This morning I dreamed a whole series of excruciating puns based on Broadway standards. Thanks to the dream-cdent and dream-inpetto for making me laugh so hard I woke myself up.

The salt pond that's immediately outside our building is almost entirely dry now. It's still reddish, but it's beginning to sparkle. I love this crazy landscape.

Spam subject of the day: "You can be ugly and stupid if your shaft is up."

I failed to mention earlier that once again I'm taking two classes. I should have known better. I'm not managing it all very well; I've been up till 1:30 most nights, and I'm a little sluggish and literal-minded. The continued eye prescription delay hasn't helped with the sluggery and literal-mindedness. I'm still wearing the ancient glasses, duct-taped for stability. It's a damn good duct tape repair if I do say so myself, but it was never intended to last this long. Latest ETA is Tuesday. I'm skeptical.

The vegetable supply has been on an avalanche-like scale lately. It occurred to me that it'd easier to deal with then if I got a mandoline, so I did. (No relation to the Verlaine poem, of which I'll sing Fauré's setting by way of proof. See? Shredded vegetables right here, "Les donneurs de sérénades et les belles écouteuses"* over there.) Now things slice up neatly into bowls. Seriously, it's a big help. Because I value my fingertips I also got the KEVLAR GLOVE.

Sam's moved out. His place isn't in good enough shape to show, so Scott the elder and his girlfriend(!) Sherry (who incidentally is also the second of his three ex-wives(!)) have hired some people to help fix it up. It's looking nicer every day. If it had a bathtub I'd suck up the difference and move there myself, but -- fireplace niche and private courtyards notwithstanding -- I'm not going to fork over several hundred dollars extra every month for a place where I still can't take a bath.

The 4th itself couldn't have been nicer: various excursions up around the hills with jkonrath and Sarah and Crosbie, gazing at overlooks across the entire bay, squiggling through redwoods, etc., culminating in a picnic on the coast at San Gregorio. Not sure what's in the works this weekend, other than meeting up at Coupa with Alec and Denise on Saturday afternoon, plus the inevitable rounds of homework and cooking and laundry.

*"Echangent des propos fades
Sous les ramures chanteuses!"

Pizza places sell sides of squid rings. How great is that? A 4-topping medium pizza and a side of squid rings came to US$12.25 tonight, tax included (as it nearly always is in posted prices). In general, there is a much smaller premium for eating out in NZ than in the US (relative to cooking at home). In order to clue in to this, one has to remember that there's never any tipping or extra tax on the bill.