Sunday Morning

[This message was composed about 10:50 AM, but I was unable to upload it then because of the wonky internet connection at the hotel. Events outstripped what I wrote then, but I figured I'd go ahead and post it as it was.]

It would have been possible to accomplish most of the tasks we set ourselves this weekend in one day. That is, we could have got up before dawn in Fremont, driven to Oroville, dropped off the chest of drawers at my father's house, gone on to the storage locker in Yuba City and unloaded boxes, looked in on my grandfather in Sutter and delivered presents, and even had an early dinner with gigica before driving back to Fremont. I used to do days like that in reverse, when I lived in Chico and worked on BayCon, getting up early, driving to San Jose, spending a full day in meetings, having dinner with people, and driving back to Chico -- and going to work the next morning. But I don't like putting so much work into a single day anymore unless I absolutely must do so. We therefore spread the work out over the entire weekend. The nice part about this is that there was not a lot of urgency either day this weekend. We could wake up at a relatively late hour, deal with things in a leisurely fashion, and otherwise not get frazzled. Today is the same way. Once we're both showered and dressed, we can get breakfast and head out to my storage locker, after which we'll go to Sutter and spend part of the afternoon with my family there before the part of the trip I dislike the most -- driving back into the Bay Area. There's only two routes in (via Altamont Pass or via Cordelia Junction and the Benecia Bridge), both of which are probably going to be crowded.

Unfortunately for doing work in my locker, it looks like it will rain most of today. I seem to remember having left a fair amount of space in the front of the locker on my last trip, which would be good because it means I won't have to go through the complicated re-packing process that sometimes accompanies locker trips. But I can't remember the exact configuration. Fingers crossed that we don't get too wet shifting boxes out of my van into storage.

Better than Duck Soup

We caught a break in the weather -- no rain when we went to the storage locker. This is good because we did indeed have to pull some things out to re-arrange boxes. There really are quite a few things in that locker that I should just throw away. Maybe this summer we'll take the day or two it would take to pull lots of things out, decide that we don't really want to keep them, and either give them to charity if they are useful or take them to the landfill if they are not.

While moving boxes in, we spotted the box for the television set. The TV that we'd agreed to bring with us and give to my mother. The TV that we'd left in the apartment. Whoops. Oh, well, the way we'd packed, there would not have been room for it anyway, and this way we could take the box for it back with us and package the thing up properly for the next time I drive up to Sutter, probably in February or so.

Then it was out to my grandfather's house, where my mother was making pheasant soup. Yes, pheasant. One of my cousins had shot some pheasants and gave my grandfather a couple of them, and mom made an excellent soup from them. It was particularly good for eating on a wet, windy day like today. I went back for more, several times, as my mother and grandfather talked in the kitchen. (Cheryl and my stepfather were in the living room.) As Mom cleaned up, I handed her my empty bowl, and she said, "Are you sure you don't want more?"

"Mom, I ate four bowls! It was wonderful, but I'm quite full, and thank you!"

This gives me an opportunity to post a picture of the three of us -- my grandfather, me, and my mother -- that Lisa took over Thanksgiving in my grandfather's back yard.

( Family photo behind the tag )

We gave my mother her Christmas present, but encouraged her to open it now -- a gift basket of interesting foods we reckoned she would like.

After socializing for a couple of hours, we made our farewells and headed back to the Bay Area, crossing our fingers that we wouldn't be stuck in miles of go-home traffic as has seemed to have been the case so often.

Feeding the Cat

[Cheryl suggested the title for this entry.]

For a wonder, we had no traffic delays. It has seemed to me that there has been a continuous traffic jam through Fairfield as far as Cordelia Junction most Sunday evenings, but not tonight. That meant we were approaching Fremont only about three hours after we left Sutter. I asked Cheryl about dinner.

"How about that Asian Seafood buffet we saw advertised in the local newspaper," she suggested. That was fine for me, and I even knew were it was, because it's the building across from the Fremont library that used to be a Mexican restaurant. The SFSFC Board of Directors met several times at the Fremont Main Library, and ate at that restaurant a few times after the meetings.

The restaurant is now Pacific Buffet, and I give it a big thumbs up. Now, I like buffets, and I like Chinese buffets, but I'll be the first to admit that a lot of them are pretty weak. This one is strong. It has a lot of good food, including a Mongolian-style BBQ and sushi, plus a wide variety of other dishes. I had a lot of different types of shrimp, as I'm fond of it, while Cheryl tried the frog legs and had lots of sushi. With drinks it cost about $38 after tax; I reckon it was good value. I certainly was full and happy when we were through, and I hadn't even had room for things like the chocolate fountain. (I felt guilty about eating so much, so as soon as we got home and got our stuff inside, I insisted we go out for a walk. I was relieved when my one-hour post-meal blood sugar was only 85.)

So this was a pretty good weekend. We accomplished most of what we set out to do, including having meals with friends and family. We even learned not too painfully about another hotel where we can't really recommend staying in the future. (Luckily, neither of us needed to be continuously on-line during this trip. If we were under the gun for a project, you can expect that we would have been hanging out at the Starbuck's down the street a lot.) And we even got home at a relatively decent hour.