writing your own headlines, ignoring your own deadlines

First and foremost, happy birthday to my brother, [censored]! Hopefully he had a lovely day in Stillwater. I can almost guarantee that it was warmer there than it was in Palo Alto; after the searing heat of the desert southwest, I'm freezing my ass off in my house, even with the heat turned up to seventy. It was quite gloomy all day, then began to rain in the evening, which was somehow a fitting way to mark my return to California life.

I slept more fitfully than I thought I would last night, including an hour-long online perusing session at three a.m., and so I didn't crawl out of bed until almost ten. I finally got around to showering, then went to Joanie's Cafe for lunch because I was utterly out of groceries and had no milk for the tea that would have revived me. So, I had eggs and coffee there, then went to Whole Foods and stocked up on appropriate foods for the week ahead. Alyssa (whom I see tomorrow for the first time in three weeks - I'm going to die) sent over some meal plans, and I plotted out every menu for the week in an effort to avoid buying too much food and then tossing it. With my groceries lined up, I came home, cleaned out my fridge, messed around online all afternoon, talked to [censored], and then decided to get a salad from Sprout as an easy ramp into the draconian diet Alyssa is encouraging. It ended up being an even easier ramp than I anticipated, since the Sprout people left out both the bacon and the pico de gallo from my Southwestern salad, which is pretty much the whole reason to get the Southwestern salad. Sadly, I didn't discover this until I was already home, and I didn't want to pack the salad back up, drive back downtown, and fight for parking in the rain over some bacon I probably shouldn't have eaten anyway. Still, it made me a sad panda, but I suppose I shall recover.

I was going to write tonight, but I decided to read a book instead, and so I started a book that I bought while visiting Katie in Denver. It's about fallen angels, and surprisingly was reviewed by the NYTimes, which I should have realized meant that it was much closer to the literary end of the spectrum than what I really wanted to read tonight. It's sort of reminding me of Elizabeth Kostova's "The Historian" in terms of taking a favorite subgenre (fallen angels in this case; Dracula's in "The Historian") and making it more literary. We'll see how far I get, but it's going to need to pick up a bit more if I'm going to finish it.

And now, I shall go to bed; I have to be at the gym at ten, and as Alyssa wants me to start eating eggs and oatmeal, etc., before coming in rather than just quickly inhaling a bowl of Cheerios, I should get up earlier than I usually do. Goodnight!