you made me compliment myself when it was way too hard to take

I had a lovely Saturday! My first excursion was a drive to Pleasanton to visit Gyre, Ann Marie, and their baby Jack (you can see his blog linked from my favorite blogs section). We went out for brunch, and then came back to the house, where I proceeded to make embarrassingly high-pitched cooing noises at the baby for upwards of an hour. In my defense, the kid is freaking adorable, and I probably haven't spent that much time with a baby since Allie was little (which was almost twelve years ago, shocking). I also verified that Gyre's ridiculous dog, Koda, is still alive - he used to bring her in when we were working together in the same office a few years ago, but she was so hyper that I used to have to find something else for her to chew on so that she would stop trying to chew on my wrist while I typed. It was great to see all of them, and I'm looking forward to finding some terribly-tacky Iowa baby products to send to Jack in the near future.

After I had sufficiently indulged my maternal instincts and remembered (as Jack drooled on my sweatshirt) that I definitely don't want any kids right now, I came home, took a nap, and then met up with Victor for coffee. I hadn't seen him in quite some time; he lives in Berkeley, which is usually too far of a trek for me. Ironically, I could have seen him in his home territory today, since I was already in Pleasanton, but he had plans at Stanford later tonight, and so Palo Alto worked for him. I was v. happy to catch up with him and hear all about his work, his fiancee Laura (I can't believe they've been dating seven years), etc. We also discussed my romance novel and came up with some business plans involving strategic product placement within the books, but we'll see whether I'm able to make that dream a reality.

I spent the rest of the night trying to motivate myself to pack - I did pack up most of my desk and file cabinet, but there's still a lot to do before I can vacate my apartment in less than two weeks. Yippee. One of the things I did while procrastinating was reading some of the posts that Peder (aka Timmy Timer) sent to a thread that some of my friends and I have going regarding dinner plans for next week. The blog that he sent out is called 'Stuff White People Like'. It's perhaps not wholly accurate of white people from Iowa, but it seems pretty freaking accurate for white people from the coasts. As evidence that I'm becoming one of them, I'll leave you with two of my favorites (in that they apply to me - there are other, better ones that apply to basic coastal-dwelling white people):

Writing: http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.wordpress.com/2008/01/23/21-writers-workshops/

Wes Anderson:
http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.wordpress.com/2008/01/20/11-wes-anderson-movies/

Goodnight!