It's Thursday. This means comics day; I've started making weekly pilgrimages to Lee's again now that Gretchen has started working at a company at the other end of the business complex I'm in. Now that Brad and Gretchen have bought a house and moved to Santa Cruz I see Gretchen weekly, whereas before I saw her about once every six months. There is irony here.

Speaking of the house -- Jim and I went to Santa Cruz on Saturday to visit the boardwalk and then see the house and have dinner. We parked by the beach and walked along it for a long ways, watching the tide come in and getting our toes wet and giggling at the various kids running in and out of the water. In order to get from the beach to the boardwalk we had to wade the river. From on top of the cliff it looked like the mouth of the river was shallow enough that one could do this without getting more than ankle-deep. Not so, as it turned out; we got quite, quite wet. Once on the boardwalk though the sun was strong enough that we dried reasonably fast, plus it was warm so I didn't mind being wet much at all.

Buying tickets for the boardwalk we ended up getting season passes, which was funny since neither of us had been there before. But it was the best deal if we planned on going more than once, and with the boardwalk open through December it seemed definite that we'd want to come back. So now we have season passes, and we did have enough fun we'll be going back. We went on the Giant Dipper twice (this is the big 75-year-old wooden roller coaster), and on the metal coaster once (I didn't like it much), and on the log ride (which was wonderful) and a few others. Next time we go I'll probably play laser tag, which I used to do a lot during junior high -- we had a Photon arena in Oklahoma City -- and I'd like to see how the boardwalk laser tag compares.

After we were completely worn out by the sun and ocean and crowds we walked across the railroad bridge and to our car, and went to Brad and Gretchen's. We got a little lost with one-way streets and map misreadings, but finally found it. Their new house is beautiful; it's 110 years old, a Victorian with tall ceilings and dark redwood floors and incredible changing light and lots of space, since they don't have nearly enough stuff to fill up this huge house. I was stunned and nicely jealous, and Jim was impressed enough he actually started talking about moving to Santa Cruz, although I don't think that's going to happen until we have so much money he can stay home and only have to drive the 17 once a month or so.

After a lot of house-admiration and garden-admiration we walked down to Pearl Alley Bistro, which has been one of my favourite restaurants since Bryant took me there during my first few weeks in California. I've only been there about five times because it's so far away and usually crowded, but every time has been spectacular. Their menu changes monthly; this time it was 'food from the Aegean Sea: Greece, Turkey, and Crete'. We had a ton of appetizers, including an amazing carmelized onion tart, nice roaster garlic, a tri-colour vegetable flan (spinach, beet, and carrot -- it was really neat to look at), and an artichoke and coriander tapenade with green olive bread to spread it on. This probably sounds like an insane amount of food, but the portions are the right size for sharing a lot of variety, and Gretchen and I shared an entree (swordfish wrapped in grape leaves -- light and sour and delicious), so we could get more appetizers and first courses. I could go on about the meal forever, but I'll limit the rest of my raving to a description of one of the first courses -- cakes of pistachio, dates, and barley, crumbly and rich and smothered in sour cherries. It blew me away; I kept saying I was done and then taking a little more, which made Brad laugh.

After dinner we walked around downtown, stopping in Bookshop Santa Cruz where I found a bunch of YA stuff, including a recent printing of Magic Elizabeth, an absolutely beautiful book that I first read when I was about six. I reread it as soon as we got that home that night, and it held up really well -- the story was still good, the characters still real, and the writing so evocative of times past (the 1890's, the 1960's) that it almost hurt. Plus I had that fascinating experience of reading something for the first time in fifteen years, and finding origins for images and phrases ('a shiver of sound from the melodeon') that I've known for so long I'd quit thinking about where they came from.

After the bookstore we went back to Brad and Gretchen's long enough to admire the house one last time, and then zoomed home. I enjoyed driving the 17 muchly, which is sort of a new thing; usually it scares me silly. It's really good to be able to enjoy things that used to terrify me.