• Location: Salinas
• Mood: calm

Events

I made it up to the Shoreline Capitol theater at about 7:10pm Friday night. Given I was supposed to be there at 7:00pm, not too bad - for me.

I met up with the two disparate groups that were going to be seeing Stardust later that night - trivialt and electrichobbit from one side, and tlsthatsme, Albert, and a-number-of-people-that-I-know-by-sight-but-not-by-name from the other.

After some discussion back-and-forth, during which Mark suggested quite a few quirky little gourmet alternatives, something like a consensus emerged that we'd all go to Chili's. This was actually a notch up the civilization scale from the first emerging consensus, because I flatly, and vocally, refused to go to Denny's when I didn't bloody have to.

And at least it was fun watching Mark's face as things settled on Chili's.

Dinner was also a little separated. On the one end of the table, which now included Michael Siladi, people were thrashing out the concept of a gothic-themed Halloween con (which I learned later that night from thebatt would have to compete with a remarkably large number of gothic-themed Halloween events - many of which are free).

At the other end were myself, Stan, Mark, and Alicia (sp?), who was doing a very nice job holding her own in the snark competition. Quite a good time.

Then we all popped back to the theater, met up with justnate and kizmet100, and saw the movie. I really can't recommend this movie enough, and not just because I'm a Gaiman fanboy. While it does deviate from the book - in some cases quite a bit - it keeps the basic spirit of the original. Plus it's visually gorgeous, continuously hilarious, and touching.

From there, several of us made our way to the bar, which was, well, fairly empty at that point. I gather from timenchanter (who was bartending) that the bar had done reasonably well that night nevertheless.

Hung out there until close, then went with Timmie to Bay 101 to see how their food was. I'm really tired of Denny's.

Not bad at all, though much like Garden City, the service was agonizingly slow. I don't know what it is about card clubs and crawling service.

Then home, some sleep, then up and awake (largely at Timmie's insistence) to make it down in reasonable time to Salinas to for raininroses and amor_ereptor's BBQ.

And we did, after picking up Stanley and k_magic.

That started a rather wonderful afternoon and evening of food, hot tub, firepit, and friends. I won't try to list everybody, but it's the first time I've seen cekyr0 and jeffercine since the wedding, and the first time I've seen princesskiti22 (The word, if you didn't know, is "squee!") in at least a week and a half.

I crawled off my designated couch a little while ago, largely because I was responding to the desperate psychic pleas of my phone, which was running out of battery. And, well, the only thing I have to recharge it is the laptop, and, ya know, it's a shame to just, like, leave the laptop on without keeping it company...