Well, it looks like poor Spenser might be fully on the road to recovery.
Temperature running steady at 48 degrees, new video drivers and patches for the
motherboard… maybe we are home free. Although who knows, we could freeze
up at any moment here. I keep having paranoid thoughts about that as I
write this. Stay on target… stay on target…

Thanksgiving week was excellent. Not only is Thanksgiving really my
favorite holiday of the year, I managed to get in at least four
homemade meals in a row this year. Always a good thing when you’re a
peanut-butter-on-a-spoon consuming bachelor such as myself.

1. Tuesday night I went over to Brian Gee’s, for some homecooked
   Chinese food. The thing to understand about Brian is, he’s one
   of those guys who moved to the Silicon Valley and was shocked,
   shocked to discover that it’s sometimes kinda hard to meet nice
   girls around here. “Evan!” he’d cry. “This place is a
   wasteland.”

   Well, this year I arrived at the door to his palatial new
   San Francisco pad promptly at 7pm, to find Brian in the kitchen,
   surrounded by at least five or six reasonably attractive
   young women. Clearly Brian is not doing so badly for himself.
   Of course he is handsome, intelligent, funny, ambitious, a good cook,
   blah blah blah, so go figure.

   Anyway, it was refreshing to see Brian. I hadn’t actually hung out
   with him for a long time. How long? Well, when I mentioned to him
   that Amber and I had broken up, his sympathetic, heartfelt response was,
   “Ummm… Amber who?” Somehow I forgot to mention to him that I had been dating
   this very nice woman for the last ten months in the first place. Ooops.

   Apparently he feels this is a sign I need to be
   a bit more communicative about my social life in the future.
   I’m investigating blast-faxes.

2. Wednesday night I had dinner with
   M’ris and Mark and
   Tim. And she served angelsuppa (“angel soup”, I think), which is a
   Norsk dessert of berries (“cloudberries”) and cream. Or for American
   palates, berries and ice cream. Good stuff.

   After dinner, Tim and M’ris and I got into a discussion about Harry Potter.
   Tim and M’ris pointed out that Harry Potter and his friends are all pretty
   one-dimensional — they’re basically good kids, they don’t go through any
   major internal struggles, and they all fit various boarding school stereotypes.
   They’re right — I had noticed this with the unredeemably nasty Draco Malfoy, but for
   some reason I missed it in the other characters. Anyway, on further reflection,
   I think the one exception is Snape. He started out a Death-Eater, but
   had a change of heart; he hates Harry Potter passionately, but dives in and
   saves him when necessary. That’s worth some points, I think.

   Tim also pointed out that J.K. Rowling snubbed
   this year’s Hugo Award ceremony for
   Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. If so, that’s pretty tacky.
   I certainly hope Rowling isn’t one of those authors who thinks she writes
   “lit-rah-chah”, as opposed to that blight on our civilization, speculative fiction.

3. Thursday night was Thanksgiving. This year I decided that it was time for the
   younger generation to learn the family Thanksgiving secrets. I made the stuffing,
   made the gravy, and prepared, stuffed, and carved the turkey. The one thing I didn’t do
   was cook the turkey… so if Dad gets hit by a bus next year, his secrets
   with the Weber die with him.

   The meal was excellent (if I do say so myself). We ate with cousin David and
   some family friends, Susan Hennings and her daughter Anna.
   Anna is two weeks older than Sarah, and about a foot-and-a-half taller.
   They’ve been friends since they were crawling around on the floor… which
   pretty much puts me and Eric to shame.

4. Friday night was Son of Thanksgiving. We finished most of the turkey, although
   we had to invite yet more cousins to do it. And their girlfriends.
   I made pumpkin pie, but unfortunately I misread the recipe and used 1/4c of
   brown sugar instead of 3/4c. Tee-hee! Everyone was polite about it though.
   “Mmmm, yes, you don’t want to oversweeten the pumpkin pie. It tastes sooo
   artificial.” Some of them even waited a full 90 seconds before reaching for the honey.

   I then went and dragged Nancy out of the house, and we hung out at a bar in Campbell
   (Katie Bloom’s) with Randy and Don and Nicole and Monica and Monica’s Boyfriend Who
   I Can Never Remember the Name Of, Even Though He Can Remember Mine Just Fine and
   Seems Like a Very Nice Guy.

All in all, a mind- and waist-expanding week! I suppose I have plenty more to prattle
on about, but I might as well save it for the near future. I’m afraid I’m going to start
sounding like Liz Smith, or maybe
Jackie Harvey, anyway.
Item!

Every birthday, my Dad would come up with something special about
the number.

Nine: “Three squared!” Ten: “Double digits!” Thirteen: “A Fibonacci number!”
You get the idea.

Clearly, I was doomed from an early age.

Even when I had moved out of the house, he would come up with something during
the traditional Birthday Phone Call. Sometimes he had to reach a bit.
Twenty-three: “A prime number… and you won’t be prime again for six more
years!”

Last year was a bit tough. To get anything significant for twenty-six, you have
to turn to Gematria,
the ancient art of Hebrew numerology. Twenty-six figures
prominently throughout the Torah: among other things, it’s the numerical
representation of the name of God (YAHWEH), the number of generations from Adam
to Moses, and the number of lines that it takes to list the Ten Commandments in the
Torah (I bet you thought it was ten).

Well, this year Dad didn’t have to work too hard. “Three cubed!” I was a bit
concerned about next year, until my cousin pointed out that
twenty-eight is one of those rare
perfect numbers,
the next one being 496.

A perfect number! So much to look forward to…

The National Book Award for fiction went to
Jonathan Franzen this year. Makes me wonder, was that just a little “fuck you”
from the National Book Foundation to
to those who are not proper members of the high-art literary tradition? Hmmmm.
Regardless, I have to admire Franzen… he’s clearly a lot savvier than I initially gave
him credit for. No such thing as bad press and all.

But Franzen is not the only budding young genius in America today. Take Randy.
Randy had a great idea this week. We’re all going down to Santa Cruz and a place
called Zelda’s for breakfast Saturday morning. It’s a bit far to go, but Randy
pointed out that there’s nothing better than coffee and cigarettes on a brisk Saturday
morning by the ocean… except maybe if the coffee is served by attractive young
women in small T-shirts. Who can argue with logic like that?

Perhaps I’ll bring a chess set.

There is another place we all used to go to for a Long Breakfast — Crepes on Cole, which
just happens to be a crepes place on Cole St. in San Francisco. As a bonafide
weenie South Bay person, I used to feel very cool driving up to San Francisco
and twisting through all these side streets to get to this nice little
restaurant. Of course, it was pretty crowded. Which meant it probably wasn’t
obscure or hip enough, but what the heck? It made me happy. I have low standards,
and more importantly, so do my friends.

Problem is, I always let Pat drive. Which meant that last year, when Rachel and Ben
were visiting, I tried to take them to Crepes on Cole. And you guessed it — I missed
a turn and we got lost. Bam! There went all my SF hipness, gone in a flash.
Fortunately, after we goofed off most of the day, Rachel insisted that we drive the
Golden Gate bridge. I was a bit dubious. But Ben was no help at all, and Rachel…
well, let’s just say that if that girl wants to cross a bridge, ain’t nobody stoppin’
her from crossing that bridge.

So we crossed the Golden Gate at sunset and the bridge performed on cue. Spectacular.
San Francisco saves the day (and my hipness) once again! Although I could have sworn I heard it
snickering as we drove out of the city. Or was that Rachel in the back seat? Hard to say.

For Halloween, we had a whopping four trick-or-treaters. One small child, three
teenage girls. At least they all wore costumes… I heard that in
Sunnyvale, kids were just wandering around in street clothes. Is Halloween
getting worse every year? Is anyone even trying?

We saw “The Nightmare Before Christmas” and “Sleepy Hollow”. I hadn’t seen
“Sleepy Hollow” before… not a bad flick. Is it just me, or did both of
the scarecrows in “Sleepy Hollow” look like Jack Skellington (with and without
pumpkin head?) One thing bothered me… Ichabod Crane struck me as
a bit inconsistent. I mean, in one scene he’s in hand-to-hand combat with
an invincible headless ghost. And a few scenes later he’s up on a chair, frightened
of a large spider. What gives?

Anyway, we had Nancy’s chili and Don Little’s garlic tri-tip. And plenty of
leftover Halloween candy.

As for my birthday, that went… ummmm… rather well. Friday night we
went out as planned. We went into the back room of La Bodeguita del Medio.
Everyone bought me free drinks. And I smoked a cigar. It was very Gentleman’s
Club (but not the strip-club-with-plush-chairs variety). Then we went
to F&A’s. Mental note: if you decide to regress about seven years and
drink past your limit, make sure you have lots of good friends around to
apologize to Security and haul your sick, sorry butt home. Woo! Do I still
know how to party or what? Sad, sad, sad.

Well, presumably the next time this happens, in another seven years, it will
be for a more noble cause. “Drink all ze mojitos, Señor Goer…
or ze hostages die!”

The BBQ the next day went on, although I was thinking of cancelling it up until
about three hours before. Renee King showed up briefly! She was on her way to a wedding
reception. And she seemed unimpressed by the fact that there were only two other guests
when she arrived. Well, Renee, if you’d only come an hour and a half late like all the
cool people… Boy, that lady knows how to kick a man when he’s hung over
and down. That husband of hers, Whatshisname, is clearly a bad influence.

I should mention that due to my
weakened condition, I specifically requested “Number” candles on my cake, rather
than lots of little ones. I hope this is not a sign of things to come.

Fortunately, although I did not make it to the store, my friends covered for me
admirably. Barbara showed up right on time with piping hot baked potatoes
and all the fixings, just when I was thinking, “Damn, we need a starch.” I
don’t know how she managed to keep those potatoes hot all the way from
Campbell. That woman defies the laws of Thermodynamics.

Hmmmm… better add “defies laws of Thermodynamics” to The List.