An interesting night, a gloomy morning, the lawnmower man, and puns at the corner bakery

I returned home to cook dinner and Harish was AWOL. The cheap white dusty answering machine gave me the answer: he was out to a friend's place for a "party" (why the quotes? read on). So I decided to pop in and visit Aranyak and Parikshit and their friend Obro, now at Princeton, and visiting for a week. Pre-dinner refreshments were OJ (for me) and OJ spiked with Malibu for the rest, as we sat and listened to Creedence Clearwater Revival, The Grateful Dead and Bob Dylan. Dinner was a delicious combination of rice, sambhar (non-Indians: read spiced mixed vegetable gravy) and aloo ki sabji (non-Indians: read slightly spiced fried potatoes).

The drinking continued at Rocky Mountain Pizza Co. and I tagged along despite my abstinence just to catch the fun of watching people sink into the smashed state of mind. I wasn't disappointed and things stayed well within control too. No violence. The arguments were marked with long-drawn emotional sentences that would make sense only in a Dicksian universe.

Back home, I used the second edition of The Java Programming Language to put me to sleep at 3 am. All week long I had been waking up at 7:30am and Saturday was no different. As I painfully struggled to return to sleep, the lawnmower man outside and a series of phone calls slashed my slumber to shreds. Finally I gave up trying and got ready for the dull dismal dark depressing weather outside. The saving grace of the rather dank unpleasant afternoon was a trip with Chris for a light lunch at the Corner Bakery café. I had a pecan chicken salad, whose coldness was a disadvantage. The salads were fresh though. The store abounds in puns: Everything you knead, and the tips cup was labelled thanks a latte. One pun too many. Still, I wouldn't hold that against them: at least the puns were interesting enough. The place was sparsely filled, probably because of the weather outside. After lunch we made a quick stop at the public library where I got two books and a couple of CDs:

Books: In my life: Encounters with the Beatles and That's blaxpoitation: Roots of the baadasssss/James Darius

CDs: The Best of Delaney and Bonnie/Delaney and Bonnie and South America (a collection of South American music)