Monday, January 14, 2019
Breakfast at home: dinner leftovers. Walked and rode Muni to UCSF Laurel Heights. Sprint standup. Chatted with Eric and James about IPE and Panels and Panelizer issues. Styling and Siteimprove work all day. Lunch at Starbucks: chicken manchego sandwich, sweet potato chips, tall chai tea latte. Errands in Laurel Village: kitchen supply store, hardware store, office supply store. Rode Lyft to the Mission. Met Patrick for couples counseling. Rode UberX with Patrick to dinner at Jasmine Garden: we each had vermicelli noodles with bbq pork, Patrick's with spicy fish sauce, mine with non-spicy fish sauce. Vietnamese hot coffee for Patrick, hot water for me. $31.47 before a $5 tip. Drinks at our first visit to Last Rites (718 14th Street), which had opened in June 2018. No-glass Last Rites ($14) for Patrick, Last Rites mai tai ($12) for me. $28.21 before a $5.25 tip. Our receipt said that our server's name was Serve R. Stepping into Last Rites is like a nighttime visit to a plane crash site on a tropical island. The lighting is so dark that it's difficult to get good photos of anything without flash. The main bar was created from part of an airplane fuselage, seating uses portions of old airplane seats, and an airplane door jammed in the walls at one corner serves as an odd kind of table. Skulls feature prominently in the decor, implying sacrificial rituals to contrast with the alcoholic rituals of the present natives. On this Monday evening the space was not crowded, and we found seats we liked pretty quickly. After a few minutes of wondering whether we needed to order at the bar, a cocktail waitron arrived with menus and returned a few minutes later to take our order. The menu is an impressive masterpiece of graphic design, and probably relatively costly to produce, with what seemed to be a custom die cut along the bottom edge. The paper has a fine stiffness, texture, and (I think) gloss. Styled as a handwritten form, it has a fascinating level of verisimilitude and attention to detail. The Last Rites cocktail ($14) includes a smoldering cinnamon stick and seems to be a better bang for your buck than the mai tai ($12), which includes a sugar cane spear and seemed to disappear more quickly and isn't as potent. The decor has many excellent details best seen in person and is easily Disney quality, and I liked that there seemed to be many hooks under tables to keep your stuff off the floors and seats. My only complaint: no drink menu on the website. (If you search Google for [last rites menu scribd] you might find an excellent reproduction of a menu that is no longer current.) Rode Lyft home. After bed, I woke around midnight and couldn't continue sleeping, so I left bed, restarted the entertainment server MacBook Air which had displayed an unusually high memory pressure in Activity Monitor, then troubleshot minor issues with email, spam, filters, and SpamSieve. Patrick woke a few hours later. I wrote in my journal and had a small meal of ginger tisane with sugar and steak and potato canned soup before returning to bed for a few more hours.