Thursday, August 22, 2002
Worked on emergency contact info cards for the office. Worked on the mail server which was a great deal of work and took most of the day. Aaron stopped by for a visit—his last for a while since he's leaving soon to get a PhD in New York. He and Patrick drank wine and talked. Dinner with Amy and David at La Note in Berkeley. We enjoyed our dinner very much because we hadn't seen Amy and David in months. Amy talked about her vacation to New York and Cape Cod. David talked about news with his job—he's working on butynol now. They both talked about CarShare, with which they recently had a great experience. We talked about our vacation and Georges and Norita's vacation and Patrick's first novel. Patrick and I both had chicken with basil tomatoes over saffron rice. Amy had the bouillabaise. David had a chicken sandwich, but they had a 6-letter French name for it instead of "sandwich" which I did not recognize. All the food was delicious and the servings are on the large side, but after getting home Patrick and I decided it was significantly overpriced. And Patrick added, "Especially for Berkeley!" The chicken dish Patrick and I had was US$17.95. I believe Amy's dish was $18.95. David's was $10.95. Amy and Patrick each had a glass of the house wine. For dessert: Amy had the chocolate something. David had the lemon sorbet. Patrick and I shared the chocolate something. Our bill came to about $112 before tip. If we ever go back, we'll remember to split a single dish between us—it would have been better that way. The tables were almost too small to be comfortable, but we appreciated the small candles floating in a small jar of drowned orchid-like flowers. Service was slow, but since we had a lot of catching up to do it was more bearable than normal. Our server was eating dinner at a nearby table at 10:00 PM, ignoring us as we looked over to have her pick up our check. Patrick and I took MUNI and BART to Berkeley because Patrick was worried about traffic on the way over. However, long before getting home close to midnight, we'd realized what a mistake that had been. We'd ended up spending 3 hours getting to and from Berkeley on transit, and we should have driven instead.