Going with the flow
So, all thirty-one of you, my dedicated fans, might have noticed the construction going on around here. Keep your hardhats on when you lurk around: Things are far from complete and the hammers will be pounding for a bit longer. Your safety is my utmost concern and I wouldn’t want anyone to have a 2×4 fall on their head or anything. I’m all about my readers.
I do beg for your patience if things aren’t so pretty for a while, if pics are slow to upload or if navigating isn’t exactly intuitive. Of course, I won’t blame you if you move on to something more exciting. And regular. I know I’ve been less than stellar in my posting. But I should have everything cleaned up and worthy of visitors soon enough and I will (hopefully) feel inspired to dig into all of my parental, wifely, womanly angst to give you something worth reading. If that doesn’t work then I may just resort to more nude pictures of myself.
In the meantime, let me tell you about my annual Girls Only vacay that transpired this past weekend and which began in a taxi driven by what had to be the only black Republican cabbie in the universe. I swear. I tried to blow it off. I bit my tongue for as much of his diatribe as I possibly could until a final exasperated guffaw fell from my mouth as I fumbled to exit his car as quickly as I could. I do believe Rachel laughed out loud at him toward the end. But only in the most respectful of ways; she’s solid like that.
Rachel and I decided to try something a little different this year and abandoned our hearts in San Francisco for a flirt with Santa Barbara. Does anyone have alarm bells going off in their heads after reading that sentence? Yes? Well you’re not imagining things. There are bells ringing. Five-alarm-type bells, to be precise. But I’ll get to that in a sec.
My ever so capable partner in crime packed us a lovely picnic of hummus and carrots, crackers and aged cheese and wine and a deck of cards. All I had to do was show up. I swear, she enables the sloth in me and for that, I’m grateful. We chatted, we read. We got hungry. We ate and we drank and then, Rachel repeatedly thumped me in round after round of Gin.
It was demoralizing. I like to win. Losing sucks. But she packed the perfect lunch and took care of all the reservatioins so what could I do but be graceful about it? I only kicked her under the table twice. Other than that, I smiled and pretended I was cool with being a loser.
We arrived in Santa Barbara with a couple hours of daylight left for us to stroll and then drink more wine in a street-side cafe. The light was brilliant, everything seemed to be glowing. We were getting in the groove of being free of obligation for three days.
At my urging, Rachel bought a dress that she’ll be wearing until she’s 90. Or until she’s dead, whichever comes first (hopefully the former). It’s so timeless and elegant that she can be buried in it and be a fashion forward corpse. She’ll be thanking me from the grave, I tell you. I don’t have a picture of her in it but I do have a picture of the sky as the sun was setting and it was only slightly more fantastic than our day.
Everything was perfect.
And then… there… was… this:
Dang! We knew our time in Santa Barbara was limited. We lost power in the hotel room and in fact, the only places in town that had power were a RadioShack–where we purchased a flashlight–and a restaurant aptly called Ruby’s. We brushed the ash off ourselves and settled in for dinner and margaritas while formulating Plan B. We talked about catching a flight to San Francisco but we’d packed all wrong for November weather up north. We talked about Disneyland but decided we’d rather spend a weekend sealing all the grout in my house.
We are not part of the Mickey Mouse Club.
Because Rachel had packed every last necessity except particulate masks, we headed back to San Diego the next morning, left our luggage at the train station and headed directly to the Nordstrom Half-Yearly sale. What else do you do when the world is on fire and the economy is collapsing? We had an early dinner at Café Chloe where we were chatted up by a Republican in granola clothing. I never knew Tevas could be so very misleading. The guy had a haircut exactly like my Javier did in “No Country For Old Men” but he was no Javier under that mop. Indeed, he was a bookend to our friendly neighborhood cabbie. The two of them can cry in their soup for the next four years as far as I’m concerned, because this year? My team won!
Not ready to return to reality, we checked into the darling, wonderful Hotel Sofia on Broadway (used to be the Pickwick and has been renovated, for any locals looking for a getaway). Then we fetched our bags, showered and went out on the town as if we were tourists. We settled for some blues because this town is more pathetic than supporters of Proposition 8 when it comes to live jazz. Still, we had a great time and got to do a little bit of swing dancing. Certainly the highlight of the evening but a dangerous one since we’d both gone commando beneath our dresses and the guy twirling us around really liked to dip. Fortunately, we’re old enough to be properly cautious. Unlike the beautiful girl in the purple shift lying on the floor of the bar.
In the morning, we had breakfast out, revisited the half-yearly sale (since we couldn’t do it all in one stop), then decided to call it a vacation, one day early. I got a nasty head cold later that day and my Ray-Ray got some gastrointestinal thing that I won’t talk about since I don’t discuss such things. Even with her. I simply called to check in on her, made sure she was okay, wished her well and told her I’d go to the ends of the scorched earth with her. Even if it means Disneyland is somewhere in our gallavanting future.
Looking forward to seeing it done!
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