Very busy, but mostly pleasant weekend. Friday evening, I took off from work a wee bit early so that Daniel and I could meet my friend Jennifer for dinner at the Tied House Cafe and Brewery in Mountain View. Jennifer and I were grad students in the same lab, and she got her Ph.D. about the same time I got my Masters. When we were both job hunting, we'd get together every so often and swap job leads, hit career fairs, and commiserate about the lousy state of the job market. We got jobs at roughly the same time, and we've kept in touch by e-mail, but between our new jobs and new dwelling places (we both moved from the East Bay to the South Bay) we haven't had a chance to get together for a while.

It was great fun. We talked shop about our new jobs. (Jennifer is working for a small-ish biotech start-up that looks remarkably close to actually bringing a viable product to market, and she seems to be about as happy in her new job as I am in mine.) We caught up on gossip about our former lab-mates. (Not much gossip. I guess chemistry and molecular and cell biology grad students are a quiet bunch.) A good time was had by all.

Saturday, we had coffee and read the New York Times at a local cafe. Then we headed up to Berkeley. Stopped in at The Other Change of Hobbit, which was still there and doing a reasonably brisk business. I don't know if this means that they're not closing after all, or if we Bay Area science fiction book lovers have just been granted a reprieve. I should have asked Tom Whitmore while I was there, but it was a beautiful day and there were lovely books and I didn't want to spoil the mood.

We also stopped at Comic Relief. They don't make comic book stores like that down here in San Jose. (The closest comics store I've found to our new apartment actually has a pretty good selection of comics, but it's not nearly as congenial for browsing as Comic Relief (it's cramped, dimly lit, and packed to the gills with gamers), and the last time I was in there, I nearly had to physically pry the clerk away from a miniatures game in order to pay for my purchase. (Daniel intervened for me. He leaned over, and in his most terribly polite voice said something like, "I beg your pardon, but would it trouble you overly much if we were to buy something?" Best part is that the clerk appeared to totally miss the tone, replying quiet earnestly, "Oh sure, no trouble.") Um, anyway, the point is, Comic Relief is a lovely lovely store. I looked at all the manga and then left empty-handed because I couldn't make up my mind. Daniel actually managed to buy a few things.

Then we went off to rendez-vous with assorted friends for a little send-off dinner for Avi, who is moving to New York for six months or so. We went to an Ethiopian restaurant on Telegraph Avenue called Finfine. Amazing food. They do a seabass dish (something I don't think I've ever seen on an Ethiopian restaurant menu before) which is really nice, and we also had a spicy beef tartare (called kitfo, I think) which was impressive. I also really need to learn how to cook collard greens the way African restaurants do - I could eat the stuff by the bucketful, and I think even Daniel thinks it's okay. (Daniel and leafy green vegetables don't get along so well.)

It was nice to spend the evening with more friends that I don't see often enough.

We got back home after dinner Saturday night, and Netflix had sent Disc 5 of CSI season 1, and I was so excited that I stuck it straight in the DVD player and watched all four episodes back to back. Usually I spread the episodes out over 2 or 3 nights, but I hadn't gotten my CSI fix in a while. They were fun, though I think there was one episode where the writers were trying a little too hard with the plot twists. (It was one of those episodes where you have a large family involved, and everyone in the family get their turn at being the suspect, right down to the three-year-old.)

Sunday, I woke up feeling cranky, and we went to Sears to try to buy an air conditioner. We didn't find one with the price/features that we wanted, which didn't really improve my mood. The mall in which the Sears was located did not improve my mood either. It was out in this vast sun-baked wasteland, on a vast sun-baked plain of asphalt, surrounded by vast sun-baked hills. They were renovating it, and there were large piles of gravel and pieces of construction equipment strewn about. At one point, I looked around, and said, "Sheesh, all this place needs is some orcs." Orthanc mall.

In honor of my lousy mood, we went home, and I curled up with a cherry Coke and watched Sharpe's Rifles, a British TV adaptation of the novel by Bernard Cornwell, starring Sean Bean. It was fun, particularly if you like watching handsome men running around in Napoleonic War uniforms (and really, who doesn't?). I did think that the script was a bit obscure in a couple of places, and the production values look a little bit cheap by the standards of modern big budget historical epics. (Sharpe's Rifles was shot in 1993, probably on video tape. The costumes and sets looked pretty good to me, but the whole thing wasn't as crisp looking as I'd have liked.)

Anyway, I threw a couple more in the series onto the Netflix queue. (There are 14 of them, each one presumably corresponding to one of Cornwell's novels.) I think the series will have to improve a bit in order for me to watch all the way to the end, but I think it's worth a shot. (Oh, and I'm definitely going to read a few of the books.)

Then I puttered around the house and did a bit of reading, and Daniel and I were both still feeling rather listless, so we decided to go see Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. I'm not sure what to say about it, except that I enjoyed it thoroughly, I thought it was a much better movie than the first one, and that no, it's not as good as the book, but very few movies ever are. Also, I want to visit Hogwarts. Preferably by Knight Bus.

Today was Monday, and back to work.