Well, my honey is gone. Not gone really, since our separation is not in the marriage break up style, and she's not dead or anything, but it still seems pretty bad all the same. She just went off to the East Coast. I still have her rib in the fridge, which is nice, but not nearly the same as having her around. But it sure is quiet around here all of a sudden.

Anyway, I haven't reported many of the mundane details lately, mostly because up until her departure, I kind of had my hands full. So now I can tell you all about some of the goings on around here. Let's see, first things first. Nineteen feet of snow fell in the region about three hours drive from here. Which is an awful lot of snow. Down here, which is a much lower elevation, it just rained, though it did rain in a pretty serious way. But up there, people got stuck in their cars for periods of around 13 hours at a clip, and they closed Donner Pass, which is the famous place where frontier people starved and wound up eating one another.

Besides that, I had a lovely little visit from Courtney, who is a very kind person indeed, and we ate a dinner which I was sort of resentful of, both because it was pricey, but also because they don't make menu substitutions, and there was only one thing on the menu I could eat, and it was full of cream and ricotta, which annoys me.

Speaking of eating out, right before she left, Mark took me and the wife out to a place called the Cheesecake Factory. I had heard of this place, beacuse a person told me that it was a good restaurant in SF. At the time, I didn't know any better, but one day on the news, I heard Kobe Bryant, after his arrest, was in Florida eating lunch at a Cheesecake Factory, and then I deduced that this was a horrific chain restaurant, located in malls accross america.

Which it is, though it is in upscale malls with Nordstroms where they sell shoes that cost 400 dollars, not just greasy foodcourt malls. So after I tried on a pair of 400 dollar shoes in Nordstroms, we went next door and ate at the Cheesecake Factory. Which, for mall food, was good, though if you ranked it against just any old food, it was mostly like the kind of food one might eat ina restaurant where one never intended to return. Which I won't. Return, I mean. I found out at the end of the meal that their claim to fame is portion size, which is big for the food but colossal for the cheesecake, which we dutifully ordered and ate.