Friday, March 10, 2006
Lunch at Five Happiness Mandarin Cuisine Restaurant (415-387-1234, 4142 Geary Blvd): cashew nut chicken lunch special. This place is decent—awful decor, wanting cleanliness, good food that's inexpensive, service above average especially in friendliness. If you're in the neighborhood, it's worth it just to step foot in the door to see the gigantic fish in the foyer fish tank. I think one of them was bigger than me! My fortune: Good health will be yours for a long time. Listserv troubleshooting for Joel. Took photos of student MB for a publication. Scanned in documents to PDF for Cindy. Updated block calendars with a new note about holiday schedules for Cindy. Finalized the poster project for Cindy. Met with Rodney to review things I'll need to know while he's away. Tonight just before dinner around 7:00 PM there was a truly frightening and very brief lightning storm. It started as I was working at the computer. I saw the first flash through the closed venetian blinds and my initial thought was, "How can there be fashion photographers in my back yard?" but one second later a severe brownout hits, the lights go out briefly, and the uninterruptible power supply on my computer beeps loudly. One more second later a very loud rumble of thunder confirmed the reality. Not long afterwards—maybe 30 seconds?—the same thing happened. I was hovering near the door and window trying to gauge whether it was raining—there were some drops, but no downpour. Wherever the lightning hit, it seemed to be very close. The lightning and thunder continued for perhaps a few minutes more but stopped completely. We got a little bit of a steady rain, but then even the rain stopped. Very strange! I had wanted to unplug our computers and did so with Patrick's laptop, but I felt the web server was safe enough to risk leaving it on and it was too difficult to find only the remaining computers and unplug them. Dinner at home with Patrick. Patrick cooked oven-baked, flavor-bursting, honey mustard chicken with an Italian herb risotto. I went to bed early tonight—around 8:00 PM.