I'm not sure what happened this weekend. For some reason I could hardly move off the couch Saturday. I think that is what happens when your body just has had enough, which might have been the result of all the travelling I was doing through different time zones, or the recovery from giardiasis, which was not easy. Or the week or hard labor. In any case I was thoroughly pooped. Plus we had some lesbian doulas over for dinner Thursday night, which was fun but after a day at work kind of saps the energy out of you. Then Friday went out to dinner in Marin. So Saturday was a kind of need for recharge. Then on Sunday it was off to the races again with dinner with Mike and his friend, who wanted to argue Israel politics with me. Luckily I let him have it good, and got him to admit that the so called Palestinians were Jordanians, treated far better as refugees than by Jordan.

Today, after work, I went on an exploratory mission to Montclair, which is a town in Oakland. I had my predjudices, but I thought I would see for myself. It is quite a nice place, with a lot of hills and fruit trees, and Craftsman homes, though Oakland Hills also has a lot of multimillion dollar mansions. There was room to expand because a few years ago there was a fire that destroyed quite a few homes.

Oakland is a little like South Africa, though it is more like Hollywood, in that the hills are pricey and the flat parts are blighted. I also had spent a bit of time in Berkley and grew to not like it, but at the end, I went to Rockridge, which is near Berkley but this time I really liked what I saw. In some ways I would prefer to live in the other Montclair, in New Jersey. But it wasn't bad, really.