Today was a lovely day, although I began it very grumpy indeed from staying up too late last night and being awakened by a massive garbage removal truck at 7:30 AM. G and I got in our exercise duds and drove over to Santa Monica. It was a beautiful, eautiful day and the cool breeze off the ocean was heavenly. We had a nice long walk up from Main Street, which is a lovely old historic section with nice little shops and bars and things, to the 3d Street Promenade which is a pedestrian mall sort of affair and very well done. There was nothing like this here when I first visited Santa Monica something like 15-20 years ago. Santa Monica is where we want to live for sure, once the need to be proximate to my school is past -- I have never wanted to live somewhere more than I want to live over there.

Anyway, we took a long, brisk walk up the beach walkway to the Promenade and I unsuccessfully looked for a book in the Borders there, and then we took a leisurely walk back to Main Street, hit a bagel shop and a coffee roasters for Sunday paper reading/Sunday breakfast supplies, then had a delicious breakfast at a lovely old-fashioned place called the Omelette Parlor; G had a waffle and I had a sausage, tomato and mozzarella omelette. We enjoyed all this so much. More than once we said, "THIS is why we live here," and apart from the purely practical considerations, it really is.

Stopped at a Tibetan store I've been wanting to visit, and then I dropped G off at home, hit a local Borders where I found my book, which promises to be an interesting read. Then hit the Best Buy for a new hard drive for the media server, came home, took a much needed and insanely refreshing shower.

G and I walked down Hollywood Boulevard, which I love doing at night -- the lights! the neon! the freaks! -- to dine at Miceli's, a classic old-school 1940's Italian restaurant. The whole bit, wicker Chianti bottles, plastic red-checked tablecloths, a guy singing Sinatra at the piano bar. One of my favorite kinds of restaurants. Had a light ravioli dish, and then we went to see Jonathan Demme's update of The Manchurian Candidate, which I found to be a very enjoyable rejiggering of the themes and plot of the original. It lacks the dramatic, stark, almost expressionist visual style and has nothing like the flashy "garden party" sequence in the original. Although Meryl Streep is excellent in it, I rather preferred Angela Lansbury's marvelous and unexpectedly jarring performance in the same role in the original. But they are two very different films.

Then we walked back home and I am trying to ignore the horrible movie G is watching because there's only boring Olympic action and none of the stuff we're actually interested in on right now.

Backtracking: Friday

Watched Bergman's Wild Strawberries yesterday afternoon, a wonderfully, emotionally complex film. Last night we went off to the lovely Library Alehouse in Santa Monica for dinner, and stopped off at a pub for a pint, swung back home and watched the Olympic opening ceremonies -- thoroughly enjoyed watching them on HDTV, not least due to the fact that the HD feed did not feature the absolutely nauseatingly puerile and nearly-constant commentary by Bob Costas and Katie Couric. Both of these idiots really need to have their mouths filled with concrete and sewn shut with piano wire. Here was this beautiful staged and excuted performance piece, and instead of occasionally adding an illuminating remark here and there, they were constantly barraging the audience with trivia or, worse, really stupid, infantile jokes. For example, when Bjork was singing (well, lip-synching) her song about the sea and her "dress" billowed out to cover the assembled athletes, the two of them just would not shut up for a second. "I'd hate to see the dry cleaning bill on that bad boy!" said Costas. Similarly asinine remarks, which might be OK if he were doing play-by-play for a bowling tournament, poured out of his mouth like a river of liquid turds. In other words, here is an artistic performance piece which Lord knows how many people have slaved over, being executed to near-perfection, and it's treated by these two twinkies as if it were the Macy's parade. G was so hostile about it she charged off to her computer to email a vicious and contemptuous and nonetheless richly-deserved letter of complaint to NBC.

With relief we realized the HDTV feed was delayed and featured two commentators who largely limited their remarks to unobtrusive and illuminating observations on the cultural or artistic or athletic significance of the unfolding event, and coupled with the crystal-clear HDTV picture and 5.1 surround sound it was much more pleasant viewing and also featured about 967 fewer commercials.

G went to bed and I played Xbox for a while. Before going to bed I took a quick look at the media PC, which we have been copying all of our CDs into, and found that despite Microsoft's optimistic apparaisal of Windows Media Player's ability to compress audio, the hard drive was almost completely full. So I ended up staying up until almost 4:30 evaluating options, which ultimately boiled down to needing a new, larger hard drive, and observing Jupiter, I think, which was burning so brightly in the northern sky at that hour that I could not believe it.