vamos viver a vida

Dear Alan (aka Walter's dad) - Walter says hi!

For all the rest of you - today was a lovely day. As you can probably guess from my unusual intro, Walter is in town for a surprise guest appearance, and I spent the entire day with him. He arrived at my place around 10:30am; unfortunately, I had an appointment at eleven that I couldn't cancel, but I came home directly thereafter and we went to Joanie's Cafe, where we had delicious breakfast-for-lunch and began the long and arduous process of catching up. Then, we proceeded to Whole Foods to buy potatoes for tonight's dinner; when I decided on the spur of the moment to make strawberry shortcake, we then went to Safeway to buy Bisquick, since Bisquick is too much of an abomination to be carried by Whole Foods.

After the grocery stores, we went to downtown Mountain View and hung out at Verde drinking pearl milk teas; Walter took the adventurous route by ordering something different, which is always dangerous there, and ended up drinking something that tasted like sour salted plums (mmm). For the first time in many moons, I made myself laugh so hard that I started crying - for some reason, this happens frequently when I'm around Walter, but since I hadn't seen him in ages, I've typically been more controlled than that. This happened twice more over the course of the day, so hopefully I'll be able to get command of myself again once he leaves.

Anyway, we came back to my place, sat around the living room, talked, and drank more tea. Sometime around 6:30, I began preparing for the evening's festivities - I decided to serve leftovers for dinner, since I still had enough boeuf bourguignon to feed an army, but I made fresh mashed potatoes and also made shortcakes and cut up strawberries. John and Jess arrived around 7:30, not knowing who the surprise special guest was; Walter happened to be in the bathroom when they arrived, and the reaction was even better than I expected, because when he came out of the bathroom, I heard Jess say, "Who are you?!" She has only met him a couple of times before, and in her defense it was quite dark in the hall as he stepped out, but this was certainly a strange reaction to the surprise guest of honor.

However, the evening progressed wonderfully, and we voted to remove Chandlord from Blood of Lincoln and replace her with Walter. She should not be hurt by this; my own residents stripped me of my title of golden goddess and gave the golden god title to Walter instead, so I see Walter's winning as not just expected, but inevitable. However, as he is returning to San Diego tomorrow, I think Chandlord is still in by default, since Blood of Lincoln cannot sustain itself with only three people.

Anyway, dinnertime was awesome; the boeuf bourguignon was fantastic, if I do say so myself, and I don't feel bad about serving leftovers because it was twice as good today as it was on Tuesday. More importantly, though, we had a wonderfully ridiculous time, culminating in some quality time looking up words in the Oxford Historical Thesaurus (which is actually amazingly fun if you're a complete dork, and pretty much the hit of the party - particularly after we discovered that 'raccooning' can mean to 'raccoon about', as though wandering like a raccoon in the dark; this resulted in us turning off the lights in the kitchen and then Jess going completely crazy while the rest of us couldn't stop laughing. Also, to be 'wampish' is to wave/toss one's arms about, which is pretty much all I do while telling stories, so apparently it's an integral part of who I am).

John and Jess eventually left because they have 'work' or some shit. After they left, Walter quite stoically said that he was willing to collage/brainstorm with me so that I could work on the plot for the next book, but I decided not to put him through that; instead, we watched "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou", which we had both seen many times, but had not seen recently. It was well worth the rewatch, and I'm eager to jump into my shamelessly lazy few weeks of movie watching and book reading as soon as I'm done with this synopsis. Now, though, I should probably sleep; Walter and I will likely eat something tomorrow morning and then he will take off, at which point my little week-long vacation ends and the fight to figure out the next book begins in earnest. Goodnight!