shopping and ranting.
8+ miles. Pant, pant.
The big plan for the day was to do a long run with Rob. When we called him Sunday night, he mentioned that Gordon would be joining us, not only for our long run but for the Bay to Breakers. Well, fine. (Actually, it was fine.)
Got up, went over to Rob's house, and the three of us set off for an 8-mile run. This was tougher than the runs I do, because we did them on the rough terrain by the train tracks in Cupertino. Rob says that my telling him about the train tracks is what has kept him running; running by traffic is just too much of a hassle (and, on occasion, a heart-stopper). The train tracks have packed dirt, the occasional patch of large rocks, and obstacles like piles of large wooden railroad ties. You can run for miles pretty much uninterrupted by anything except other runners and dog-walkers.
I hurt after our run, between breaking in a new pair of sneakers and running on dirt. We also went pretty slowly, averaging about 11 minutes a mile.
Once back at Rob's, there was a minor Nutmeg crisis--she may or may not have swallowed some snail bait, so Rob took her to the vet and I stayed there to surf the web. When he got back, we went to the Original Pancake House for some banana/chocolate chip pancakes.
Then I went clothes shopping.
You have to understand how momentous this is--I never go clothes shopping. I've gone clothes shopping willingly probably 10 times as an adult and even fewer as a child. It doesn't interest me.
However, I've recently come to hate my wardrobe, which pretty much consisted of the same clothes, day in and day out: t-shirt, jeans, cotton socks, and either sneakers or my very old Timberlands. And I wore a skirt for some reason last week and thought: I want to wear more skirts.
(I know you're saying to yourself: Diane, I'm pretty darn sure they've got shopping malls in Los Angeles. But when I'm at home, the last thing I want to do is go shop. But here I'm on vacation, it's special, you see? Of course you do.)
I drove over to Stanford Shopping Center and went first to Nordstrom, where I found very, very few clothes. (Do you know how hard it is to find short-sleeved button-up blouses? No more t-shirts! I declared, not realizing that knocks out 90% of available sporty women's clothes.) Then I headed to Macy's, where I found a few more things. And I hit the Gap, lured by those damn khaki ads. I bought a khaki skirt and a blue cocktail dress. Okay, not really, but it's a blue dress all right, and I had trouble deciding between the 6 and the 8, both of which fit, with the 8 being a little looser. The girl doing the folding of clothes recommended the 8, but I liked the fit of the 6 better around my chest, so I went with that.
Tough day, huh?
I drove into Palo Alto, wanting to go to a used bookstore next to Cafe Verona but discovering that the entire building next to Cafe Verona has been torn down. So I went to Kepler's, enjoyed poking around, and then drove back to the hotel.
Darin had spent the day at the Apple Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) with his brother Scott, so the two of them headed back to the hotel and arrived at the elevators at the exact same time I did. (Couldn't put that in a script.) I coveted the special bags given out this year and we made plans to go to dinner immediately, since Darin was hungry. I suggested we call Greg, so we did, and the four of us went to dinner at the California Cafe at Valley Fair.
(Which is currently being remodelled and is hard as hell to navigate and is nothing around here the way that it used to be???)
During dinner Darin ranted about what he'd seen and heard at the WWDC about Mac OS X, which is not the anti-slave-name operating system but the funky way of saying "Mac system 10." He's not a happy camper. He may give up Macintosh--that's how bad it is.
DIANE
You know, it might be worth it to move
back up here if you went to work at
Apple, just so I could hear about the
fights between you and Steve over this.
DARIN
They'd have to get a restraining order.
GREG
Against which one?
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Copyright 1999 Diane Patterson
Send comments and questions to diane@spies.com