Despite the gnawing desire to check my email from my exceedingly comfy bed when I first awoke at about eight this morning, I managed to force my utter exhaustion to take control and send me back into a doze until about half ten. Then I gave in and checked my mail, and spent a pleasant while reading, but decided to leave replying until a position less oriented toward pins-and-needles presented itself.
So I hauled myself out of bed and shambled into the kitchen, looking forward to a nice normal bowl of cereal to start the day with. Of course it came as no surprise when the cry of "so do you like dim sum?" went up and the three of us headed to Oakland's Chinatown in search of an authentic Hong Kong style breakfast. Again once one of everything that seemed good was had we were pretty full, and after doing a bit of shopping for dinner tonight we returned to the house.
Karen and George, friends of Rod & Ted's who have just returned from a holiday in London and Ireland where my family really seem to have rolled out the red carpet in fine style for them, had phoned last night to say "how about dinner tomorrow night?". Rod & Ted had interpreted this as an invitation to dinner at their place, but a clarifying phone call today revealed that it was actually they who were intending on coming over here. A menu was hastily assembled and ingredients purchased, and I spent the day sitting on the couch doing Internetty stuff or playing with the dog.
Karen & George travel a lot, and George particularly has been to every country that was mentioned throughout the evening's conversation, and plenty more besides. They talked about their time in Ireland with my family, and in London, and about my plans for Australia, and so forth. It was all very pleasant and civilised and the food was unsurprisingly fantastic, and after they left I watched a bit of a television programme that Ted recommended called Six Feet Under (you'd probably have to watch a few episodes to care about it, I'd imagine) and then I retreated back to my computer where I am now. A thoroughly lazy day, but that's good, because I'd been planning on having a proper holiday - it's been a long time since I had a holiday where I could actually relax.
I'm going to meet up with Lara at the Powell Street cable-car turnaround at midday tomorrow, and if the weather's good we'll walk across the Golden Gate bridge (we tried for that in '97 but only made it halfway across before we had to turn back because they were closing it to pedestrians for the night) and if it's not good (which it hasn't been much lately) we'll do something else. Rod's busy on Tuesday (he's out of work at the moment, so has been free to ship me about thus far) but the weather report just there seems to have had something to say about snow, so he's talking about going skiing on Wednesday. Holy crap, man.