Sunday, January 16, 2005
Leftover Chinese food for breakfast. Patrick has Grape Nuts. Cleaned the shower (again). Bought a water purifier at Walgreen's. Groceries at Trader Joe's where we saw Kristina and her husband. I installed the water purifier. I chose PUR Plus over a similar Brita model because it was $8 less expensive and had a 3 year warranty instead of just 1 year. I'm a little disappointed that the PUR model doesn't let us reattach the stream-spray switcher that we installed a few months ago, but we can live without it I guess. The Brita model has a built-in light that would shine green when the filter was new and blink red when it was ready to change the filter. I couldn't help imagining someone in a Brita boardroom saying, with desperate urgency, "Look, there's only one more month left in this quarter. Make ALL the lights blink red now BEFORE IT'S TOO LATE!" After we got home, I realized that the Trader Joe's wild mushroom couscous looks like Vampire Wild Mushroom Couscous. The box depicts a (Middle Eastern?) temple with a black arched entryway, but it's all tinted purple and dark purple, so it's easy to mistake for a gothic mansion. The word COUSCOUS floats over the temple image in large letters with a yellow-white outer glow giving it a very Halloweeny feel. Somehow it made me wonder if January was the right time of year to eat couscous. Started backpopulating journal entries. I can't remember now when my old web server had crashed—it was 2 or 3 months ago—maybe the first or second week of November? Some of the past 5 or 6 months are holey or entirely missing. There might be some data to salvage from the old hard drive—I haven't gotten to that yet. Patrick ate the 5th fortune cookie: Your sparkle never fades, the party begins when you arrive. Patrick did the PUR Plus water taste challenge and guessed the filtered versus unfiltered water incorrectly. Dinner at home with Patrick and Tony Q. He brought a bottle of Volker Eisele cab 2000, which tasted fine enough to me. Patrick made us a delicious dinner: seared ahi tuna with carrot miso sauce, nicoise salad, bread and butter. We made popcorn and watched 2 Simpsons episodes. Tony had never seen the Simpsons before (!)—he said he didn't have time.