Wednesday, April 17, 2002
Our soon-to-be-ours apartment in Parkside is an in-law unit built in the not-quite basement portion of a single-family standalone house. Our landlords live in the house above, which is reached from a short flight of steps at the front of the house. Our entrance is through a side gate, down a clean concrete corridor. Our living space is about 550 to 600 square feet total, but it's split up rather unusually: living room 1 (135 sq ft), living room 2 (108+ sq ft), kitchen (104 sq ft), bedroom (94 sq ft), bath (40 sq ft), big storage room (34 sq ft), and two smaller closets (30+ sq ft). The unit is entirely brand new, so we're the first ones to live there. At work today, I gave a presentation to the UCSF Web developers group about the School of Pharmacy project in which I participated. The presentation went well even though I had only 10 minutes after a bunch of other speakers. Several developers came up to me after to say how they thought I had done a very nice job, and I was touched and appreciative of their praise. Our current landlord, Clay, returned from New York to finalize arrangements with selling the building we're living in. He took us and our friends and upstairs neighbors Amy and David to dinner because he felt like we'd all been through a lot of crud with the house selling process and he wanted to pay us back in some way for putting up with it all. We went to Mecca, and it was a fantastic choice. I had never been there before, and I was very impressed with the character of the wait staff, the finery of the surroundings, and the quality of the food. When we arrived at 7:45 P.M., a DJ was already spinning lounge music, which reminded Patrick and me of Buddha Bar in Paris. The rooms were all surprisingly dark. An early dinner and bar crowd had already made the place lively. We started out with drinks: Clay and Amy each had Cosmos, David had a ginger ale, I had a Smith & Wesson, Patrick had a glass of a French pinot noir. We shared two appetizers: seafood ceviche (shrimp, scallops, crab, halibut, red shiso, jalapeno-scallion marinade, US$13) and ahi tuna spring rolls (oven dried tomatoes, basil, maui onion, balsamic soy vinaigrette, US$12). Assorted breads were served in a stainless steel wire basket. Clay decided that the wine Patrick chose was so delicious he'd get a bottle for the whole table. We toasted to "new beginnings" as we all would be living in new homes within the next month. Patrick and I talked about the new home we had found and signed only yesterday. David talked of his new job working in a ten-person biotech firm in San Leandro. Amy talked of the tail end of her temporary job with Wells Fargo. And Clay talked about his new home and hanging out in San Diego. Dinner arrived: Clay had the grilled pork chop, Amy had the rack of lamb, David had the lemon chicken, I had the jumbo shrimp linguine with sausage, and Patrick had salmon with sesame noodles on a bed of marinated, thinly sliced cucumbers. For dessert, Clay and Patrick each had a glass of port. Clay, Amy, and Patrick each had the creme brulee trio: chocolate, peppermint, and ginger. I had the black forest chocolate cake with cherries. David had the sorbet trio: watermelon, mango, and ginger.