hand covers bruise

I went to the evil city today, but unfortunately they don't give out medals for that kind of sacrifice. I intended to get up there slightly earlier than I did, but I turned off my alarm and promptly went back to sleep, so I didn't reach Chandlord's apartment until 11:30am. Once there, she and I walked down to Hayes Valley and had brunch at the Grove that recently opened up in that neighborhood. Verdict: the space is really nice, with lots of natural lighting and enough space for plenty of tables, but the food was hit or miss. The hits were my applewood smoked bacon (awesomely delicious and hard to fuck up) and the hash browns with just the right amount of rosemary to make them interesting. The misses were the toast, which was about an inch thick and therefore not particularly toasty (and they put the buttered side down on the plate, which I found odd), and the poached eggs, which were cooked until the yolks were nearly solid. The whole point of a poached egg, and the entire reason why I enjoy it, is because the yolk is soft and explodes onto the plate, to be sopped up by a slice of toast -- and with a hard yolk and an inferior piece of toast, that part of my breakfast was a disappointment. But, they served Diet Coke, so I suppose overall I would give it a B-.

The company would get a B- too, but as Chandlord is my only friend, I'll have to engage in some grade inflation and give her an A. After we ate, we strolled back up the hill to her apartment, where we laid around talking of nothing for a couple of hours and fighting the urge to nap. Finally, I abandoned her to drive back to the glorious south bay, reaching it just in time to talk to my parents. We were on the phone for quite some time, since they had much to catch me up on; while I like my California life, being here means I miss out on the everyday occurrences of small town life, including the digging of graves, the installation of drainage tile in fields, and talk of the fluctuating price of gold and silver. But, since I don't pay attention to gold prices, know about drainage tile only because I've heard it discussed before, and wouldn't want to dig a grave, I suppose I'm in the right place. Still, I'm glad that I'm going home in a couple of weeks, even if it's only for a few days, and I'll have to make plans to spend a couple of weeks at home sometime later this summer, when everything is green and lovely and I can try to explain to Alyssa why eating two ears of sweet corn at every meal is a necessary part of my diet.

After I talked to my parents, I messed around on the computer for a bit, then went to Stanford campus, grabbed something to eat at a cafe there, and went to the library, where I wrote six pages of zee romance novel. It's not a lot, but it effectively doubled my previous total word count for the project, so I suppose that's something. It's hard to write the intro because I'm straddling a fine line between how much Ellie and Nick should want each other vs. how much they should hate each other for the betrayals of the past decade, and I'm just continually reminding myself that I'll end up rewriting the first chapter anyway and so I just need to get on with it. So far, so good; hopefully tomorrow I can keep up the pace.

And now, I shall go to bed -- for real, this time, since I'm too tired to stay up until two a.m. like I usually do. Goodnight!