Friday, April 28, 2006
Part D press announcement formatting for Susie. Updated a listserv for a student due to an address error discovered this morning. Helped a student learn how to send messages to the listserv. Staff meeting. Lunch at desk: takeout from the cafeteria: chicken burger, fries, cottage cheese, potato salad. Lots of Medicare Part D work today, including making our site live at pharmacy.ucsf.edu/partd. After a visit to the doctor, I went to the Castro hoping to meet up with Patrick. I got there and called him from a payphone, but he was spending time with his mom for a while. I took photos of the bizarre multi-car accident and resulting fire which took place outside Cliff's Variety yesterday evening. Two news vans with satellite antennas were parked outside. The paint on the wall at Fuzio turned all bubbly from the fire, and much of the awning for Cliff's had burned away. Some people had left flowers and signs with supportive words taped to nearby poles in memoriam of the man who died here yesterday. I took photos and uploaded them to Flickr but will add captions and other things later. Today was the first time I ever ran out of batteries with my camera. I think the last time I put in fresh batteries was after we got back from Disneyland, and I have taken over 100 photos. Stopped at Urban Eyes to discuss my eye care benefits and how to spend them, decided I will buy contact lenses online instead. I spent an hour in Books Inc looking for gifts for people but all I found was a book for myself: Teach Yourself Visually: Weight Training, which was on sale for $7.98, originally $24.99. It took me less than a minute to decide to buy the book. Just by browsing a few pages, I realized that it gave me a lot of key information very quickly, and reading some of the pages in detail corresponded with some of the knowledge I already had regarding weight training which I believed to be correct advice. I especially like that the writers tell you what not to do, what you can do to make a particular exercise easier, what you can do to make a particular exercise harder, and whether you should avoid or take extra care with a particular exercise if you have an injury or problem specific to a part of your body. They do this for pretty much every exercise, and there are about 300 pages in the book with 2 pages devoted to each particular exercise. The writing is clear and concise without being condescending. I also like that the male model is muscular and attractive without being porn star quality, which can be a rather difficult psychological hurdle to overcome for simply doing exercises and improving one's health. The female model is a little scary too-thin—see, for example, the photo on the first page of the table of contents. Dinner with Patrick at Thai House Bar and Cafe (415-864-5006, 2200 Market Street). We had fresh spring rolls, BBQ chicken, vegetable curry, steamed rice. The food was just okay, and the service was occasionally neglectful. We've eaten here a few times in the past. The space is nicely decorated, but the food and service are not pleasing enough to bring us back frequently. I'm 99% certain that Nathan S from the biopharmaceutical sciences degree program was seated at the table next to us, but he didn't seem to recognize me. I hadn't interacted with him much in the past so I didn't say hello. Home. Started reading the new weight training book. I'm learning a lot in just minutes. I love this book! I recently finished A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge and I can't remember if I said anything about it. It's a very long read, and not for science fiction beginners. It might not even be for science fiction intermediate readers, either. My joke to Nate was that A Fire Upon the Deep was mind-expanding, and A Deepness in the Sky is mind exploding. For me, it was less satisfying than A Fire Upon the Deep, which I believe is its sequel. (Or Deepness is a prequel to Fire, rather.) The book I'm starting now is The Commitment by Dan Savage. I've always enjoyed Dan Savage's books because he brings a perspective and voice to the world which no one else can bring, and he makes you laugh along the way whether you want to or not. Seeing the world through his eyes is enriching.