What a Feeling

I had a letter from Fred!  I knew that he and his family (and their house) had survived the hurricane because I received a letter from Compassion saying they were ok (that took several weeks to get), but this was the first letter from him.  Fred is 10 and I just love how matter-of-fact he is.

Dear Auntie Sykes.

Thank you for praying for me.  We had a typhoon here but we are OK.

That's it.  The rest of the letter is about his health, his likes, and asking if we have storms here.  But it was so good to hear from him directly.

It was a relatively quiet day.  I did my mother's laundry, and will return it to her tomorrow, with fingers crossed for success.

I also got some mail ready to send and when I went to get stamps out of the stamp drawer, I realized I owe the DMV a huge apology.  I had NOT, after all, left the paperwork in my purse and thrown it away.  I had carefully put it in the stamp drawer, where I would not lose it.  I feel pretty stupid, but since they were angry with the clerk who had waited on me, I guess I need to let them know that it was not her fault after all, but the fault of the person who thought she had lost her temporary license and who thought the clerk had not given her back the medical form.

I am going to contact Atria and see if there is somewhere with two bedrooms so I can move in with my mother!

The eye doctor had sent a note saying she would leave a duplicate form for me at the desk and even though I knew I now did not need it, I felt bad not picking it up, so Walt and I drove in to Sacramento to get it before we went to a show tonight.

There was a huge commotion at Kaiser, with a long line and a TV news truck there.  We weren't sure what was happening.  They were handing out forms to people in line and they were filling them out.  When I entered the building, I saw signs for a flu clinic so I figured that was what was so newsworthy.

I fought my way through the crowd and upstairs to the office, which was closed.  But there was a guy tidying up the office and I talked with him.   He looked for the form, but it wasn't there, so he went in search of it.

He came back and said the doctor was filling it out right then, so I confessed that I had found the original and that she didn't need to fill out another form.   He called her and told her not to worry about it. Thank God it will be a year before I see her again and maybe she will have forgotten by then what an idiot I am.

The Eye clinic is right by an opening where you can see what is going on downstairs and I took a not very good picture of the flu clinic.  This is the end of the line and from here it wends it way all through the building and out onto the street and halfway down the block.  Children were crying.  It was organized chaos.

We had 3 hours to kill before the start of Flashdance, the current touring Broadway show that I was reviewing.  We decided to go out to dinner and, since the Olive Garden is almost right across the street from Kaiser, we decided to go there.  This is the Olive Garden where my friend Kathy and I have been meeting for lunch almost every month for the past nearly 15 years.  I sent her a message saying Walt and I were there and it felt like I was cheating on her.

She and I always have the same thing--we both get the soup and salad combo.  She has minestrone and I have something called Zuppa de Toscana (which has sausage and kale in it, so Jeri would be proud of me) ... and the famous Olive Garden breadsticks, of course.  I sent her a second message, expressing amazement that there were things on the menu other than soup and salad.  We had roasted asparagus with balsamic vinegar, something called "risotto bites" and then we both had the prosciutto tortellini.  Everything delicious and all for $25 for the two of us.

The clientele is quite different at dinner.  Lunch is business types and ladies, like us, meeting for lunch.  Dinner was families.  Large families.  Large in girth, I mean.  A whole room of people looking like me and their children.  Lots of children, which we rarely see at lunch.

Also our complaint at lunch is that the wait staff hovers.   Every 5 minutes they are stopping by, interrupting our conversation to make sure things taste ok, and that we don't want anything else. This night there were so many customers, we hardy saw our waiter.  The ideal would be somewhere in the middle.

We got to the parking lot near the Sacramento Community Theater an hour and a half before the show was to start, so we sat in the car listening to "Says You" until time to see the show, which was very good. 

Stopped at a store en route home because the dogs were out of food and I didn't want to face hungry dogs and empty food container in the morning.  Now I'm going to watch The Daily Show and head off to bed, so I'll be all fresh to write the review in the morning.