All the Rain We Can Handle

Tuesday I took the bus in to Epic, the company I worked for from 1994-99, and had lunch with Charlie (whom I'm staying with), for old boss Cliff, and a few other folks from my old team. We went to the Creole Cafe, a very good cajun restaurant on Monroe Street which was one of my favorite lunch spots when I was at Epic. It was as good as I remembered, including the sweet potato fries.

Charlie was heading out of town on business, so I drove him to the airport and borrowed his car while he was gone. As I was driving away from the airport, I heard an electronic melody in the car. Charlie left his cell phone in the car! I picked it up and he said, "I guess you noticed I left my phone in the car, huh?" I turned around and brought it to him, running down the terminal to his gate just before he boarded.

I spent the rest of the afternoon at Epic, visiting a wide variety of people. A few of them made half-joking comments about me coming back to Epic since they could use all the hands they could get. It was nice to see everyone, though I must admit that after working at Apple for a year, I see that Apple has a much nicer working environment in a few key ways. On the other hand, Epic pays much better relative to the local cost of living, so there are trade-offs.

I drove around a bit afterwards and did some shopping. I picked up a game called Res Publica which Tracy's SO Bill recommended to me at WisCon. It looks pretty neat, and fairly simple.

The light rain on Tuesday turned into somewhat heavier rain on Wednesday. I'd had visions of renting a bicycle for my week in Madison, but the rain pretty much dashed those hopes. I was a little bummed, but not too much.

Instead, I walked down to State Street and spent the afternoon shopping.

I stopped at Myles Teddywedgers, which is a small stand near the state capital which sells cornish-style pasties. Yum! Why didn't I ever stop there during my eight years in Madison? Beats me! Meat and potatoes inside a pastry, how much better could it get? I ate pasties several other times during the week, after this.

I hit pretty much every used bookstore on the street, all of which are still there. I actually did not end up buying anything from them; I just didn't find anything on my want list, strangely enough. I did find a copy of Elton John's Rare Masters used at one of the CD stores and bought that instead. And then I spent a couple of hours once again at my favorite coffee shop reading.

After I got back to the apartment, I looked outside and saw that it was nice albeit windy outside. So I ambled down to a pier on Lake Monona and sat for a couple of hours to finish reading the book I was working on. This one was Barry Hughart's Bridge of Birds, which is the story of an ancient, fictional China. It's pretty good, with some neat twists and turns, but it wasn't as good as I'd been led to believe it would be. So I was a little disappointed. But I'm interested in trying the sequels.

In the evening I went down to the weekly Wednesday social gathering of the SF3 folks. Some folks were surprised I was still in town, although I'd told many of them I'd be around for a week. We had a good time sitting about and chatting, and my friend Pat and I made plans to go to dinner the next night. It rained cats and dogs on my walk down to the restaurant, but was fine by the time it was time to go. I did learn that this last rainfall helped set a record for rain in May in Madison. Wow!

Thursday. Well, I headed over to my old comic book store (Capital City Comics) and picked up this week's comics. A bunch of good stuff! For instance, the third volume of What's New by Phil Foglio is out, with the cartoons fo Duelist magazine, spoofing the collectible card game craze of a few years ago, especially Magic: The Gathering. I also had a great time chatting with the owner, who's an entertaining, knowledgeable fellow. He says business is doing pretty well in these days of the industry slump, and in particular he has trouble keeping back issues in stock to meet demand; apparently demand is huge! Good to hear; it's a terrific store, and he does a great job ordering new books and stocking back issues.

Unfortunately, in the evening it started raining like crazy. Charlie was due to come home tonight, and his flight got delayed. And then Pat had to cancel our dinner plans because she had some flooding in her basement. I was bummed! But we made contingency plans for the weekend, so hopefully we'll get there eventually.

The rain was something to see: Huge sheets of it pouring down, obscuring the view. Tremendous thunder and lighting. Water washing down the hill onto the adjacent street, and the drain couldn't hold it all, so much of it spilled over onto the railway tracks. It's been quite a while since I've seen that kind of storm; I'm glad, despite it all, that I got to see this one. I do like water.

It eventually did let up, so I went down to the coffee shop and did some more reading. I do like my coffee shops - you may have noticed!