|
Bookshelf:Recently finished: Currently reading:
 Next up:
|
Resting UpAlthough I haven't yet written an entry about it (soon...) I had a lot from last week to recover from over the weekend, so I resolved to basically spend the weekend having fun. Which, you know, isn't that hard to do in the Bay Area! Debbi's sister Janine is in town for a week, and at my suggestion they both drove down to meet me and we spent the afternoon doing the main tour at the Winchester Mystery House. You can read about it in detail at the Web site, but basically it's a Victorian-era house occupied by the widow of a president of the company which manufactured Winchester Rifles, and Sarah Winchester was so consumed with guilt over the deaths caused by these guns that she believed she could only pacify their spirits by building onto her house non-stop for the rest of her life - 38 years. As relatively little planning went into the house, there's a stairway into a ceiling, a door that opens onto a wall, a window in front of a wall, a beautiful stained glass window which is completely obscured from any sunlight, and a whole chunk of the house which was never repaired after the 1906 earthquake. It's also a key setting of Michaela Roessner's novel Vanishing Point. While I think the tour is overpriced, it's worth going on at last once, to see the interesting architecture, and marvel at the bizarre floor plan. There are also some beautiful furnishings (sadly, not the originals), and a few other sights to see. There's a second tour which shows some behind-the-scenes sights, or you can go on both tours for a discount - but they take two-and-a-half hours. Check it out. Saturday evening the three of us went north for Subrata's birthday party, which consisted of miniature golf (which, as far as we know, I won, although we misplaced a few of the scores), and then dinner and cake back at Subrata's. It was a pretty low-key time, and I had fun, and I think Debbi did too. I think Janine was a tad overwhelmed by the number of people she'd never met before, though. Oh, and I did bring my rubber band gun to the party!
 Sunday, Debbi, Janine and I met at Debbi's friend Lisa's place to watch football. Lisa and Janine are both Oakland Raiders fans, while Debbi - and to some degree Lisa's boyfriend Michel - are San Francisco 49ers fans. Me? I'm not a football fan! We actually watched both games, both of which were pretty good, going into overtime (although I must admit I think that sudden death overtime in football is lame! They should just play a full extra quarter, and declare a tie if no one's ahead at the end of it. As it is, too much seems to depend on the coin flip and a single big play). We also heard about Barry Bonds hitting three home runs, to bring him to 63 for the season, tied for third-best in history. Only 8 more to go in 18 games to break the record! In-between I drove to the Great Mall of the Bay Area to seek Mephisto sandals, which I still have been unable to find in any variety. Apparently there was an outlet store for them there, but it has closed (or perhaps moved; I admit I haven't tried the phone number yet), which was a real bummer. I wandered into a few other shoe stores in the mall, but none of them carried Mephistos. This quest is becoming really annoying; I'm getting tempted to just buy some new Birkenstocks and be done with it. In the evening I took off to Kepler's for this month's speculative fiction discussion group, where we discussed Anita Diamant's The Red Tent. It was a larger group than usual, I think because the book is relatively mainstream and we got some non-SF fans coming in for that. A few people loved the book, most liked it, and myself and a couple of others didn't care much for it. The discussion ran long, and I admit I got tired of it after a while because I just didn't find the subject matter of the book that interesting. Ah, well. Afterwards I recommended several books to another member of the group, which she bought, and I noticed that Sean McMullen has a new book out, Eyes of the Calculor, which I'll have to pick up before too long. He's writing them almost faster than I can read 'em! Somewhere in there I also finished Kage Baker's Mendoza in Hollywood, which was enjoyable but rather flawed. But still tantalizing enough to continue on to the next book.
Today I received part of an Amazon UK order I placed last week, with a couple of books not available in the US (one of them is still en route), as well as the CD Understand by Jadis. I discovered this album through the streaming station Aural Moon, and enjoyed the tracks I heard. The album is actually quite good, with smooth vocals, rocking bass and drums, and strong guitar reminiscent of Rush's Alex Lifeson's best work. I'm quite enjoying it, and will have to buy another one from them. In the evening, Debbi, Lisa, Janine and I met Michel at Ghirardelli Square in San Francisco for ice cream. Strangely, Lisa had never been there before, despite being a northern California native. Go figure. (Then again, I'm a Massachusetts native and I've never walked the Freedom Trail or seen the USS Constitution.) We porked up on ice cream and had a good time hanging out. And, after all of that, I do feel pretty well rested from last week. Phew!
|
||
