March 2002
Summary: Dexter visits, School of Pharmacy Web site redesign is completed, Lodestar Quarterly Web site premieres, Patrick finishes the entire first draft of Second Island, Oyster Boy Review wants to publish "Blackout"
Dates on this page
Fri Mar 1, 2002
Oh, man. I can't remember what happened today. I went to work. I came home. Patrick and I had dinner. That's what usually happens most Fridays, anyhow.
Sat Mar 2, 2002
I was tired all day, and slept most of the day. Patrick and I had burritos at Pe????te, a Mexican restaurant near us. We ran into Tom, whom we met at Aaron's Thanksgiving party last November. After that we picked up DVDs at Lost Weekend Video and bought groceries at Whole Foods. There we ran into Vicki's friend Alice and traded hellos before goodbyes. Dinner at home: a concoction of stir-fried vegetables over gemelli—Patrick dubbed it Asian-Italian fusion, and it reminded me of Oritalia, a former restaurant of Nob Hill we'd been to in the past. We watched Unbreakable on DVD. It's enjoyable, though Patrick thought it bordered on corny at times. The 2nd DVD with the extras is mostly a waste of time except for the deleted scenes, which were interesting.
Sun Mar 3, 2002
Worked on Lodestar all day. Sandwiches from Golden Crust Bakery. Watched "Raising Arizona" on DVD. I laughed a whole lot. Patrick laughed some. Patrick made a shrimp stir-fry for dinner.
Mon Mar 4, 2002
Moved Kristina's computer temporarily to Chris's office because the furniture in U-12A is getting moved out. Troubleshooted schedule template problems with Debrah. We eventually decided that we'll wait until next quarter to use them, as they didn't behave as expected in Microsoft Word (Office XP). Reordered Kristina's UNIX account. Dinner by myself at San Tung on Irving: cherry pork, mixed vegetables, steamed rice. The food is very good except that I could tell they used a lower grade of pork or were lazy and didn't cut away all the unchewable parts of it. Caught up on the journal and e-mail.
Tue Mar 5, 2002
Today Joel's furniture arrived, so I moved his computer from U-12B to U-12A, then moved Kristina's computer from her temporary spot in Chris's office to U-12B. I put screen snapshots of PharmAdMIT on the Web for Chris. Joel, Ena, and I went to lunch at Nan King Road Bistro. We talked about the rental market and saving money and Ena's "I'm just eating less" diet. I put in white headings to the Web templates. I wrote Martha some lengthy emails about domain names and URL choices. Patrick went to Jumpin Java to meet with Aaron. In the evening, he went to yoga. I'm sitting it out this time coz my knee is hurting a little bit ever since my first yoga session. There's just a tinge of pain when my leg is extended fully. If it doesn't heal by itself in another week, I guess I'll check in with the doc to see what's up.
Wed Mar 6, 2002
Updated frankfarm.com (my resume, in particular). I spent most of today writing the content for the "Information for Entering Students" section. It turned out to be 8 pages, mostly links, but still a bear to organize. I got InDesign 2.0 in the mail today. Woo hoo! (Haven't installed it yet, tho.) Patrick came over to my work neighborhood for lunch. We met at Park Chow and had pesto pizza, fish soup, and a root beer float (Patrick) and linguine and shrimp (me).
Thu Mar 7, 2002
On the way to work, MUNI broke down at Duboce and Church. We had just come out of the tunnel, and a few minutes later the manager of the MUNI hut there declared that all overhead power was lost. I don't wear a watch, but it must have been around 9:00 am. I ended up taking a 22 bus to the Haight and then a 6 up to Parnassus. I got to work just before 10:00 am. I spent the morning troubleshooting software installation problems for Kristina's computer. Meeting Maker, Eudora, and Sophos were all giving me grief. Turned out to be weird permissions problems for Meeting Maker and Eudora and registry problems for Sophos. It's still not all perfect, but I'm making progress at least. I converted Debrah's class schedules to PDF and uploaded them to the old and new websites. I put in plenty of site changes for Susie, including what should be almost the last of our images. At home, Sam drops off some gifts for us: his mom Dianne had sent me and Patrick some gaudy beaded necklaces, a painted ceramic mask, and a big Mardi Gras king cake from Randazzo's Goodchildren Bakery in Violet, Louisiana. It's awfully sweet of her. We had dinner at Opera Plaza Sushi (formerly Tempura House), then went to Christopher Rice's reading of his new book, "The Snow Garden." He read a passage about a man who had just learned from police that his wife was dead. He seemed intelligent, perceptive, mature, and engaging. Patrick was surprised to learn that Mr. Rice said his childhood influences upon his writing were more from films than from books. There was a large crowd, a packed house at A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books. Patrick wanted to talk to him, but there was already a line of 30 people for book signings, so we left. Patrick said, "I'll just send him e-mail." I drafted table structures for Lodestar's back end and did more tweaking to the front end designs. A long day, and it's midnight now, so I'm going to bed. Oh, Patrick said today he wrote Chapter 14 in 3 days.
Fri Mar 8, 2002
A hallmark day. I performed a test migration from our development Linux server to our live Sun Solaris server. There was a small problem with one server variable in my PHP code, and Julie Bernstein helped me track it down very efficiently. Everything, symbolic links and all, came over beautifully, and the site looks like a dream. I rebuilt the glossary database in about 3 minutes; I was very glad that I took detailed notes on the import commands for it. Our redirects to the old site are still in place (as desired), but it's nice to know there will be no transition problems to worry about. I installed InDesign 2.0 (but didn't get time to use it). Susie and I worked on a bunch of changes. Cindy and I reviewed and adjusted the faculty lists for the pathways. Kristina and I talked about dogs (she had a dog named Hudson).
Sat Mar 9, 2002
Woke up at 6:00 A.M., did the dishes, caught up on e-mail and journal. My brother Dexter came to visit. We wandered Pacific Heights. It was our first time in that neighborhood, our purpose of visit being to see "Amelie" at the Clay Theatre. Before the film, we wandered looking at shops, then ate at Pauli's having American breakfast fare: eggs, chicken apple sausage, potatoes. The film was delightful, and I recommend it. It reminded me of "Run, Lola, Run" and "Chocolat". We wandered Pacific Heights some more and saw a 2-bedroom for rent for US$1375. We went home and Dexter helped me with my taxes while Patrick finished the first draft of chapter 15, which took him 2 days. Dinner was sushi at Hamato in Noe Valley, which was recommended by Patrick's friend from Jumpin' Java, Yasuto. When we got off the 48 bus near our place, we saw Britney Spears standing on the corner of 24th and Mission in her tight, white jeans and "here's my belly button" t-shirt. We knew it was her because she was on the cell phone.
Sun Mar 10, 2002
We have brunch at Ton Kiang. Dexter had never been, so it's a fun treat to introduce him to it. He seemed impressed, and identified many of the things Patrick and I love about it. We got there around 9:20 and got a table right away. People who arrived after 9:40 had to wait. When we left at 10:30, there were about 30 people waiting outside the door to get in. Our last course was the egg custard steamed buns that Patrick ordered, a perfectly sweet way to end the meal. Dexter took off after we stopped back at home. He left for us many great gifts: a framed photo of Santa Cruz Beach at sunset, a Minolta 7000 and zoom lens that he's letting me borrow, and a bottle of wine: 1998 Firestone Zinfandel. I napped. Patrick and I went to Muddy Waters on Church. An early dinner at Bombay Indian Restaurant. Back at home, Patrick finishes the first draft of chapters 16 and 17—a record for him. It's the most he's ever written in one day—a total of 25 pages. Most days he writes only 6 pages. I work on Lodestar. We learn today from Amy that our house is being put on the market for US$550,000. It's two flats in a 1900 Victorian, 1568 square feet, 2 car garage, storage, upgraded electrical, visible copper, one upper flat (2 bedrooms, 1 bath, rent = $1900 per month), one lower flat (1 bedroom, 1 bath, rent = $1400 per month). We both think it's worth much less than $550,000, so we'll see if it sells for that much in this market.
Mon Mar 11, 2002
Backed up Chris's laptop and installed updated virus definitions. Started working on new content for the website: the computer section for students. I had lunch at Panda Express today. My fortune said, "Get to the nitty-gritty of things in all dealings." Patrick finished the first draft of chapter 18 today. He and I are both amazed at the progress he's been making these past few days, and he says he's making up for all the writer's block he had last year. I work on Lodestar.
Tue Mar 12, 2002
Staff meeting today. Regular stuff. Spent half the day working on website corrections and updates, the other half pricing a laptop for the office.
Wed Mar 13, 2002
Big news: Patrick finishes the first draft of his novel Second Island. Aside from revisions to section 3, it's all done. Hooray! I set up Cindy's and James's computers to print to the color printer. I did stylesheet sweeps in different browsers and made adjustments. Lunch with Joel at Andy's. My fortune cookie fortune said, "You will be needed for your advice or your help. 31 13 14 16 34 12" On the way home today it was sunny and freezing, like Seattle this time of year. I saw a short woman waiting for a train outside with her handbag straps around her neck so that she could keep hands stuffed deep into her hooded jacket. She looked ridiculous, but she didn't seem to care. Patrick makes pork in mushroom sauce over wagon wheel pasta for dinner. This evening, Patrick gets an e-mail from Oyster Boy Review; they want to publish his story called "Blackout"! Hooray!
Thu Mar 14, 2002
It's one day before the launch of the website I'm working on at work, and I'm still getting new content from Susie and Cindy to put in. It's not ideal, but I deal with it. We're mostly good, anyhow. I only wish we could have gotten more testing done. With 7 stylesheets and over 200 pages of content, there's gotta be holes, but I don't consider them to be big ones as I'm very careful about catching them. Rodney reconfigures Meeting Maker on a different server, so we now have Web access to it again. Hooray! Lunch with Joel at Pasta Pomodoro. We have the lunch special: sun-dried tomatoes with big, red olives and chicken over spaghetti, sides of focaccia and minestrone, US$7.50. All throughout lunch Joel is Mr. H (the hater) while denying he's Mr. H. Patrick sees Gosford Park (Sony Metreon, US$6.00). Patrick thought this was cheap for a movie, but I told him, "You still had to watch commercials." Of the movie, he said he found the British accents hard to understand and would like to see it again on DVD (with subtitles). Leftovers from last night for dinner. Patrick and Amy go to yoga. I fall asleep right after eating dinner. Much too tired for yoga.
Fri Mar 15, 2002
At 10:41 am I made the changes to set the new UCSF School of Pharmacy Web site live to the world. The rest of the day was spent sweeping up loose ends, setting up redirects from the old server at www.sop.ucsf.edu, writing announcements, and so on. Cindy bought me a bouquet of yellow tulips with a note card: "Frank, Congraulations on the successful launch of the new site—just a small token of my appreciation for a job exceptionally well done!—CBW." I have a late lunch at Nan King Road Bistro: my usual, #1 not spicy. After lunch I stop at 9th Avenue Books, which is having a going out of business sale—books at 50% and 60% off. I find two E.M. Forster paperbacks that I'm pretty sure Patrick doesn't have yet: Howard's End and Maurice. I also find a small hardcover book called "Traditional Chinese Medicine" by Daniel Reid. All three books cost me US$9.48—a steal. Dinner at Eric's: sizzling rice soup, five taste chicken, mixed vegetables, steamed rice. My fortune: It is better to get something done late than never (2 12 15 26 29 38, 3 5 8). Patrick's fortune: Magic will be created when an unconventional person comes to stay (15 26 36 39 41 44, 4 5 9). I find out today that Kelly Hawk is leaving eTranslate to return to Apple to work on iMovie. It was his birthday yesterday, and I had neglected to call because I fell asleep right after dinner.
Sat Mar 16, 2002
Patrick has been writing about 3 times a day—morning, midday, and evening with breaks in between.
Sun Mar 17, 2002
Went to dinner with Amy and David. They took us to a Thai restaurant that we hadn't yet discovered on 26th and Valencia called ?. We had the stuffed mushrooms and 3 dishes, all family style. Garlic fish, noodles, pumpkin curry, steamed rice. No dessert, as we were all full. US$58.00 for 4 people (no booze). We hadn't hung out with them in a while. We talked about fretting over the showings that have been taking place by Mike Ackerman at Zepher real estate. For example, today when Patrick and I got home, we found water spilled on our coffee table that hadn't been wiped up. Nothing was damaged, but the inconsideration for the value of our belongings made us angry. Amy was mad that they didn't let George out of his cat box when they left like they were supposed to. Patrick and I talked a little about Lodestar, since we're very close to launching that site. We got home and played Boggle for about an hour. Amy won with 68, then David with 63, then me with 35, then Patrick with 23.
Mon Mar 18, 2002
Susie sent me 31 purple helium balloons to thank me for the successful web launch last Friday. One balloon was star-shaped with the words, "A BIG THANK YOU!" and the others were regular balloons, each bigger than my head. Patrick is at class tonite. I shower then make dinner at home: spaghetti with organic spaghetti sauce, corn off the cob. I wrote Lodestar's privacy policy.
Tue Mar 19, 2002
Today the balloons Susie sent me were drooping, hanging in mid-air. Burgers at The Front Room with James and Joel. Set up e-mail for Kristina. Helped Ena with creating labels. Helped Melissa with a problem with PharmAdMIT. Optimized Chris's computer. Patrick's version of chicken cacciatore. Lodestar launches.
Wed Mar 20, 2002
Today the balloons Susie sent me were all on the floor. Optimized Chris's computer. Helped Joel install AvantGo for his Palm Pilot. It was a trying experience—the software installed successfully, but when we synchronized, no news content appeared on the Palm Pilot. The AvantGo website was no help, I was going to give up completely and uninstall AvantGo but Joel convinced me to send an e-mail in to the 3-day response support. Spent most of the afternoon preparing a computer budget for Cindy through June 2003. Patrick met with Karl Soehnlein today at Jumpin Java. Karl talked about his experiences with getting The World of Normal Boys published. Leftover chicken cacciatore for dinner. I slept right afterward while Patrick did writing.
Thu Mar 21, 2002
Patrick and I both woke up around 3:00 A.M. this morning. I went to sleep around 8 last night and had had my usual 7 hours of sleep. I started reading Taraborrelli's biography of Madonna. Patrick had read it right when it came out, and when I wanted a book to read on MUNI, nothing else on our shelf looked as interesting. I got to page 19 and his writing makes me cringe. Not only is it plainly obvious that he's making things up to paint a certain picture, but he also writes like television reports the news: provide a summary statement, then immediately provide a quote (or video) to back up that assertion. Since college I have realized how simple-minded this style is, and evidence of this so early in Taraborrelli's first chapter sets my (low) expectations for the rest of the book. Lunch with Joel at Beijing on Irving. I had the house special chow mein (delicious). Joel had the kung pao chicken, but he ate hardly any of it, having grown accustomed to the same dish made by a nearby competitor. "The kung pao chicken at Nan King Road is fab—u—lous." Leftovers for dinner. I went to sleep at 8. Patrick stayed up and wrote.
Fri Mar 22, 2002
Today was a day of positive actions. Woke up at 5:35 A.M. I worked on my resume and our rental resume and our rental introduction. Patrick and I hunted houses. We saw lots of trashy looking buildings, lots and lots of studios, and lots and lots of 2-bedrooms. I convince Patrick we need to start looking at large studios so that we can save enough money to leave San Francisco. Dinner at Saigon Saigon. I set my resume loose. I applied for a job at USF. I doubt I'll get any offers since there are probably more out-of-work web programmers than web jobs in this city, but it doesn't hurt to keep it out there. I sent out the Lodestar launch notice to some pals of mine. Added Lodestar to my resume. (I forgot about that this morning!)
Sat Mar 23, 2002
Patrick and I went to apt showings today. A studio at 85 Henry #4 was advertised at US$995, deposit US$1245, garage US$100 more. About 15 parties were waiting outside with us. The apartment manager didn't show up. At another showing at 134 Duboce #15, the building was so scummy looking we didn't even bother going in. It was on the part of Duboce leading to the freeway, so we could tell it was going to be noisy all the time, even if the unit was in the rear on the top floor. There were some open doors and empty apartments across the street from Jumpin Java where we stopped to get a drink. I checked them out, but they were one 2-bedroom and one 3-bedroom—bigger than we need. While at JJ, Aaron walked in. He was meeting Georgie there and it was good we were there as the tables were all taken. We chatted a while and Georgie showed up. We took off—one more showing. This one was advertised as a 1-bedroom at 106 Sanchez for US$1495. In reality, this unit was a 2-bedroom apartment with no living room. The layout was awkward: the two bedrooms at the end of a long hall with the walled kitchen sandwiched in between, the bath off the hallway before all the rooms. Of all the apartments in the building, this was the closest to the fire station, which was almost directly across the street. We had a great lunch at La Mediterranee: avgolemeno soup, chicken kebobs over raisined rice. Picked up deli items for dinner from Harvest Market (where we were charged 30 cents for each of the plastic containers for the food). We got home and I was so tired I slept for 5 hours while Patrick mixed music and wrote. I woke up around 10:30 pm and we ate some food together, then back to sleep.
Sun Mar 24, 2002
I woke up, ate breakfast, and took a nap. I have been exhausted with all the things we need to do. Patrick says I've been getting too much sleep and that's making me tired. Patrick went to JJ to work. Later, I got up from my nap, vacuumed under the bed, changed the air filter, ate leftover fried rice for lunch. We went to Safeway to get groceries. I took a nap. I chatted with Mikey. Patrick and I ate dinner: herb-encrusted salmon with pilaf and asparagus spears—yum! Amy and David came over for Scrabble. Amy won (190), then me (189—rats!), then David (172), then Patrick (28). Patrick had a blank tile and the letters E Q U I E M. He passed without dumping letters for 4 turns hoping for an opening on the board he could use to play, but it never showed up. Stayed up late to write a letter to Marcia.
Mon Mar 25, 2002
Today Randy from Unisys came to fix Kristina's Dell Optiplex GX240. The Dell technician I spoke to on the phone Thursday suspected a defective motherboard or power supply. Randy replaced both, and now all is well, including the CD-ROM drive I installed. Afterward, I again tried installing Sophos on that computer, but still got the same error I had before: "Sophos Setup. SWEEPSRV.SYS Could not install service., Error: 0. (OK)" This error does not appear to be documented anywhere, so I sent a message in to Sophos support. Microsoft released another critical update for Windows 2000; this time it's the "Java Applet Can Redirect Browser Traffic" security vulnerability. The update prevents "a maliciously crafted Java program ('applet') from silently re-routing all browser traffic to the applet's host without the user's knowledge." Thanks, Microsoft for writing insecure code in the first place. (Ah, what's new?) I got 4 of our 9 computers updated. I troubleshooted the problem with PharmAdMIT that Melissa had been having. The suggestions Ed had given us were not working, so I sent him a message with the results. Ena gave me some small changes for the Web site. Patrick had to deal with inspectors who had come to inspect the condition of our house because our landlord is selling the place. Patrick was annoyed because they'd wait outside and talk on the steps while he was trying to work. Or they'd come in to do their inspection and say it will only take a few minutes but it really took much longer. Patrick made pork meat loaf, sweet potatoes, and steamed broccoli for dinner. Patrick and I made cupcakes for my potluck at work tomorrow. I went to bed early while Patrick wrote and read Jason's story, woke up at 3:30, went back to bed at 4:30, and woke up at 7:30.
Tue Mar 26, 2002
Yesterday the AvantGo support team replied to my message from Wednesday, March 20: "It doesn't appear our software was able to install correctly. We apologize for the install errors you experienced with our new 4.0 client. We believe the problem is related to your Install Shield software on your desktop and are looking into a possible workaround. In the meantime, users have advised us that installing 3.3 allows you to use AvantGo." So I uninstalled 4.0 and tried to install 3.3 but got an error that there wasn't enough disk space (but there really was). I rebooted, cleaned out all registry entries that mentioned AvantGo, rebooted, and then 3.3 installed just fine. We had our potluck today. I brought white cake cupcakes with lemon creme frosting and pastel sprinkles. James brought pink lemonade pie which had Cool Whip on top that had melted. Ena brought a taco salad. Joel brought bread, crackers, brie with parsley, and pepper jack cheese. Cindy brought a green salad with walnuts and blue cheese chunks. Rodney brought steamed rice and chicken. Debrah brought a macaroni and cheese pie. Melissa brought a fruit salad. Kristina brought some brie. Patrick met with Jason Baum today for directed writing. I sent Heather a photo of Robbie Williams that looks a lot like Joel. She responded, saying that he also looked like Carson Daly (but I couldn't figure out if she meant Joel or Robbie). I didn't know who Robbie Williams or Carson Daly were, but I agreed that Joel looked like both of them in some way. I updated the School's Web site with schedule changes sent to me by Debrah. I also created new pages for Cindy's academic calendar for 2002-2003. Patrick found out today by mail that he didn't get the Stegner fellowship for which he applied several months back. Stanford got over 1200 applications, and they chose 5 recipients each for poetry and fiction. The bright side is that we now have Tobias Wolff's autograph. Tina left a message on our machine—she's on spring break and had some spare time to give us a ring. How thoughtful! Patrick has been working on revisions since completing the first complete draft of his novel Second Island on March 13. Of late, he's been stuck on one scene, so he's changing the Australian restaurant in chapter 14 to a French one. Sophos sent a reply to my message yesterday saying very unhelpingly, "Start the service manually." That's all fine and dandy if all 3 services got installed by the installer, but they didn't—only 1 shows up. I need to find out which ones don't show up so that I can reply to their lame reply with the details. Yet another night of avoiding my tax return! Woo hoo!
Wed Mar 27, 2002
I woke up at 3:30 A.M. today, couldn't get back to sleep. At work today I put in code on our development site that makes 3.0 and lower browsers get a stripped-down version of the page. Not strictly text only, but considerably more accessible than our standard pages. So far I've done this for the homepage and 1-column templates. By the end of the day I should have the entire site's templates redone. I can't wait—this is great to force those older browser users to stripped-down pages. The standard pages looked quite ugly because the older browsers don't do stylesheets and didn't handle tables as well. Today we have a project review meeting for the School of Pharmacy project that went live on March 15. It was probably the most enjoyable project I've worked on. I worked with people who knew what they were doing and were passionate about making things as right as could be. After the meeting, Susie had a Web team luncheon planned as a small celebration of our project's success. It turned out to be more of a banquet than a luncheon. The Dean's conference room table was covered in white tablecloth, a purple flower arrangement about the size of a loaf of bread, and full service silverware and china for a 3-course meal: assorted rolls with butter and a green salad with bleu cheese, Morroccan chicken with rice pilaf and chutney, and 2-layer lemon cake with lemon frosting, all served by a courteous gentleman dressed like a waiter in a fine restaurant. Joining the party: Julie Bernstein, Susie Levings, Carol Fox, Bob Ignoffo, Mary Anne Koda-Kimble, Martha Fitzgerald, Alex Kerr, Andy Evangelista, and Cindy Watchmaker. We celebrated our successful Web site in style; Julie kept saying how she wasn't accustomed to the royal treatment. We talked of plans for our Web site as well as how frustrating Web-related subcommittees are at UCSF. Most of the afternoon I spent in InDesign 2.0 putting together a special version of the 2002-2003 academic calendar at Cindy's request. I had been anxious to try out the new table features in InDesign 2.0. They turned out to be remarkably superb. It took a little learning how things worked, but after about 30 minutes I got the hang of it. It took a very long time for me to figure out how to change the width of a table—the online help was no help in finding the answer to this. (The answer is: Select the Text tool, then hover your cursor over the right edge of the table. When it turns into a different cursor with arrows pointing left and right, click and drag to change the width of the table.) However, I still haven't figured out how to do this numerically, which seems odd to me because you can control everything else imaginable numerically. Also, I wish they put all the table border settings in a single dialog, and I wish they had table styles. Copying table formatting became very tedious very quickly. Patrick made yellow curry chicken for dinner.
Thu Mar 28, 2002
Meeting with Susie postponed until tomorrow.
Fri Mar 29, 2002
Met with Susie. She says we have some money left over because we spent so little money on our recently launched Web project. She wants me to price a digital camera and a slide scanner. Final class schedules were released as well as the 2002-2003 calendars I'd been working on. Most of the afternoon I spent defragmenting hard drives and updating everyone to IE6 and corresponding critical updates for Windows 2000. Lunch with Joel at L'Avenida. Roast chicken, green beans, baked potato for dinner at home with Patrick. I went to bed early, around 8:00 pm.
Sat Mar 30, 2002
I woke around 7:00 am. Brunch with Brian and Kelly at Grub. It was our first time to this restaurant since the Cuban restaurant which was in its place a year ago closed. Patrick and Kelly had the deep-fried french toast, Brian had the Santa Fe omelette, and I had the veggie benedict. We all shared a bowl of fruit salad. Kelly has quit eTranslate and is now working at Apple on iMovie. He loves his job; he hates his commute (driving 4 days, CalTrain on Fridays). Brian seems well. He told me in e-mail he recently narrowly kept his job. I'm glad he's still employed, but I didn't ask for details. After brunch we talked at B&K's for a while, then Patrick and I took a walk to see what For Rent signs we could find in the neighborhood. Patrick got tired soon afterward, we think either the antihistamine he took earlier or the sugar crash from his meal. Even some espresso didn't help, so we headed home and he took a nap while I updated the journal and did more of my taxes. Good news! After hours of looking over tax records, it seems I only owe about $221 to the IRS. This is fantastic because earlier before I figured out some answers for the questions in Turbo Tax, it thought I owed $1500. Months ago I thought I was going to owe something like $10000 so this is really great news. Watched Citizen Kane on DVD. It's Patrick's first viewing. He liked it, but he said Touch of Evil was better.
Sun Mar 31, 2002
Woke. Ate breakfast (cinnamon and brown sugar oatmeal). Napped. Woke. Showered. Went to Barnes and Noble in Colma coz Patrick got a $50 gift card from Dianne for his birthday—an early gift. Adding in the $28 I had left on my B&N gift card from Dianne for Christmas, Patrick got a ton of books: "Resistance, Rebellion, and Death" and "A Happy Death" by Camus; "Albert Camus: Lyrical and Critical Essays" by Thody; "in the snow forest" by Parvin; "The Vintage Book of Amnesia: an anthology of writing on the subject of memory loss" by Lethem. We got some chicken strips and fries at McDonald's for a midday snack. Patrick is still on Chapter 14. It's taking longer than he wanted, but he's still on schedule. I watched the Roger Ebert commentary of Citizen Kane.