Social Weekend

In the evening I had plans to meet up with some friends for dinner at Amber India, a good (if expensive) Indian restaurant in Mountain View. First, though, I got sidetracked playing Quake 3 at work for 45 minutes. I got in some good practice with the rail gun on one of the space maps, and accumulated many, many kills. It was rewarding.

So I was late to dinner, but not egregiously so, getting there around 7:20. The parking lot was packed, so I had to walk a little distance in the moderately heavy rain, but no biggie. "Moderately heavy rain" in the Bay Area means "light shower" almost anywhere else.

Dinner included Lucy and her husband John, Bill and his wife Julie, and another couple they all know, whom I'd met before, but whose names I've now forgotten! At Amber India I can never resist ordering the Butter Chicken. Just the name, "Butter Chicken", sounds so decadent that it's difficult to look at other choices. I did refrain from ordering side dished or Naan since I'd also had that big lunch. I fortunately did not feel completely stuffed at the end.

After dinner, Lucy and John, Julie, and I went back to Lucy and John's place and hung out for an hour or two talking. We got to ooh at our hosts' spiffy Power Macintosh G4 which they just bought (replacing their Performa which was not fast enough to keep up with their modem!). I definitely want to buy myself a new machine this year.

Lucy writes about the evening in more detail, including a photo of her cat Keiko putting down roots on my lap, and a wacky feud-that's-not-a-feud that I've apparently been having with one of the women in this social group which is why I'm not often invited to their regular Friday outings. My theory is that she's confusing me for someone else - with a very similar name - who is widely disliked among another of her social groups, although it's also possible that she's miffed at me for something I did at Worldcon in 1997, though I can't recall what that might be. (I'm pretty sure that whatever it is, she didn't mention it at the time, so ghod knows.)

Anyway, I have not been losing any sleep over this thing, but it would be nice to see it straightened out in any event.

(By the way, you can see in the picture on Lucy's page that my beard has pretty much entirely grown in at this point. I have mentioned before that I grew a beard, right?)

Today I did laundry all morning, and in the afternoon went to Subrata's to play Car Wars. Subrata, Ben and company have started playing Champions role-playing campaigns lately. Champions is a superhero RPG where you can design your own character, and Car Wars is similar in that you design your own car using a somewhat similar system. So I guess SUbrata got a yen to play this game, too.

I've never found the Car Wars system entirely compelling; making cars is fun, but I always found its playability to be not quite as good as that of Star Fleet Battles (and that includes the lousy damage allocation system that SFB possesses). So we played for about five hours, having a fine time shooting out each others' tires on our vehicles, and I killed my driver by running head-on into another car, and pretty much worked off any desire I had to play the game again in the near future. Fun, but not a lot of re-play value, for me.

Afterwards I went off to Cafe Borrone to read. A couple of days ago, Lucy had said that if I ever wanted some company on one of my excursions, to give her a call. So I did.

Of course, this was after all the mental gyrations that my mind often goes through on things like this. "Well, she just suggested this on Wednesday [or whenever] and probably didn't expect me to call so soon." "We just saw each other last night and she probably has other plans for tonight already." "I'm such a creature of habit, I pretty much to go the coffee shop any weekend evening I don't have other plans, and how often ought I to call her when I'm going, anyway?"

Finally I just mentally thwacked myself upside the head and called her, figuring if she's busy, she's say no.

Well, it turns out she'd been sitting around all day anyway and was happy to have an excuse to get out of the house, so she did some shopping and joined me at Borrone after a couple of hours. And we had a fine time chatting about various things. Plus I got a bunch of reading done before she arrived, so what more can you ask for? It also turns out that she's into rubber stamps, and knows (by correspondence) the family of my friend Charley back in Boston, which is quite a coinkydink! Who'd have figured?

So I figure I will call her again in the future, because, as I thought, she can always say no, and if I call too often, she could ask me to stop, or something. It's not a big deal, I just always seem to make these things into big deals.

Anyway, it was fun.

On the way home I stopped at work, curious to see if people were playing Quake. They weren't, but I decided to spend a few minutes beating up on computer players. It was fun, but I didn't stay long. I actually showed some self-control - how about that?