• Velo Rouge Café. Memorial Day weekend. Summer. Cold weather.

I am sorry but the answer is not to wipe one’s hands on one’s pants. Nor is curtailing shower time by a collective minute or flushing every other time.

This nitpickiness is just another name for the defragmentation of means. On my end I am making the radical suggestion that it would do the world much good if each of us took another minute in the shower to think how to reach a decisive solution for this water shortage. Also, each of us would smell much nicer, ergo, it would be much more pleasant to sit together and work out a solution.

• 1PM. It’s a Grind. San José. Waiting for Y who is on a 4-hour interview(!) again I am undergoing the highly enjoyable experience of being abstained from going to pee due to uncanny apprehensions about leaving my computer and bag behind. I’m too lazy as well as too embarrassed to pack up just so I can go to the bathroom. Obviously, that would be major hassle and it would be ridiculous, who among the zillion other coffee-drinking, computer-gazing people around here exactly do I suspect of grabbing my computer? Well, I’m just being nitpicky about this. After all, I still have one kidney to spare; I’ll just wait until it bursts. Then I’ll go to the toilet.  
• I am working on refashioning my paper for the LSA Meeting in Denver, but I’m afraid I am not be in the best positions for doing that at the moment – I just corrected the first sentence in which I originally explained that at the moment I am weighting for Y. Well… I blame the cookies on the counter in front of me. I hope I’m not transforming my paper into a chocolate manifesto.
• It’s high time I got back to posting stuff. If I don’t, pretty soon I’d be losing my entire readership for lack of a reliable & contiguous news stream (can you use the term “readership” for an expected audience of one? I wonder).

Yesterday Y refused to take charge of the money collection when it came time to pay the bill. Megan eyed him for a moment, obviously in order to assess the nature of his refusal. Finally she offered her diagnosis. “How unjewish of you”, she told Y. To show that I am a good sport, as well as to take the sting out of it, I instantaneously retorted that “sure, a classic Jew would not only take charge of the money, but would happily expropriate both the fund and a fee for his trouble.

As we usually do, on our way home we discussed the notable aspects of the rendezvous. This was probably right around the 10^th incident which we brought up. We began by calling Megan a self-hating Jewess. Then we noted that she didn’t think of herself a Jew, unlike other people we met here whose father is Jewish whereas their mother is not. Then we clammed up. Thinking that worse than a self-hating jew is an anti-Semite, self-hating, half-jew, or simply, non-jew under the Halakha.

A few days later I come to the conclusion that some people here still have a sense of humor while we are starting to get accustomed to the Berkeleien, or rather the American brand of tight-ass tolerance. The one that only proves that the group is still weak or that it is becoming weak.

Obviously, Jews have been stung by a century long reputation of fiscal mania, and one can try and make fun of it, though hopefully, with better taste. This is not alarming. Alarming is calling a Jewish family in the film Two Lovers by the name of Creditor. Papa-Creditor was an illegal immigrant from Israel. Dark haired Creditor-cub has his heart set on a gentile blond-haired maiden. He is planning to make her a Creditor. Luckily, she sets him straight and he turns his affection where it rightly belongs – the family business. There I go again – losing my Jewish sense of humor.

• I finish writing this at the Velo Rouge Cafe' in Inner Richmond. Funny, again I need to pee.

Dear all,
 We're going to be away between June 10 and July 26th this summer,
and need to find someone to take care of our pets: two cats and
(possibly) two leopard gecko lizards.

    Ordinarily we'd find a house sitter, but it is likely we will need
to have the pets out of the house for this
period as well, so we're looking for someone  who can provide a
temporary home for the animals.

        The cats are very sweet and generally low maintenance except for
one thing: one of them  needs, every three days, a "subcutaneous injection" --
basically 150cc of iv drip.  It's very easy to do, painless for him,
and takes about 5 minutes.

     The lizards (quite cute also, in their own way) are also pretty
easy.  They basically need to get fed some live crickets every other
day.  The slightly
more complicated thing is that one has to go to the East Bay Vivarium
on 5th Street
every other week or so to buy 100 new crickets.

   We were thinking that $300 would be an appropriate and attractive
amount for the cat care, with an upward adjustment for the lizards,
plus expenses/supplies provided, etc.  If you were uncomfortable with
the iv procedure, we could have someone come in to do that, but would
adjust downward.

      Please let me know if you are interested in this - and feel free to
pass this on to someone who might be.  Thanks!