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Thoroughly BusyWe've been having a nice little heat wave here in the Bay Area, with highs in the low 80s. With everything blooming and the lovely weather, it's felt like a pleasant summer, and we've still got a few days to go 'til the official start of Spring! My old friend Matt - from high school - was up visiting late last week. He recently moved to Los Angeles, and is checking out grad school options, so he stayed with me while scoping out Berkeley during the day. We had some good dinners together and did some hanging out. A pretty low-key visit, but it worked out well. We did the grand tour of three of my favorite nearby restaurants over three days. Friday I picked up Debbi and the kits for their weekend visit. The kittens are enthralled by the warm weather and open windows, and spent much of the weekend sitting at windows watching birds and bugs fly about. They're only 8 months old, so this is their first taste of such things since they were very tiny kittens! Debbi is still looking for a new car, but it looks like she's going to buy a Honda Civic - basically a newer model of my car, only in a lovely blue (I'm envious - the 2000 Civics came in pretty blah colors, my forest green shade being the best of a bad lot). Details are still pending, but hopefully it will be a done deal by the end of the week. I think she's going to get a good deal on it, too! Anyway, Saturday we went to test-drive the car, which - surprise surprise! - drives a lot like my own. I think it'll be a good thing for her.
 Other news? We went to a nice dinner at the Basque Cultural Center in South San Francisco on Saturday with some of Deb's friends, since her friend Lisa is getting married later this year. I had stuffed quail, which was pretty good. Quail is not quite as flavorful as chicken, and I doubt it could carry the meal all on its own, but stuffed with veggies it was tasty. I'm pretty much thoroughly in the baseball mood these days, with just under 4 weeks to our fantasy baseball draft. We're having some rough administrative patches in our league, but hopefully we'll be through them soon. We did, at least, manage to fill our three vacant slots, and with some pretty strong candidates, I think. Debbi and I also spent some time on my patio cleaning up yesterday: Pulling weeds, extracting moss from between the tiles, sucking up leftover leaves, and so forth. It looks a lot better! Now I need to finish it off so I can start planting flowers and tomatoes for the summer.
For last night's Kepler's book discussion we read J.R.R. Tolkein's Smith of Wootton Major/Farmer Giles of Ham, a pair of short pieces from circa 1967 and 1949, respectively. I'm a big fan of The Lord of the Rings, and less so of The Hobbit. These two are lighter weight than even the latter. Smith is a short romp through the realm of faerie, which I would say is to-the-point if it had a point, but it's short on both plot and characters, and left me wondering what the point of all that was. The best I got from the discussion is that it's a striving to capture the sense of wonder of faerie stories, making them mysterious yet compelling. All well and good (especially if you're a Neal Gaiman fan), but ultimately there's not much there there. Farmer Giles, on the other hand, is a whimsical story of a determined farmer in a land of weak leadership, who becomes an unlikely hero when a dragon invades the land. It's filled with light but funny characters and many delightful turns of phrase. Tolkein leaves no noble unskewered and makes a sort of hero out of a lowly dog, even. It's not great, but it's a nice little diversion. I probably wouldn't have read either of these if not for the book group. Getting exposed to Farmer Giles was worth it.
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