Ohhh, it’s Christmas Eve, and all’s well. I haven’t had such a wonderful Christmas Eve in decades.
This morning I sipped a monstrously fine coffee from Peet’s while I called friends in Amsterdam and London, and received a call from my cousin Jania in Texas.
Then I caught up on some email correspondence, lunched on a sandwich of spectacular smoked turkey that I’d smuggled in from Texas, and made a batch of my now internationally acclaimed chocolate sauce (four continents, if we’re counting Australia).
Late this afternoon I strolled down to the gym and performed a really splendid workout, during which one of my fellow pumpers took a close look at the Oracle Applications T-shirt and cried out, “Love yer stock!” (It’s tripled since this summer.)
I completed my workout by climbing back up the hill to my flat, detouring a block to the west to Castro Street so that I could 1. take a look at the window at Ixia (stunning floral/vegetable/plant matter designs. Click on that link!), 2. eat a milk chocolate with macadamia nut cookie at Hot Cookie and 3. be faced with a somewhat easier grade on the return trip.
For supper, I baked a sweet potato and a red onion, surmounting the sweet potato with a generous ladle of Wolf Brand Chili from Texas and the onion with a couple of tablespoons of quark. Before you recoil in horror, I have to tell you that the piquancy of the chili and the sourness of the quark cut the sweetness of the sweet potato and onion, producing really fine flavor combinations.
As an evening constitutional, I climbed over the top of Dolores Heights on 21st Street and then down between Sanchez and Church to a house that has for many years been spectacularly decorated and more recently has featured a Santa. The street was thronged with cars and a crowd of pedestrians gasping both in delight and from having climbed the hill. And sure enough, Santa was there, being photographed with various persons, mostly of the quite short variety. I expressed my appreciation of the decorations by giving him a jar of the chocolate sauce, the act delighting both him and the crowd as folks were unaccustomed to seeing someone giving Santa a present.
I returned home feeling quite good about the world.