Sleepychameleon Hangout v.3

me: how is Tienpup?
mei: mad at me. xP

I suppose, before the day ends, I should be like everyone else in the blogosphere and recognize everything I’m thankful for.

Yes, that’s a sentence that ended with a preposition. Onwards!

Foremost in my mind, there’s people. I’m not going to namecheck everyone, but the Boy, my family, my friends, and quite a few former acquaintances-now-friends are definitely a lot on my mind these days.

I’m also thankful that I seem to have finally started pulling myself out of the rut that I’ve been in for the past threeeeeeee maybe four years. I think for a number of reasons (and now is not the time to really explore this, nor the place) I’d never really learned to be concerned with more than one general area of focus, and I think this year is the year all the groundwork is starting to pull together into a more cohesive whole. The tools and the mindset are still solidifying, but if the fact that I’ve got two and a half outlines done AND I have a regular workout schedule (Couch-to-5K ftw!) is any indication, I’m well on my way.

Hmm. In other words, I think I’m thankful for my own good health. ^__^;;

Other things I am thankful for: Google Reader which has made me SO MUCH MORE efficient with the time I spend online, yoga for, among other things, giving me a bit more of an ass*, having a space heater in my room, and colored post-it tabs. Really.

Most of these tie into that second paragraph. My life feels like it’s coming together, which is always a good thing. It’s not always going to feel like it is, but I think the foundation under my castle in the sky is beginning to gel. It makes me feel less guilty about all the turrets I keep adding to it.

Happy Thanksgiving, any of you reading this.

*Surprisingly, taekwondo doesn’t do all that much for ass. Yoga giving me arm muscles is understandable, but ass-enhancement was an unexpected benefit.

Last night’s dinner was at Downtown, with a group of seven people, both current and former Berkeley graduates. No one brought a camera, other than cell phones, and we all dressed up a little for the occasion although ultimately it seemed unnecessary. Downtown is a place that we’d all passed by on a regular basis but never actually stopped in and tried out, and one day, S & Y and I decided we’d make reservations and go in two weeks.

Evites were sent out, reservations were made.

The food was pretty good all around, although it seems like the staff could use some additional brain power. They originally made the reservation for the week after, a mistake that was only discovered upon adding two more people to the dining group. And after our meal, we split the check and neatly calculated the totals to be charged to each credit card on a postcard, which the waitress (who wasn’t our server) blithely ignored. When we pointed out that we’d each been overcharged by $10-15 to her, she tried to find the mistake in our math. Umm, table full of Asian kids. Hello? She apologized, took back our credit cards, and then had to return to our table a few minutes later to ask for the piece of paper on which all the calculations were written. Which she had originally taken with her.

Right. Well, the food was good–the risotto and pork chops were done close to perfection, and the desserts were definitely worth staying for, even though there was a gelateria down the street. Not that this prevented some of us from having gelati afterwards!

There’s talk of Chez Panisse next month, and S wants to revisit Butterfly, and personally, I want to take a trip out to Napa to try out French Laundry.

Hmm. This could get expensive.

*Originally reserved for editing…but I’m too lazy to edit. So here it is.