a dry catalog of the things I did over the last few days

Thursday night, I met up with Quinn and Ryan and finally saw Mike Hauer again. We all met at the Fillmore Vig, a new Vig location a bit north of downtown by Cibo. Really cool place. Nice outdoor patio. I ordered "the last word" a kind of prohibition-era gin martini. Not bad, not bad. Of course, it started to rain while I was there. It would rain for the next two days.

Friday, we picked up mom for lunch and went to The Arrogant Butcher in the CityScape complex. Not bad, but personally I thought the interior design was better than the food. That night, we ordered pizza and watched mom's favorite show, Project Runway. 

Saturday we ran errands. The library, Sprouts, a few other places. That night, we watched a string of Dr.Who specials culminating in the 50th anniversary Dr.Who special, which was inexplicable, inconsistent, but nonetheless interesting and watchable. I am a sucker for John Hurt. 

Today I made eggs for breakfast and we all looked at the gloomy overcast weather outside. We ran to BevMo for more wine and beers, and then the grocery store for Thanksgiving staples. After we got back, I went hiking back into the mountains, three hours of strenuous fast hiking up to the peaks in the Guadalupe range. The feel of the mountain was different after all the rain. There were standing puddles still in the hollows of the rocks, and a few boulder rock falls had water trickling down the face of the stone. The ocotillos had not unfurled their precious leaves, but their stems were swollen, green, and splitting the skins from all the water they had recently sucked up. 

Sausages for dinner and more refrigerator cleaning. Mom gave me her old netbook she didn't use much in Law School so I'm replacing my old netbook I picked up before I moved to St. Louis. The battery won't hold a charge on it, and it is incredibly slow. This netbook is actually probably slower than my Nexus tablet, but there's still some things I can't do in the tablet. (view some websites, add attachments to emails, download and organize photos from my camera card, for example). 

I'm 20% through the Wiliam Shrier book Rise and Fall of the Third Riech. It's of the most appalling books I've read in a long time. Fundamentally, is the story of an organizational and branding genius playing and drawing out unsavory and deep-seated cultural aspects of German peoples and long-standing institutions. How could Nazism have happened? The absolute moral horror, the scientific absurdity, the individual prostitution of some of the great minds of Germany like Heidegger. It's a complicated and disturbing answer.