jf jf

-Nurse quote: "Your arm's just a little sensitive."-

Well, dreamt I was visiting the royal family, and that they lived in Southern California. Pause, pause.

Yesterday was one of those days where I set out to have a bad day. Ever had one of those? My arms were very sore and a tiny bit swollen (especially random PPD). It was hot out, this now being insane-summer-of-Great Domesticated Desert of Doom^TM. Furthermore, some people I know were going to drag me out to look at cell phones. Whoopee-doo. Oh, and I was finally going to have my PPD checked, so that was a small relief.

So anyway, we drive out first to the AT&T store (blame my family for choosing one of the worst carriers -- basing the decision on its rollover feature -- then locking the rest of us into it by means of free in-network calling) to look at phones. For a long time. I find out that since AT&T is sort of evil like that, the phones that I had initially thought I could live with lack the features that I want. On top of that, the iPhones are all missing, so I can't even play around with those while the others in the group look at phones for themselves. So my mood is getting more sour.

But ah, relief. The next stop is to be the hospital, to get the TB skin test read so I can stop worrying about coddling it (to prevent a false positive). So we drive up to the hospital, and two of us jump out while the rest look for parking. We waltz into the building... only to find that the injection clinic has just begun their lunch break. It does not escape my notice that we would have made it if we hadn't spent so much time at the phone store, and my mood darkens again. Also, my arms are hurting worse, to the point where I'm afraid someone will bump them and I'll fall to the floor or something.

Then, lunch. I have had a late breakfast, so food does not hold any particular appeal to me, especially at this point, where I just want to go HOME. But the rest of my group is hungry, so we drop by a nearby shopping center. One notices a restaurant named "King Cafe" that he thinks is interesting, so we go there. The place is empty -- dead empty, except for the staff. I head straight for a corner table and wedge myself into a good woe-me position. The rest of the group piles around me, and the menus are opened. I am still not hungry. They look over the lunch specials, one of which is a spicy mango-chicken dish. That sounds interesting, slightly. I might be induced to try a piece of it if someone else orders it. Finally, the owner comes over to ask for orders. One guy in the group asks what

Potato Beef - East meets West!

has in it. The waitress replies matter-of-factly: "potato beef". Hardly very informative, but it does make me grin just a tiny bit. Orders are taken; I get nothing, but figure that I can always split with someone if the urge to eat suddenly returns. The waitress does, however, kindly include a soup for me, even though there are only three entree orders. It is Hot & Sour soup, and very good.

There is a particular wonder to eating in an empty restaurant. One is that you can tell exactly when your food is cooking... and that the chef is singing to himself as he cooks. I am an absolute pushover for singing chefs; they never fail to make me smile in glee. So by the time the food comes out, I am feeling much improved, and I polish off a good third of my seatmate's utterly delicious Mongolian Beef. Why is it that hole-in-the-wall restaurants so frequently have such good eats?

We head to Costco next, since its website claimed that it had all the highest rated phones, if a smaller selection. We tromp to the mobile section, and the AT&T corner has precisely 5 models. However, to our surprise, one of the models is an $80 BlackBerry Pearl ($30 with a data plan). Now, I may be a pushover for singing chefs, but I'm even more of a pushover for geekery, so despite the fact that I hardly need a BlackBerry, this was cheering news.

More cheering news -- we stopped by the hospital again, and they were out of lunch break this time. My skin test was checked, and I test negative for TB. Not that I had any expectation of testing positive, but still, it was just another little good thing. Even better, now I don't have to worry about creating a false positive by irritating the spot.

And to top it all off, I found out that Amazon sells the newest Casio Pathfinder watch (which is solar, atomic, and water resistant to 200 m, with a barometer, altimeter, thermometer, tide graph, and moon phase tracker) for less than $300, which was a pleasant surprise.

I sure feel silly about my surliness yesterday morning, in retrospect. Funny how these sorts of days seem to always turn out like this. It's as if God decides that He's going to have fun dumping blessings on me anyway -- in spite of my ungratefulness.

Reality check. Yup, I am a pushover for more technology than I really need. But you never know! I might someday get stuck on a mountain, in the middle of the ocean, 200 meters underwater and need to know what phase the moon is in!