/annoy her. So I perhaps over-scrutinize my words when I write about her and David. Probably I do this because I haven't known them as long as I've known John or Rob, and perhaps it's also because I'm already feeling that they're good friends and I don't want to jinx it.)
We went up Page Mill Road to a park about halfway up which is only open to residents of the city where CJ and David live, parked the car, and went out for a couple of hours of hiking. We saw many lizards, and several coots and mother ducks with ducklings in the lake on the land. CJ and I each took a few photos. Amateur photography is a hobby of Ceej's, so her camera is considerably fancier than my ten-year-old cheapie; at one point I looked through the lens of her camera, focused it, and said, "Well, I've learned one thing from looking through this camera: I definitely need new contact lenses!"
It was a lovely day for a hike, and we varied between a little power-hiking through a wooded area, and lazy ambling around the lake. We saw the tail end of the flowering season in a few patches of flowers among the grass. And, we did check ourselves for ticks at the end, and found one on me and one on David, although neither had actually latched onto the skin yet. Whew!
Afterwards, we went and got some yummy ice cream and hit Future Fantasy, an SF bookstore in Menlo Park (I think). All-in-all, a decidedly successful day out.
We went back to their place where I showered, and we all collapsed for a while. And, having told CJ that my boss had lent me a copy of Starcraft, I learned that she and David had played for quite a while. So we installed her copy on her two machines, and played a few games. Well, we played one game at first, and CJ bailed, thinking I was about to swarm over her with my forces, when in fact I was only digging in and she was somewhat more advanced technologically than I was. Then we went to dinner at a tasty burrito place - I think in Mountain View. (Boy, I have got to move up to the peninsula!)
We spent the evening playing more Starcraft, as I got my ass kicked by first Ceej and then David. At least against Ceej I put up a bit of a fight and even pulled a surprise or two, but David pretty much chose a very effective and unorthodox strategy and steamrolled over my forces in fairly short order. Still, it was a lot of fun and good practice, and these war games are definitely much better played against a real person than against the computer. The debriefing after the game is worth it all by itself!
My Powerbook unfortunately does not have an ethernet connection, but perhaps I will get one so I can bring it up there so we can have three-played games. (Assuming Starcraft will run on my 1500cs; if not, I may need to buy a new Powerbook!)
Finally we conked out around 11:30, and I drove home, feeling considerably better than I had in the morning. It was a very good day, and I look forward to more. And since CJ's baseball interest seems to have been rekindled (hell, stoked) by going to those baseball games with me, it seems likely we'll get out to do that at least... and maybe drag David along at some point.
I sort of screwed around early in the afternoon. Well, okay, I was playing Starcraft. I then drove into work and configured my new G3 Mac there. Well, sort of configured it. I got Mac OS X Server installed, and a copy of MacOS 8.5 installed in another disk partition, but I'm having trouble with monitor resolution inside OS X, and having trouble booting from CD for some reason. Something is screwed; perhaps I'll wipe it out tomorrow and try again. I need to contact systems and get some network IP numbers for the machine anyway. But, it was time well-spent to try to do all of that by myself. Good experience.
Then, of course, I spent more time screwing around with Starcraft!
Came home and did laundry, petted the cats, made some dinner, and watched a bunch of TV: A mediocre episode of Batman Beyond, an intriguing but somewhat disappointing episode of Superman with Aquaman in it, and a couple of good, recent episodes of Homicide. So it was a bunch of downtime, mainly, although I did some apartment maintenance stuff with the TV in the background, too.
And that was pretty much Sunday. I'm hoping I can get into a groove at work tomorrow, hit the ground running and be productive this week. That would be a good feeling.
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