The car has been insured, passed the smog test (needing only a gas cap replacement, the inspection of which seems to fall under the purview of emissions control), and has been properly transferred to my ownership. I have not hit anything or anybody – other than my narrow driveway, scraping the right side of the car three times to date. I’m so glad I swallowed my pride, took advice, and accepted a beat up car which turned out not to be so beat up after all, because I’d be literally crying over the scrapes if it was a new Z4. As it is now I just shrug. In my defense, the retaining walls begin immediately after the sidewalk, and it’s an awkward right turn on a busy street. Despite the added expenses which just add up, the insane cost of parking downtown, and some jittery nerves which haven’t gone away it’s just so freaking cool to be able to go grocery shopping and stock up on lots of stuff. (Those of you who’ve been driving most of your lives are rolling their eyes at this point. Hey, I still take the bus every day.)
The July 4th weekend was an anniversary with Susan, so naturally we spent it together in the Bay Area. We had dinner at Chez Panisse, which was worth absolutely every penny spent, munched on kettle corn while experiencing the superhero angst that was Spider-Man 2, and watched fireworks at Jack London square in Oakland. I thought the display was mildly disappointing, although I was satisfied somewhat by the exploding happy faces. Anniversary: it’s been one year of dating. I can’t imagine life as a single geek again. If I’m lucky (and I have been, to date) she’ll overlook the serious geekiness (Wow, it’s Doc Connors! The Lizard! I had the first issue of Spectacular Spider-Man with him on the cover! And look, there’s Stan Lee!) and also the current obsession with plums and apples (I have two abundantly bearing fruit trees on my property).
A little bit of overdue maintenance: I’ve decided to switch this blog over to blosxom. The easy part is done already – you can check it out here, it looks almost identical at the moment. Since my current scheme is text based to begin with (albeit one monolithic file), and since Wayne already turned my text to html formatting code into a blosxom plugin (which he unfortunately called “fongination” – I need to have a little chat with him about that – yes, we use blosxom quite extensively at work) it was pretty simple to get this far. I have to rethink some of the permanent link, archive page, and navigation stuff though, and I could probably spruce up the CSS a bit.
