Mmmmm tired

So what do I do with an "unscheduled" weekend? Let's see. Saturday: slept in until 10am or so, then cooked a nice complex breakfast. (Reason #37 I want a girlfriend: so I can have someone else enjoy my weekend breakfast cooking, too.) Mid-afternoon, off to go furniture window-shopping in consignment stores with scotica, culminating in her buying a nice oak "lawyer's bookcase" that she'd had her eye on for some weeks. (Since I had the Element there, she actually had a way of getting it home.) Then off to a new (to us) sushi place in Palo Alto: Fuki Sushi. Really excellent food. We sat at the bar and stuck to nigiri, asking the chef to give us whatever he thought was good. (We had to persuade him that we really did mean "whatever".)

Sunday, it was up at workday hours to take the bike on BART to Orinda where I met up with thread_walker and a couple other friends of hers to take Bear Creek Road up around Briones Park, ending up in Concord. Gorgeous ride! Two significant hills and several milder ones. Great scenery. Road-kill count included a couple of long-dead deer and a much fresher turkey vulture, plus many assorted squirrels and a large lizard. I ended up very tired but not even close to exhausted. Sometime around when we were coming into Concord my cell phone rang so after I peeled off to do some shopping at Fry's (printer ink and looking for a bicycle mount for the GPS with no success) I returned the call and it turned out to be cryptocosm following up on my idea of commissioning him to build the camping-gear/sleeping platform for the back of the Element. Since he was calling from Sacramento, I figured I'd be home by the time he got there, but what with Fry's, taking the time to have breakfast (ok, I guess it was lunch by then), then getting off BART at Rockridge to do the grocery shopping on my way home, he actually got to my place before me.

So we have a design for my platform and the various lumber and hardware acquired. My job is to try to locate a neighbor with a table saw to make cutting the plywood topper a bit easier, then he'll come over some day in the near future to do the construction. I'll post pictures when it's finished -- that'll be easier than trying to describe the thing. The basic idea is to have a removeable framework that supports a sleeping platform, with space for gear storage underneath. The innovation is that the platform will compress sideways when not being slept on to allow a little less than half the rear of the vehicle to be open when desired. (For, e.g., convenience when dressing, and for the ability to transport, e.g., my bicycle inside the vehicle.)

And now I get to collapse and vegetate for the rest of the evening.