Luci's been through a lot and has recently moved from her memory-filled ancestral house in Corte Madera, California, to her own trailer home in Sonoma. It's not a teeny type trailer. It's double width and in a nice residential area. She has a garden she's beginning work on. She's a fantastic artist -- painter, collage, and computer -- and is also delving into an astrology service.She's only just moved in, so we had to improvise a bit on sleeping arrangements. It's wonderful to stay with friends and just chill. She spent quite a bit of time looking at all my pics on the computer and the ones I brought from home. I gave her two -- a large one and a small one. She wrote poems for them.
We went out to dinner at a kind of spiffy restaurant. On the way, I saw the above vividly coloured truck and car. Luci thought I should take a pic.I ordered some fritatta and a glass of Pinot Noir, which I found out cost $12/glass after it had been poured. Luci was fairly livid about this, since it's one of her favorite restaurants she likes to take her friends to, and they hadn't posted the prices on the sign.
I had ordered at a Starbucks-type counter, so didn't necessarily expect that kind of spendy-ness. She complained to the manager (she is braver than I), who ended up giving us the rest of the bottle. It was good Sonoma Pinot Noir, not your rouge ordinaire.We sat for a while outside to have a puff -- they still allow cigarette smoking in front of a restaurant on the streets of Sonoma, much to my amazement. I took these pics of her. The result is what happens when I use "aperature preferred," without knowing how to take a pic in the dusk. She liked them though, and didn't want me to take another in better light, so there you go. They do have a certain charm (note the pumpkin).
We went back to her place to talk. I learned a lot about how she became a buddhist and student of Khyentse Rinpoche's (the elder, now reincarnated, whom she met in Nepal and held on her lap for a bit).
I slept well. The next day Luci had a lot of things planned. We had seen a store that we wanted to look into near the one with these old Chinese stools, which while cool, were none-the-less something like US$125 each.
I didn't buy the necklace I was looking at (I do have a rather large collection of my mom's jewelry that should do me for a lifetime), but I did get some pants, a skirt, a shirt, and a scarf, at great expense, but just in case I had to dress up for something.I did take a great pic of the wall in back of the store, which had a few tables in it and was all enclosed. Very New York I thought.
We didn't have time to go to the winery that Luci wanted to take me to -- I spent too much time being in consumer heaven. She had an appointment at 3 pm in Berkeley and I had promised Zeb's dad, Howard, that I'd be there around then, so we went back to her place to pack up and get ready.
I'm afraid I scared her cat -- what you get by trying to "herd cats" -- by rushing it to try and get it to head back into the trailer and not out the door. I'm not really a cat person and don't have a lot of empathy or maybe it's sympathy -- they seem to like me well enough, maybe it's that aloof quality. Luci is a cat mom, and it was kind of upsetting having to rush around to get ready while having to calm the cat. I asked to follow her out of town, which maybe wasn't a good idea as the traffic in California is not like it is in Nova Scotia. California motorists are almost always in a hurry to get "there," though Luci was very patient and waited for me at crucial turns.
As you can see, Luci also has a good sense of humour and was able to forgive me in the end. She has always been my very good friend. And, I hers.
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