So, Thursday was Daniel's birthday. Since he works from home, I decided that the best present I could give him was a day out of the house. So I took the day off from work, and we spent the day together.

Fortunately, the weather cooperated with us by not being all horrid and rainy.

We started with a leisurely brunch of bagels and Peet's coffee. Then we went down to the DMV so that Daniel could renew his driver's license. (A remarkably painless procedure. I think it took us less than 20 minutes.)

Then we drove up to Berkeley, and visited The Other Change of Hobbit. Daniel got caught up on his back issues of Locus. (Actually, next time I'm saying that I can't think of a good present to get Daniel, remind me to get him a subscription to Locus.)

Next stop was Comic Relief, where we were immediately greeted by proprietor Rory Root with a "Hey, guys, long time no see!" We neeped about San Jose comics shops - I now have a couple more places to try. I picked up the first trade paperback of BONE, because it's a classic and people keep telling me that I should read it. Daniel picked up the latest Girl Genius.

Then we went to Yali's Cafe (another regular old haunt) to drink coffee and read our comics. Everyone out there who's been telling me to read BONE: Yes, thank you; you were right. I love it - it's sweet and funny and slightly surreal and also just a really well done comic. (It takes a tremendous amount of skill to do the kind of visual slapstick that you get in BONE in a static medium. Cool stuff.)

We had dinner at La Note, where I had a rather amazing wild mushroom ravioli. Mmmm.

We rounded off our tour of our regular Berkeley haunts with a visit to Pegasus Books, followed by a quick tour around the Barnes and Noble across the street. Then we went home.

It was a nice way to spend the day. It's kind of fun to "play hooky" and take a day off from work in the middle of the week. I should arrange to do so every now and again.

Friday I was back at work. And it was raining like heck again. Work was fine.

I came home to find that one of the purchases that I had made with some of my holiday gift money had arrived - a LoveSac. That's not as kinky as it sounds - a LoveSac is basically like a bean bag chair, only it's filled with foam bits instead of beans. It is gloriously comfortable.

It also arrived packed into a duffel bag and shrunken down to 1/8 normal size. You have to pull it out of the duffel and fluff it until it gets expands to normal size. Fluffing a LoveSac requires a clean mind if you want to do it with a straight face.

Anyway, I got the LoveSac fluffed, and zipped into its snazzy blue denim cover, and then Daniel put in a DVD of Hero, and I flopped down to watch. I'm still not sure what I thought of the movie, but the chair was great. It's really comfortable. I was tempted to sleep on it.

So, now that I've filled you in on what I've been up to, I think I'm going to go grab a book and a soda, and lounge on the 'Sac and read.

Later!