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September 3, 2000 |
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I had gone in to work for a while today, especially since I didn't go back
to work after yesterday's episode.
I talked to Pam during the day. Along with
remisniscing about last night's activities, she also asked if I was coming
to her place for dinner. Her mom was making spaghetti and she invited me
to join them for dinner… to which I happily agreed. I asked if I
should bring anything, and she replied that I didn't.
I arrived at her place shortly after 7pm, which is the time we agreed on. It was very nice. She had been stewing the sauce for a while and it had smoked Italian sausage. It smelled simply wonderful. We started off with the salads. I had honey mustard dressing on mine, although truth be told it tasted more like vinegar than either honey or mustard. The salads contained romaine lettuce, which is good, but I prefer iceberg lettuce. I know that romaine lettuce is better for you, but it is just leaves with little flavor, which is generally what lettuce is anyway. However, iceberg lettuce does add texture to a salad, which I think is important.
But let's not get carried away with the entire lettuce discussion shall we?
I helped Pam boil the spaghetti. She likes spaghetti, she keeps it on her counter. I suggested that she may want to add a little oil to the boiling water to prevent the noodles from sticking together, but she finds that this causes the sauce to not stick to the noodles as well. I'm not sure if I have made the same observation, but she is the one cooking. I'm just there for emotional support.
Dinner was very good. We had a couple of loaves of garlic bread that, although tasted wonderful, had been toasted to the point that they were very difficult to separate. Naturally, I was the first to rip off a piece and was trying to separate the slices while continuing the conversation and acting nonchalantly. I felt a little like the dinner guest who has his wine glass glued to the table.
We never talked about the movie we skipped last night in lieu of the hotel room. Thank goodness they didn't ask.
Immediately after dinner, Pam and I went to Lowe's, formerly Eagle hardware. She had gotten a number of things the day before at IKEA, which she now needed to install. As much as I like IKEA, some of their products are a little lacking in equipment. For instance, we were going to buy mounting screws because the nifty towel rack that she had picked up did not include them. Little things like that irritate me… Earthquakes. They irritate me too.
Once we were at Lowe's we picked up a number of things. She had found that the showerhead that she had picked up a couple of days before was still not satisfactory. Upon closer observation, it didn't lack the pressure, it was simply mounted too high. Other showerheads would have the same problem, the only real solution was to get one of those handheld massager showerheads and a separate mount. Okay, that's not true, that wasn't the only solution, but I wasn't about to redo the pipes at her apartment simply to relocate her showerhead. Besides, these type of showerheads allegedly have a certain appeal to women, and I was curious as to the allegations.
We got a number of other things from our list, among them: a new mop head, mounting screws, and a floor fan that she saw on our way out. It was $15, you can't really argue with that price. I suppose it is a matter of summer being over and the typical, wonderful Seattle weather returning. Not that I'm complaining, not at all.
Once we got back to her place, she though we might skip it doing the miscellaneous repairs. I told her it would only take a few minutes… changing the showerhead would only take ten minutes and similarly on assembling the fan. She didn't believe me… I had been challenged.
It took me precisely ten minutes to replace the showerhead. It only took me seven minutes to put together the fan; though there was one caveat. I missed one mounting screw, it only took me one minute to re-assemble it correctly, but I noticed it way passed the original ten minute limit.
I wasn't up until later that I realized that I might have overstepped some boundary. Her father is very protective of her and enjoys doing little tasks for her. Maybe by my doing so many things around her place he felt like his importance was deminishing and he started to feel a bit out of sorts.
I suppose it is their relationship, and I can only go by what they tell me. I'm sure some common sense was in order, so I tried to keep a relatively low profile as I went around accomplishing these tasks.
Lastly we put a tape in the VCR and watched a movie I brought. It was The Princess Bride, which is incidentally one of my favorite moview. Her parents went to sleep shortly after the movie started. Pam and I stayed up for a while. I had finished the movie; naturally, she didn't. She still liked the few parts that he saw. I went home after the movie to catch my beauty sleep.
September 3, 2000