jhokes, guitars and toilets

Today was a great day, except for the two minutes when I had half my arm in John and Jess's toilet.

Everything start off well. Vidya (the Chandlord), Claudia and I made plans to have lunch together at my employer's office in San Francisco; the cafe there has gorgeous views of the bay, and since neither Claudia nor I have jobs and Vidya is for all intents and purposes unemployed, free lunch in a nice place sounded like a great idea. I went in early to have a conference call with Lauren (my old manager) to discuss career options, which went well. Then Chandlord, Claude and I had a nice lunch, followed by some coffee, while catching up and looking at the Bay.

After lunch, I dropped Chandlord off in Oakland, and then met Claude at John and Jess's house. She came over to play Rock Band, which we did...for over four hours. It was great fun; her presence encouraged me to unpack the drums and the microphone, since I had just been playing guitar before. We made it through about half the songs and did quite well, if I do say so myself. I'm getting much better at guitar, but want to switch it up with the drums sometime when I'm playing in the afternoon and won't antagonize any neighbors with drumming at night. But at one point, she was singing some song whose name currently escapes me, and I started laughing so hard that I was crying -- she was quite good at it, I was just laughing because the lyrics were so dumb, and then the feeling of tears drying on my face drove me crazy as I kept playing.

However, we had a rather somber interlude -- Claude used the bathroom and came out to report that, just as she was flushing, she managed to knock my deodorant into the toilet. Shockingly, the deodorant actually flushed, but we knew that it couldn't possibly have made it through the pipes. We stared at the toilet for a minute, then I took of my ring, bracelet, and watch, grabbed a garbage bag, and stuck my hand in to try to find it. The deodorant hadn't made it past the first curve, but was still a little tricky to fish out, but I managed. Sadly, the bag (which I thought was a brilliant idea) had a hole in it, so I still got contaminated, but the toilet was none the worse for the wear, even if I did throw my deodorant away.

After finishing with Rock Band, we used Yelp to find a great Thai place in the general vicinity, where we had pad thai and some great chicken w/peanut sauce. Then Claude went home, I spent some time prepping for tomorrow, and now I'm going to go to bed -- I 'thrashed' too hard at Rock Band, and I have to be in Mountain View by 9am for the follow-up appointment with my allergist. Goodnight!