there's no sex in your violence

Today I hit up #63 on the 'Stuff White People Like' list - expensive sandwiches (http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.wordpress.com/2008/02/11/63-expensive-sandwiches/). In my case, the sandwiches were prepared at Ike's Place in San Francisco (aka the evil city). Ike is so passionate about his sandwiches, and apparently so bad at growing his business, that he now makes sandwiches on weekends by appointment only because the past weekends have been too insane - the wait for a sandwich last weekend was apparently two hours. He says 'by appointment only', not 'by reservation only', possibly because he only has a few tables, and so you can't really reserve them. However, when we showed up for our 1:45 appointment, we were the only customers for a good twenty minutes, which seems like a strange way to make money.

Then again, his sandwiches are to die for, in my opinion. The last bite, which I savored as it slipped away into memory, was enough to make me want to order another sandwich to go, but I decided to leave well enough alone. I got the '16th and Market', which is chicken, avocado, bacon, jack cheese, mustard, lettuce, tomato, peppers, and Ike's dirty sauce, which tastes like melted garlic butter. I was in heaven, but my dining companions (Vidya, Adit, and Katrina) all thought their sandwiches were too intense. Vidya and Katrina both got the 'Super Luigi', which is a vegetarian meatball sub (ew) with marinara sauce and whole mozzarella sticks embedded in the sandwich instead of actual cheese. I guess vegetarians aren't used to eating such heavy sandwiches, but this really didn't faze me. Adit got the vegetarian BLT (made with fake bacon), which struck me as blasphemy, but they all seemed to think it was good.

Anyway, Ike is a god among men, particularly since he runs the place with his mother, and only seems interested in making delicious sandwiches. We spent quite awhile there, since we were able to get the only interior table, and generally had a fun time. Then, we picked up Geetika's roommate Sean and went to Phil's Coffee, which sells pretentious hipster coffees in a v. nice environment. The fun continued to escalate, particularly when we played the 'ordinary to extraordinary' game again (in which you try to come up with rhyming words that evoke the same type of improvement vibe as 'ordinary to extraordinary') - while I think that the 'seagull to eagle' one that I came up with on a previous outing still reigns supreme, Sean came up with 'ancient deer to engineer', which was hilarious just because it's so ridiculous.

I left the evil city around five, none the worse for the time I spent in that den of iniquity, and returned to the safety of Palo Alto. Vidya followed me home and helped me to pack up some of my kitchen (Michael - that's why I was rather abrupt on the phone, Vidya was here); we wrapped dishes while watching '10 Things I Hate About You'. Heath Ledger was adorable in that movie, and so I was sad all over again that he died. But, it was nice to spend some additional quality time with Vidya, particularly since her presence helped me to get stuff done when it's quite likely I would have just sat around and wasted time otherwise.

But, the time for wasting time is ending - Katie arrives tomorrow morning! And, I need to make arrangements for movers, a storage facility, and a cleaning service, in addition to packing all of my belongings and showing Katie a good time. Since I intend to leave this area in approximately eleven days, I really need to get to work! Oh, and I need to write my romance novel too, but in case you can't tell, that's on hiatus until I finish moving.