Saturday, December 20, 2025
Breakfast: one-egg soft taco with grated mixed cheeses, diced green onion, and diced tomato; hot water. Regained access to a financial account after updating my address with them. Tax and financial paperwork. Left a message with a vendor about parts I had ordered a while ago. Continued working on the Recharge Medical dev website: some styling work. Lunch: leftover white beans and rice, one sumo orange. In the evening Patrick and I rode Uber to the Great Dickens Christmas Fair at the Cow Palace. The Uber driver dropped us off at a sidewalk location that wasn't anywhere near the entrance, and we tried to get the driver to drop us off closer, and he did, but it wasn't that much closer. We walked about six minutes to the entrance. At some point along the drive to Cow Palace a huge power outage hit San Francisco but not at the Cow Palace. We opted for the $34.46-each Twilight Entrance option, which permitted entry at 3:00 p.m. instead of an all-day ticket. The event ended at 6:00 p.m. This is essentially the same price as an all-day ticket the last time we went six years ago in 2019. But we probably couldn't handle more than three hours of it anyway. Like last time we found the meat pie and scotch egg place after entering. Patrick ate a scotch egg, I ate a beef and cheese meat pie. We found a picnic table to eat at. The meat pie was extremely hot on the inside. Both were prepared well and tasted delicious. I thought the innards of my meat pie tasted a little like beef chunky soup, but Patrick disagreed. My meat pie became messy to eat near the end. Next, same like last time, we got beverages separately from eating because it was too much to deal with without trays. Egg nog with brandy for Patrick and egg nog for me. This time we avoided using the map which we found unuseful last time. Not long after drinking the egg nog my stomach began to hurt a lot, so after wandering and seeing just about everything we sat on a bench for a bit. After some time Patrick left me on the bench to decide on more food to enjoy. I couldn't eat anything rich, so I got a small salad with ranch dressing, and he got farfalle with meatballs in marinara. My salad was surprisingly fresh. Patrick's dish was disappointing in that the pasta was very overcooked. We rode Uber home, choosing to walk about six minutes to Geneva Avenue to simplify the pickup. The power outage continued, and Patrick pulled out and lit all our electric candles. Since there was little to do without power, we went to bed early. Around 10 p.m. we were awakened by people talking very loudly seemingly right outside our window. We noticed the power was on. The Christmas tree lights had come on unexpectedly, so I turned them off then returned to bed.