I'm about to go to bed earlier than I have in an age; there's an Irishman asleep in my living room (who, thankfully, is tall enough that I'm pretty sure he's not a leprechaun), and in honor of his jetlag + the fact that I want to go to the gym early tomorrow, I'm retiring earlier than usual.
I had a lovely day to start the first full week of 2011 in California; I managed to drag myself out of bed and to the gym in time for my eight a.m. training session with Alyssa. We reevaluated my 'progress' -- which, in this case, was a regression, since the past 3.5 weeks of unmoderated consumption of midwestern food (instead of the salads and endless variations of chicken breast that I was subsisting on before) + lack of exercise basically meant that I slipped back to somewhere between where I was when I met her the first time in November and where I was when we reevaluated a few days before I went back to Iowa. I was strangely perfectly fine with that -- I would have rather enjoyed the holidays than been an ascetic martyr, and the beauty of starting with her before the holidays is that, on the whole, I ended the holiday period still slightly ahead of where I was before I started. We set some aggressive goals for the next three months, including training with her twice a week, and so I bought groceries this afternoon to help me get back on track (since 'on track' does not involve any variations of Baja Fresh, the delicious head-sized sandwiches at Cafe Borrone, etc.).
After the gym, I came home and took care of some stuff around the house before driving over to my old place of employment to have lunch with Dontae, who used to report to me and is now more of a friend than a minion (even if I did skip his birthday party on Saturday because I felt too old to attend). It was lovely to see him, and we cafe-hopped, grabbing dishes from two different cafes and ending with coffee from the barista in the area where people usually wait for the shuttles back to the evil city or the dirty east bay at the end of the day. After we parted ways, I did my grocery shopping, came home, and finished tidying up my place, which involved more swiffering than I care to admit. The only thing left to tackle now is my bedroom, but it's going to remain a sty for awhile, since I need to stop procrastinating with housework and start writing.
I did manage to write a couple of pages this afternoon, and was getting into the groove when Irish Matt called asking to be picked up. Longtime readers will remember that Irish Matt was one of my closest friends from my India expat days, and we traveled together in Sri Lanka at the end of our assignment in India. He comes to California a few times a year, and we still see each other whenever he's here even though he jumped ship for our archrival last year. He came into town today and wasn't able to find a hotel room anywhere in the Valley, so he's currently sleeping in my living room on a juryrigged 'bed' made of my couch and loveseat cushions since he's too tall for the couch (or my bed, since I offered it to him and he declined). After I picked him up, we went to Menlo Park and had a delightful dinner at Left Bank, catching up on life and spending several minutes thoroughly bashing 'Sex and the City 2'. We got back here around nine, and he was clearly on the verge of collapsing, and so I got him settled into my cabin and let him go to sleep.
And now, it's bedtime; I'm going to the gym early (and dropping him off at work on the way), and then I have all day free to write before the first meeting of this quarter's writing class tomorrow night. If I never blog again, it turns out that Irish Matt was a leprechaun after all -- but given that he would have had a much easier time murdering me in Sri Lanka without ever getting caught, I have a feeling I'm safe. Goodnight!
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