you gave me magical, i gave you wonderful

I meant to be in bed two hours ago, which means that the likelihood that I'll go into the office early is vanishingly small. But I continued my 'vacation' by doing some mindless internet tasks (pricing and book metadata updates) while watching the Golden Globes, which was lovely...until I remembered at 9:30pm that I needed to write a guest post for a historical blog for tomorrow morning. Ugh. So I spent the last two hours whipping up a post about the East India Company's tea trade, since that was a subject I knew quite a bit about and didn't have to do any fresh research for (although finding notes and photos when not everything has been transferred to my new laptop made that a bit more challenging than it should have been).

But today was a good day nonetheless; I slept until 8:30ish, laid in bed for another hourish, ate the breakfast the hotel had brought me (hard boiled eggs, yogurt, and fruit - the best!), showered, packed, etc., and left Carmel just before noon. I twisted my ankle in a not so pleasant way on the way to the car and it kind of hurt for the whole drive back, but I can walk on it okay enough, so I suppose I'll have to man up and not get it amputated. I stopped in Palo Alto for lunch at Joanie's (my fave), where several of the servers stopped by to ask how I was doing since I haven't been in nearly as much in the last few months - I told them that I live in San Francisco now, but refrained from telling them that Des Amis has become the new, more spendy version of them in my weekly routine. Then I drove home, then talked to the family for a v. long period of time (and got a pep talk from my dad that wasn't a pep talk so much as it was a reminder that I'm pretty much fucked, since I'm too ambitious to ever really relax - but he did give me a definition of stress that is entirely appropriate for the road ahead, so that was good).

And then I spent the rest of the night trying to be mindful while also trying to be mindless, and I guess it kind of worked. But now I desperately need to sleep - goodnight!