Condo Envy

It's apparently not in the greatest neighborhood - plus, it's basically surrounded by other condos and by apartment buildings, hardly a real house evident nearby - but other than that it's quite nice. Two stories, laundry on the second floor, a cathedral ceiling'd living room with lots of wall space along the stairs to put pictures. Plus both a downstairs and an upstairs porch.

As condos go around here, it is also reasonable affordable, but it's still something that's out of my price range at the present time, especially since Apple stock fell 15 points in the last few days (of course, that just means that we're back to where we were around Thanksgiving, so no one's crying about it).

Also, I must keep telling myself that my friends who are out buying houses right now are 3-to-5 years older than I am and/or are DINKs (dual-income no-kid couples), and that when I'm in my mid-thirties, I'll be far more likely able to buy something in the area.

Patience. I must have patience.

The actual Bridge session itself was unremarkable. I corrected a few details in my bidding, and also realized that I had a basic misunderstanding of what a 'finesse' is. But otherwise, there seemed to be no particularly fascinating hands. But it was fun to hang out with everyone anyway.

One of the people did come by with an interesting story, though: It turns out that his car's gas gauge is broken, and he ran out of gas halfway there. So he pulled over and walked to a call box. It turns out that there was a guy in a car sitting by the call box. He mainly only spoke Spanish, but he basically conveyed that he'd be willing to drive my friend to a gas station to get gas, and back.

Of course, my friend wondered why this guy was sitting by a call box, and why he was willing to ferry him around to get gas. The obvious conclusion is that he was looking for someone to kidnap for some reason. I mean, it certainly sounds like a suspicious situation, right?

Well, it turns out that my friend did get in the car, and - amazingly enough - the guy did exactly what he said. He has a gas can in back, he bought some gas (refused to accept payment for it), and took my friend back to his car and said goodbye. Go figure. We all pretty much agreed that our friend was crazy to get into the car like that. But, apparently it worked out okay. Weird!

(All of the men in the room agreed that we probably wouldn't have gotten in the car, though we might have considered it. The women flatly said that they would not. Which is no surprise, really.)

Today I went up to the city to do some Christmas shopping. I also wanted to take some photos of the city to show my folks. I ended up getting a late start, but still managed to get everything done that I wanted to do.

I stopped at Borderlands Books, which turns out to be a pretty good used science fiction, fantasy and horror shop, with new hardcovers and trade paperbacks. I found a hardcover copy of David Brin's The Postman for only $9.00, which is pretty good, I think. (And it's not a book club copy, either.) I heard the movie was lousy, but the book is one of my favorites.

Went by Ghirardelli Square and walked around fisherman's wharf taking pictures. Remembered this time to get my parking ticket validated so I paid nothing for parking (amazing!). Then I went over to the Golden Gate Bridge and took more pictures. Plus, it was nice to just walk around for a while outdoors. I had a hell of a time fighting through traffic to get out of the city, through. It took long enough that I decided to go to Cafe Borrone for dinner and kept reading Dorothy Sayers'  Clouds of Witness.

Oh, and I also went jogging this morning. Did pretty well, too. My quad seems to be pretty much healed, although it is still a little unhappy (in a way my other one is not) when I stretch it out. But it held up just fine for the run.