the recap, complete with scoreboard.
I meant to go running. Honest. But it rained all weekend!
New Year's Resolution: no more travelling.
That said, we went away this past weekend.
Thursday
Thursday night was mostly spent installing Virtual PC on my Powerbook in order to install Caesar III and see if I could play it. Nope. So I removed Caesar III and Virtual PC and cursed Bill Gates (mostly just 'cause I like doing that). Then I played some Clan Lord, where I ran into Rob and told him Darin and I were coming up:
BATHORY
Hey, Acht and I are coming up tomorrow.
Pancakes?
RIFKIN
Sure. Look out for that ant!
Friday
Darin and I arrived, rented a car, and picked up Rob. We went to the Original Pancake House for some banana and chocolate chip pancakes. We discussed Clan Lord and some technical stuff that was probably not way over my head, but I made like it was anyhow. Then we dropped Rifkin--err, I mean Rob--at Apple after lunch and continued on to Toys 'R' Us to get the gift for Jess Knaster's bar mitzvah. We then went to Mitch's condo, where we immediately started playing Clan Lord, until such time as I went and napped for two hours.
After I woke up, we started organizing dinner plans. (Yes, my social life consists of going from one eating session to the next.) I sent mail to Greg saying that if we'd been able to get a hold of him, we could have dinner with him, but since we couldn't, we can't, and he immediately sent back mail saying, Don't go anywhere without me!
Greg, Rob, and Laura converged on Mitch's house and the 6 of us headed to Mandarin Gourmet for some totally excellent Chinese food (which we still haven't really found in LA), and then to Crepe Daniel for dessert crepes. Laura and I shared a chocolate, banana, and almond crepe a la mode, which the restaurant rather nicely divided for us. I coveted her portion anyhow.
I think the evening ended with Clan Lord. Mitch was up until all hours of the morning playing CL, I do know that--Darin and I kept waking up during the night to go to the bathroom (note to self: don't drink 14 glasses of water when you're not in your own house) and Mitch was always up, playing away.
Saturday
The reason we'd come up was Jess Knaster's bar mitzvah. It's much easier to get us to make a trip when there's a reason, rather than, "Hey, let's get together at some unspecified time for some unspecified reason." Scott Knaster, Jess's father, had mailed us an invitation, which we'd promptly said, "Gosh, we should do something about this," and then forgot. Scott, knowing with whom he was dealing, sent us e-mail reminders, which made us decide to go.
(Scott told us during the luncheon that we were definitely not the only people not to respond. He e-mailed all the people who didn't respond who had e-mail, and called all the people who didn't have e-mail. He got a much better result with the e-mail reminders than with the phone reminders.)
The bar mitzvah was scheduled for 9:30; the lunch for 1. "The bar mitzvah will probably take about 3 hours," Darin told me.
Surely he was jesting.
No, he wasn't: it was 3 hours, it was 95% in Hebrew, I had no idea what was going on. The hazzan (is that feminine for "cantor"?) sang prayers for over an hour. I finally started paging through the copy of the Torah (which has a specific name that I can't remember now) I'd been handed on the way into the synagogue and started reading the story of Abraham and Lot and all those wacky guys, which really threw me back to my childhood, when I'd read the Bible of my own free will and knew all those stories inside and out. Even if I wasn't quite sure what Lot and his daughters were up to.
After the service we headed to David's, the restaurant at the Santa Clara Golf and Tennis Club. We picked up our name card and discovered we were at the "Penguins" table; most everyone else Darin and I knew were at the "Diamondbacks" table. We discovered one table had both a Penguin pennant and a Diamondbacks pennant, which we thought was quite nice: a mix-and-match kind of setting.
Well, no: it turned out someone had messed up the pennants and Jess ran around, trying to right wrongs and get people to move to their proper tables. We told him it wasn't going to happen. Eventually he gave it up.
Our table had John Sullivan and Monica Rua, Jim Friedlander and Renee Rodrigue, Greg, Timo, and Josh and Megan. Basically, a General Magic class reunion, which made the whole trip up worthwhile. Despite the loudspeaker booming RIGHT IN OUR EARS (despite Josh's vain attempts to point the speaker in a different direction), we had a very good time. I hadn't seen John and Monica in years.
Most of the luncheon was designed for the kids--conga lines, bizarre party games, hula hooping, very loud music. We played stuffy adults and just sat and chatted.
The hilarity wrapped up around 5--which means we had put in a full workday of fun and Torah-reading--and we headed back to Mitch's house. Mitch was up in San Francisco visiting with his parents (who coincidentally were in town) and a few family friends. So Darin and I sacked out, played Clan Lord, and then got together with Rob and Laura for some sushi at Kikusushi and coffee at Smoking Society. Actually, the name of the place is still Coffee Society, but sometimes it feels more like a smoking organization, because there are so many youths (pronounced, "yutes") smoking and wearing black.
I think I went to bed at 10, completely wasted.
Sunday
Sunday was spent with my family. We drove up to my parents' house, only to discover my dad's down with the flu (ick); we took my mom downtown to meet my sister Deirdre and Greg for pancakes at Sears' Famous Pancakes, one of the finest culinary establishments San Francisco has to offer.
I was mostly interested in seeing my sister and brother-in-law...who had just bought a house! Which is always very exciting. They had a picture of the front and described the inside. We won't get to see it until the New Year (because escrow closes New Year's Eve). We also caught up on everything else going on (like buying a house isn't exciting enough).
After breakfast we all went back to the house and talked for a couple of hours in front of the fire. An actual fire in a fireplace is useful in San Francisco the way it's not in Los Angeles, especially when the weather's cold and damp, as it has been.
We discussed the building next door. There used to be an old, run-down Victorian next door, with an entire vacant lot next to it. I called it the Psycho house because all the paint had peeled and it looked vaguely frightening, this old weather-beaten house in the middle of San Francisco. It was owned by an old Japanese man, Mr. Seiko, who had had to fight to keep the house during World War II. He lived alone with 8 million cats and he would feed the birds in the garden every day (which annoyed my parents to no end, because the pigeons would then roost in their roof, which ruined it). I often wondered if he attracted the birds for the cats. The one time I stopped by his house, I saw he was one of these people who stacks newspapers from floor to ceiling--a not inconsiderable feat in a Victorian.
Anyhow, Mr. Seiko died a few years ago and his house was sold--a double lot in the middle of San Francisco's Pacific Heights area. I can't imagine what it sold for. The only way to pay for it, of course, was to tear down the Victorian and erect two condo buildings on the two lots. There was a problem with the first developer, who was as underhanded as they get--even my parents started going to community meetings to find out what could be done about this guy. Then something happened to him and the property passed to a new developer, who's evidently a little more on the up-and-up. The constant racket of building next door has been driving my parents (who are home most of the day) nuts. It appears to be near done.
Now my parents's house is the only single-family unit on the block. Which is kind of sad for a residential neighborhood. But maybe that makes their house that much more valuable.
When we left at 4pm we thought it would take an hour to get back to San Jose, but we didn't reckon with a)Sunday night traffic or b)rain, both of which led to an hour and a half trip back to San Jose. We had just enough time to chat with Mitch (whom we really hadn't seen much of the entire weekend) before going to the airport, returning the car, and making our flight.
We got home and discovered that neither the Babylon 5 movie River of Souls or the X-Files premiere had taped. Both Darin and I were seriously bummed. Of course, the B5 movie gets repeated.
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Copyright 1998 Diane Patterson
Send comments and questions to diane@spies.com