Monday, May 7, 2012
Breakfast at home: slice of toast with butter and grated mixed cheeses, hot water, 8 ounces of carrot juice. Rode Muni to work. Sent a reminder to students: listservs are for academic info only. Made live computer requirements for fall 2012. Began encrypting an external hard drive. Listserv management. Made live updates to add info about the new photo upload feature provided by the Registrar for Shirin. People content type spec conference call. Arranged to transfer my participation on the Service Desk Oversight Committee to Michael W. ICRD work for Sue and Kim. Introduced Chris C to Michael W and Greg H regarding the Salesforce Honors and Awards project. Lots of calendar management, arranging meetings for OSACA reviews of the web redesign work with Chapter Three. Webpublished graduation ceremony news. Did some workcleaning (like housecleaning but for work). Patrick picked me up in the car. We drove to North Beach. Bought a few pastries and cookies at Mara's Italian Pastry. Dinner at Comstock Saloon with Drew, Romy, Phil, and Patrick. It was too expensive for what you got. My tasty cocktail ($12) was Saint's Buck: brandy, elderflower, lemon, Angostura, ginger beer. The 10-ounce glass was more than half full of 1.25-inch ice cubes. For appetizers we ordered the corn hominy fritters ($5), the genever-cured salmon gravlax ($12), and the pig in a biscuit ($13). All were tasty. The fritters and pig in a biscuit were disappointingly small for what you paid. My entree ($21) was ricotta gnocchi, asparagus, black trumpet mushrooms, green garlic, fava greens, parmesan, brown butter. It was very rich and the portion was sized normally—not too big, not too small. Phil ordered the roasted game hen ($22?) and was disappointed to find it was only half a game hen. We pulled a Tina and ordered all the desserts ($8 each): bourbon pudding (banana cake, bourbon-vanilla caramel), chocolate parfait (orange marmalade, espresso cream, bitter chocolate cookie), carrot cake (white chocolate-coconut cream, walnuts). The carrot cake was the best—moist, creamy, velvety textures. The orange marmalade in the chocolate parfait overpowered the rest of the flavors. The bourbon pudding was basically runny, imperfect "ice cream" with banana chunks at the bottom. The consistency was not of pudding. I couldn't taste the banana cake—only banana. The flavor was not very distinctively bourbon or vanilla or caramel. Service was mostly good except that late in our meal many of our water glasses ran dry and service frequently reached over my place setting instead of going around. While leaving we realized that the great music we had heard while dining was by several members of Gaucho—fantastic! Patrick and I later decided we had no reason to return to Comstock Saloon. Day 2 of 5 checking for jury duty: I don't have to go in.