In my progression toward adulthood, I took another critical step today by revisiting and making changes to my insurance policies with my new insurance agent. I took the BART into the evil city to meet up with the agent; amusingly, I don't know my way around the city that well, and so you can imagine my surprise when I turned the corner onto Grant Avenue and suddenly found myself directly under the main gates into Chinatown. The office was about halfway up the block, so I got to walk past several shops selling cheap Asian knickknacks, and I managed to refrain from buying any crap, which is another indication of my maturing state. The insurance lady was nice and my discussions with her were quite painless, so that's good.
I was supposed to meet Vidius Chandicus (aka Chandlord) directly after my appointment, but she was delayed by an important phone call, so I wandered around the Union Square area and window-shopped. I bought some amusing birthday cards at a paper store, then went to Borders and started looking up info on Bermuda -- I'm trying to decide where the pirate brother in my romance novel series is going to be based, since I need to make reference to his 'plantation' in the current book, but I don't want to choose arbitrarily and then find out later that the island I chose doesn't allow for the storyline I'm planning for him. But before I could figure that out, Chandlord called and stole me away from my research.
We spent a couple of hours at a cafe, drinking delicious coffee drinks while discussing life, etc. I also had the quite depressing realization that, other than work friends whom I've made in the past few years (mainly in India and Ireland), Vidya was the last non-work friend I made. And I made her in 2004 -- which is kind of a long time to go without making a new friend outside the office. I guess Katrina is a new friend, but she also works at the same company I do, so it's unclear where the line is. And I like spending time outside with the kids I met at work, so it's not like I've been completely antisocial -- but I seem awfully young to freeze my friend group in its current state. I would claim that I'll be more social in the future, but considering that Vidya then invited me to dinner so that I could meet the kid she was going to hang out with, and I turned her down to come home and fill out change of address forms, I don't know that I can hold myself to that promise.
So seeing Vidya was good, and she didn't make me cry, which was awesome. I took the BART back and then did end up 'crying' on the walk back to the house because I had something awful in my eye and could barely see, but that's not Vidya's fault. Then I took care of all the change of address stuff that I needed to take care of, caught up on some other stuff, and generally had a decent if uneventful evening.
Finally, check out the article Dan sent me tonight. You may not think you're interested in people who dress up guinea pigs, but go through all the pics and you'll see why I was way too entertained by this. Now, it's time for bed!
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