Over Saturation EDIT

Counter at Brian’s restaurant.

Himself:  Sales then the museum.  Tomorrow he was given tickets to the ball game.  We are both looking forward to this. Herself:  A little shopping, an inedible lunch, and some research for tomorrows snippits.  Making potatoe salad for later.  Game tomorrow.   Having a Hodad’s hamburger in the stands for lunch or dinner.  Just the best ever.  Maybe we will win too. Reading:   Blogs, yes I am catching up with you all. Balance:   No crows or parrots.

Estate sales this morning then breakfast.  Here in our neighborhood, we now have Perry’s - a genuine greasy spoon, there’s a Du-Pars -  thirties style breakfast joint, two Denney’s, Brian’s up the hill, and now the Broken Yoke.  These aren’t fly by night places to eat, they are all offer full service breakfasts with large servings and bustling wait staffs.  There are crowds, and the food won’t kill you.

Geezer and I think the breakfast restaurant market here has been saturated.  I confess, we are judgmental.

There's I-Hop.  Their food disagrees with my stomach but it's right down the street from Denny's.  No Denny’s either.    They offer the lowest priced breakfasts and you can get almost anything you want.  The food is vaguely edible, but no thanks.  There’s Du-Pars.  They were big stuff in LA for years.  Now they have snuck into San Diego and offer vastly over priced poorly cooked breakfasts.  The poetry group meets there in the silence of their empty twin dining rooms.  Usually I have their pancakes.  Excellent pancakes tho vastly overpriced.  This week I tried a BLT for lunch, and for a BLT it wasn’t bad.  But it was fifteen bucks.  No thanks.

Brian’s has the best breakfasts of all.  I never have a complaint about eating there, but it isn’t handy to the house.  Usually we go to Perry’s Breakfast Café because the prices are lower and it’s nearby.  This week we attempted to broaden our horizon and ate at The Broken Yoke.  Yes, they always have lines out the doors at their PB place, but not here in the Point.  Their prices are a third higher than Perry’s, and they offer “truly mediocre” foods.   That’s quoting the Geezer exactly.  My omlette was ok, but it had brown mushroom beef gravy over the top.  His chicken fried steak didn’t come near that of the Studio Diner up on the mesa.  Great efforts for blah foods.

Oh, picky picky us.  We are going back to Perry’s and I’m altering what I eat.  Fruit and cottage cheese instead of those luscious muffins they give us or deliciously fatty potatoes.  We don’t have to eat all of their gargantuan portions either.  Best of all, we won’t have to suffer the mediocrity of blahness or the shock of high prices. 

We seem to learn things like this slowly.

Guilt

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Himself:  Worked hard yesterday.  He also made time to download a free online phone service to his computer.  Now when angry folks call, the call goes through to the office not his cell. Herself:  Took new glasses back.  Finished rewriting the LA trip into an essay about friendship.  Read it to class.  They liked it.  I don’t know if it is strong enough.  The new browser allows me to go places and do things I haven’t been able to do in years.  I had thought it was something wrong with my computer.  Feeling guilty that I read while he worked.  Lessa’s Christmas present arrived. Reading:  Finished the Castillo “Going Missing.”  A very well written yet horrifying look into the life of an Amish murder.  Yes, I will read the rest in that series. Balance:  Reading as usual.

The age difference between G and I has surfaced again this time in a different light.  Sometimes it’s things like wrinkles or energy, this time it’s retirement.  He over-works striving to be the best he can.  I’m retired and not only a slob but a sedentary one.

When he was out there on the road, tho I knew he was over achieving, I didn’t see it.  Now that he’s at home, there he is, right next to me, his incomprehensible charts filling his monitors and his time filled with making sure everybody has the right info in those charts.  Once I’ve written what I am going to produce for the day, entered the photos from the store, or read a few of you, I leave my computer.  No matter where I am in the house after that, I am aware that he is upstairs working hard.

Over the years, I have perfected being lazy.  My allergies to dust encourage me to let someone else dust my house.  No matter the meds I take, dust slows me down.  My laziness extends to cooking.  Not only did I cook my way through college the first four years, I’ve been preparing meals since I was a kid.  That’s almost seventy years of cooking.  My recently discovered joy in eating out has now been tempered by my newly gained width…his too.  So now I am perfecting the art of the lazy meal. 

If we are eating at home, I start the entre, perhaps a baked potatoe or squash, then retreat to my chair and read.  Oh, I set a timer.  Otherwize I read right through the potatoe.  Perhaps there’s a roasted or steamed veggie.  I like eating it, but being lazy I even begrudge the time to pop the veggies in the broiler. 

Usually right at five, the Geezer will come down the stairs calling out, “Honey I’m home.”  We laugh.  The laughter doesn’t make me feel any better about the core of laziness that feeds my guilt. 

It’s a good thing I am only home two full weekdays anymore.  If I were home all day every day, think of the guilt I could work up.    

Sloth, Laziness, and The Big Boom

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The bay.  Downtown straight ahead.

Himself:  Just enjoyed the day off. Herself:  Dozed again.  Take away the antibiotics, and all energy is gone. Reading:  “Gone Missing,” by Linda Castillo.  Engaging and well written so far. Balance:  Taking the new glasses back and sticking to my guns tho I confused the Doc.

After spending a truly slothful day creating nothing, we finally decided to go see the fireworks from the Berkley…next year.  This year, thinking seemed beyond us.

By five minutes to nine in the evening, there was a boom and the whole sky lit up pink.  It was a way beyond normal sky color…everywhere, but we ignored it.  This morning, our news reports that due to a glitch, on three of the five fireworks barges, everything had gone off at once.  At all once means 20,000 fireworks went off in 15 seconds.  This morning the powers-that-be say that it wasn’t human error but a computer error.  

No matter what caused the problem, thousands who were on the bay to watch the fireworks feet cheated.

Here’s the Union Tribune article…with video from many angles.  At noon today, some still hadn’t heard the news, but many were aware that big blast was worldwide news.  Pictures from around the world show up on my query, and I enclude this one video for your amazement.

Happy 4th !!!

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We decorate anything with flag motifs.

Himself:  Lessa’s computer picked up a virus from an online children’s pony page.  G spent two days and hours of time reinventing her computer so she could get to her college pages.  He’s one of the good guys indeed. Herself:  Still waffling about fighting hours of traffic to see a half hour of fireworks.  Had a ball shuffling kiddy lit yesterday. Reading:   Finished both the Crider….much like a Mayberry world, and the newest Muller.  Moving on to a new author. Grumpy:  Even the service writer sounded as if we were crazy to spend so much on repairs.  The cup holder is well over $XXX.00.  Just appalling.  If we didn’t use it for all sorts of things, I’d just leave it broken.  No fix for the seat either.  They don’t make the fabric any more. Balance:  Finished with the antibiotics and feeling like myself - whatever that may be.  Leg’s looking ok.

I confess.  I collect flag images.  I don’t quite remember when it started.  Perhaps the photograph of a flag on the side of the submarine dry dock was the first.  Ever since then, I have been on the lookout for dramatic flag images that I can post here.  And they are everywhere.

Here’s a few for you to enjoy this holiday from paper plates, to the dry dock, to even a post 9/11 garrison sized flag flying off the stern of the Star of India or on a woodie on the bay.