Friends, poetry, a kitty, and gelato

Today was a funnnnn day. I turned in a paper and got to watch one and a half hours of vaudeville, which really is pure fun and entertainment. Then I went to a lunch poetry reading with Lisa, where a poet named Brenda Hillman read some of her poems in her high-school-nerd voice. She is also married to Robert Hass, a poet and professor here at Berkeley who also is(was?) US poet laureate. I really liked one of her poems, the last one she read, called ‘The Spark.’ (Full text of it here.) Lisa really loves poetry, more than anyone else I’ve ever met except maybe Mr Stephan, so she is a fun person to hear poetry with. I’ve promised to go to a poetry slam with her sometime, too; she’s fanatical about those. After poetry (which was a really odd thing for me, having just come out of vaudeville), we went to the Great China for lunch and ate their enormous and surprisingly good ‘luncheon specials.’ I really like that restaurant.

This evening, Erik and I were just moping around kind of bored, when we suddenly decided to call up Jennifer and see what she was up to. She invited us over and we got to see her KITTY!!!!! Moony. Moony is the cutest little kitten, so playful and affectionate and purry and smart and with so much character! She’s perfect, Jen kept remarking. 🙂 And she really is. I’m going to go visit Jen and Moony a LOT from now on, that is if I happen to be in the area and Jen is home. 🙂 Can’t impose on Irene too much. 🙂 After playing with Moony for, oh, three hours or so, we decided to go out to dinner because by now it was much too late to cook anything. We went to the Great China (I wonder if they noticed I was there for lunch too?) and ordered a huge amount of food and actually ate it all. It was astounding how much we ate, I really don’t know how we managed it. It was nice of them to let us in, too, because they were closing in fifteen minutes, but we slipped in and ordered and they brought it all in about two minutes. Scary how fast they can do that. And they didn’t rush us to leave either, which I actually kind of expected them to do. So we had a pleasant meal full of pleasant chat, and afterward brought our full stomachs over to Mondo Gelato to fill them to the very top. Jennifer had cream puff and dark chocolate, Erik had cream puff and limone, and I had pannacotta and tartufo. Dark chocolate was like solid dark chocolate, really astounding. Tartufo was a strong rich chocolate and rum combination, and pannacotta reaffirmed itself as one of my favorites. I’d only had it once before but loved it, and this time it tasted just as good.

What a wonderful evening. Having started out as boring and mopey, with no good prospects on the horizon, it became fun and spontaneous and yummy. Excellent. And tomorrow night we’re going to see Mark Morris Dance Company! Sublime!

I’m going to work sooooo hard this weekend.

[This post was imported on 4/10/14 from my old blog at satsumabug.livejournal.com.]