Car service successfully wrangled; since it was the dealer the
charge was high & I feel ripped-off - but now I have new rotors,
pads & shoes. My contact in the Service Dept, like last
year <1>, was
Dwayne, who in the movie of my life will be played by Nicholas
Cage. Riding the bus was educational - it was my first time on the
local system (VTA) - both buses had new-smelling interiors, done
up in a very pleasant blue motif. The downside was this system
doesn't do transfers! Instead, the one-day pass priced at
slightly more than two tickets is available. The immediately obvious
positive attribute of this system's buses is the cow-catcher rig
they've got attached in front - it folds down to hold a
bicycle or two.
What's happened with the kiwi fruit? Almost invariably, wherever I go
over the past week or two, they've been hard & unripe. I eat one a day,
with my shredded wheat in the morning, and I spend a lot of time in the
produce section selecting the best kiwis. These are slightly (but not too)
squishy. You can try buying them hard, in hopes that, like bananas, they'll ripen
eventually, but my experience is they won't. Those that I've been buying
have been the most squishy among bins of hard kiwis, yet when I get them home
it's obvious by the first knife-cut that they're not yet ripe - instead,
hard & flavorless. They're all too hard, I just had high hopes I
foolishly bought the least hard. I think whoever back at the farm is picking
them too early.
Reading ceej's
journal. I wish she didn't wax so technical, I scan over all her job
talk to read the rare words on any other topic. And she writes a lot of words.
Unlike me, of late - I feel a little more inhibition than when I started this the
thing, knowing now certain of friends & family are reading this.
.......LITERARY INTERLUDE........
| Though brilliantly sunny, Saturday morning was overcoat weather again, not just topcoat weather, as it had been all week and as everyone had hoped it would stay for the big weekend - the weekend of the Yale game. Of the twenty-some young men who were waiting at the station for their dates to arrive on the ten-fifty-two, no more than six or seven were out on the cold, open platform. The rest were standing around in hatless, smoky little groups of twos and threes and fours inside the heated waiting room, talking in voices that, almost without exception, sounded collegiately dogmatic, as though each young man, in his strident, conversational turn, was clearing up, once and for all, some highly controversial issue, one that the outside, non-matriculating world had been bungling, provocatively or not, for centuries. <2> |
Got these great new kicks from Lands' End today - my first sock-sandals, made for
action with lots of Velcro. There most be some jargon term for
these<3> but I don't
know it - instead I call them Vlad Shoes, after the odd Russian I worked with a
couple projects back. Here is my favorite quote from Vlad:
"I can only fall down between this but I can't understand. This Art is... which
is better? This Art is beyond or behind me?"
Perhaps you had to be there - he'd come into my office & noticed an abstract Kandinsky poster I'd put up. He stood there
in his sandals-with-socks and eventually said in his thick accent
Although Vlad was fun to talk about, he was not easy to be around due to some
unpleasant habitual mannerisms. He was from Moscow (but he was not all that
recent an immigrant) - back there he is alleged to have been a teacher in a
smaller university, yet he had never heard of Kandinsky. But he wore those open
shoes with socks almost year-round - my understanding's that's a
mitteleüropäisch thing. Mine are very comfortable!