Saturday, April 2, 2005
Breakfast: Joe's Os with banana. Showered. House cleaning: washed the insides of windows to remove dirt and mold. Took out trash, recycling, compost. Did some cleaning in the shower. Folded some laundry. Snack: a banana. Swept the entryway. Lunch: leftover linguine with red sauce, leftover mac and cheese. Showered. Went to Melissa's place to help her migrate files from her old desktop computer to her new laptop. Patrick and I watched the first episode of Battlestar Galactica, the entirety of which is available as a Realplayer stream online at the official site. The audio and video quality were crappier than our antenna reception, but—amazingly—it was still decent enough to watch. I liked the show except for the parts with the jerky camera and the parts where flying ships and explosions made sounds when there should have been no sound. When will humans be brave enough to depict space the way it really is? Is it too much to ask for this much honesty in representation? In exchange for my helping Melissa with her computer, she took Patrick and me to dinner at Gaspare's (415-387-5025, 5546 Geary Blvd), a charming Italian restaurant where we had a very enjoyable meal—all of us Gaspare's virgins. It's a long, rectangular room: 4-person booths line the walls, larger adjustable tables line the middle. On the walls are paintings of memorable vistas of San Francisco and Italy. The ceiling is a trelliswork from which grapes hang vineyard-style. (The grapes are fake, but it's still charming.) The most thoughtful part of the decor was including a thick-curtained foyer to bar the cold breezes from outside and to retain privacy for booths near the front. We shared garlic bread and a 2-person deluxe salad, fresh gnocchi alla bolognese, and a small pizza with mushrooms and italian style sausage. For dessert, we shared an order of spumoni and an order of tiramisu. All the food was delicious. The garlic bread had real bits of garlic, very strong on one side, weak on the other, which was good because you got to choose what you wanted. The pizza is thin-crust, done much to my liking. The spumoni is tri-color with bits of fruit within. The tiramisu is very, very delicious—my favorite part of the meal. Our server was very polite and mostly efficient. The one time she let our glasses run dry, she was very apologetic upon her return. We drove back to Melissa's where I did some final work with her laptop (for today, anyway). Patrick and I drove home. I chatted with Dex on the phone, then briefly with Tony Q on IM. Sleep.