AudreyPodrey.com

I left Raleigh last Thursday morning.  The trees were still colorful, and the temperature wavered between warm and cool.

I returned late Tuesday night.  When the sun rose Wednesday morning and i went out to face the day, i found myself looking at an entire yard and driveway full of leaves.  The Japanese Maple in the front yard, which just a week before had been a vibrant red, is now mostly bare, with the leaves on the ground having turned to a dull rust.  And everywhere i looked, on the drive to work, the world looked just a little bit bleaker.

(i suppose the bleakness might have been at least partially ascribed to the fact that i was returning to work after nearly a week of vacation.)

We hit Mel’s Diner for breakfast again on sunday. I learned that you shouldn’t order biscuits & gravy from a restaurant that isn’t in The South. They just can’t do it right. We had a fun day of bridge, and while we didn’t score well, we encountered some interesting bidding, play and defensive problems. Solving those problems is what’s so addictive about bridge. It’s like logic puzzles or crossword puzzles or Sudoku… it keeps us coming back.

Monday was action-packed. We got up for a quick lunch at Mel’s before we walked to AT&T Park for the morning tour of the Giants’ stadium. That was pretty damn cool. Sitting up top in the “cheap seats” was by far the best - the view over the bay was gorgeous. I could understand being more passionate about baseball if i got to go to a stadium like that all the time and root for a major league team.

Back to the hotel, where we were picked up by a limo. Not the stretch kind, but a big black car with extra legroom and a driver wearing a tuxedo. (-: There was champagne and roses and much door-opening. I’ve never felt so pampered. I also felt a little ridiculous - i mean, i can open my own door! It was an extravagance, to be sure. Anyway, Jack drove us all over: along the shoreline, to the base of the Golden Gate Bridge, down the Crookedest Street in the World… and was good-natured enough to take pictures of us at the many stops we made in picturesque places.

Jack dropped us off at Fisherman’s Wharf, Pier 39, where we ate lunch, went to visit the sea lions, and toured the Aquarium. The two main features are the underground tunnels with the sealife all around you, and the “petting pools” where you can touch sharks, rays, starfish and other marine life. Very neat.

We caught a cab back to our hotel, and then decided to play in the 7:30 bridge game, as if we hadn’t done enough already. Had a great game that night, and ended our bridge tournament on a good note.

Friday we slept in and then walked around downtown until we found a place to eat. We found a place called ‘Wich Craft which was pretty cute. They used the apostrophe as their logo. Very good lemonade.

We then went back to the tournament playing site and entered the Life Master Pairs event. It’s one of the “premier” events held at national tournaments, and winning this actually means something. Lots and lots of good players, many of whom are professional bridge players, entered this event. It’s four sessions long, spanning over two days, so you have to string four good games of bridge together. 360 pairs, total. Half are eliminated after the first day.

Well, we had a great start - our first two sessions placed us 25th going into the second day! A very respectable showing, and when we went to bed, we were hopeful that we would be able to finish strong, maybe again in the top 25.

Saturday morning we got up and found a traditional breakfast place called Mel’s Drive-In. It has a cute 50s theme with a jukebox that was playing fun old songs all the time. It was very crowded, so we accepted a place at the counter. The orange-juice i ordered was freshly squeezed - it was so good. I have had the freshly squeezed stuff before, but the oranges they squeezed this particular juice out of must have been super perfectly ripe, because i have never had orange juice that tasted more like a delicious orange.

Back at the playing site, we started sessions 3 & 4. Unfortunately, we didn’t do as well. We made a few mistakes, but most of it was just bad luck. In the wrong place at the wrong time, and the opponents were in the right place at the right times. So, the dream of doing well in a big premier event vanished. But we had fun. We played against several people who have written bridge books that we own - pretty neat.

I’m slowly adjusting to west coast time - still pretty tired at night as it gets past my biological bedtime. I hear that the adjustment back to east coast time is harder.

Well, we arrived in San Francisco just fine last night around 5. We were a little bit rushed, as we wanted to play bridge at 7:30, but we also had to wait for luggage, get to the city, EAT (no real food all day), find the partnership desk to get a team for the first bridge knockout event, and check-in at our hotel.

We managed to do all this with minutes to spare. The hotel was the most interesting. It’s obviously a very old building, with very narrow hallways and staircases. We upgraded to a room with our own bathroom (apparently it is fairly common in San Francisco for the non-chain hotels to have shared baths), and went up the old-fashioned elevator and through some more narrow hallways to our room. TINY! Probably about the size of our smallest bedroom. 12×12 maybe? It looked bigger than it is because of the big, huge, tall ceiling. Everything was customized to fit in a small space - there is a TV, but it’s mounted on one corner of the foot of the bed. The sink is in the corner of the room instead of the bathroom, and there’s hardly counter space for you to put your deoderant, much less all the “junk” that i require. But it’s cozy. And the bed and sheets and pillows are super nice - last night i felt like i was sleeping on a cloud. The staff is quite friendly, too.

No internet at the hotel, but i’m sitting in the coffee house 3 doors down and that’s just fine with me.

The weather here is awesome. It must have been 55 degrees when i first went outside at 8:30. I think it’s constantly 50-60 degrees here. I love it!

I’ve been looking forward to this trip for months — The San Francisco North American Bridge Championships. It is one of three big national bridge tournaments held each year. Each one is in a different place, and i’ve had my eye on the San Francisco one for YEARS. I didn’t think it would be affordable to come here, but thanks to my friend orbitz, we found a super affordable flight+hotel combination.

And so, here we are, sitting in the Atlanta airport. Where we will be for the next 3.5 hours. I didn’t choose to have a 4-hour layover; i chose a very nice itinerary with minimal time wasted in airports. However, my friend orbitz shafted me on this one and changed my itinerary 36 hours before the trip. What can i say - still well worth the hassle for the cost.

We’ll play bridge for 3 or 4 days and do touristy stuff for 1-2 days, then spend another entire day flying back to Raleigh. I am SO looking forward to it!

At the first meeting of my new book club, someone brought up the subject of reading multiple books at once.  I do this all the time, and if the women in my book club are a representative sample, this is pretty rare. The ones who have tried it say they frequently confuse the story lines of different books or forget what was happening.

I can’t explain why this doesn’t happen to me - i’ll often be reading several books at once.  Often there will be one or two non-fiction books mixed in, and i think story lines are less of a problem there.  But i have no problem compartmentalizing the different books.

Lance also reads several books at once.  For example, on our San Francisco trip this week, we have brought a total of nine books and two magazines.  For 6 days. we have a carry-on bag that is just for the books.  For your amusement, here are the titles:

title, author - who packed it, fiction or non-fiction, subject
Irish Born, Nora Roberts - audrey, F, don’t know yet
Professional No-Limit Hold ‘Em, Matt Flynn et. al. - lance, NF, poker
Defend These Hands WIth Me, Julian Pottage - audrey, NF, bridge
Play Bridge With Reese, Terrence Reese - audrey, NF, bridge
Creating Money, Sanaya Roman - lance, NF, economics
Common Sense Economics, James Gwartney et. al. - lance, NF, economics
Inferences at Bridge, Marshall Miles - lance, NF, bridge
Play These Hands With Me, Terrence Reese- lance, NF, bridge
The Bridge World, November - audrey, NF, bridge
The Bridge World, December - lance, NF, bridge
Sudoku 2, Michael Mepham - audrey, NF, puzzles

Lance almost never reads fiction. I prefer fiction, and it’s pretty odd that i only have one fiction book with me.  But then again, it’s really three books in one, it’s huge, and i haven’t started it yet, so it ought to keep me occupied.

I love books!

Ever since i left the protected place in my parents’ home, i have been greeted with a certain bit of incredulity whenever the subject of Muppets comes up. “You don’t like the Muppets?!?” people exclaim in dismay. It’s not that i don’t like them, i just never got much exposure to them. So i don’t really “get” it - i don’t have the happy associations with childhood that other people do.

We Netflixed (isn’t it interesting how that is becoming a word, the same way “google” has become a word) a DVD of the Muppet TV show this summer, and i REALLY didn’t get it then. It was mildly entertaining, but not something where i would want to watch the entire series.

The Muppet Movie is showing at the Colony Theater for the holidays, so, on Thanksgiving Eve, we went to see it. I actually liked it! What a good story. And i really liked some of the songs, especially the “Rainbow Connection”. So, i think i’m a muppet convert now. I will never have the childhood associations, but i can appreciate them a lot better now.

Good movie.

Lars and the Real Girl is currently showing at the Galaxy Cinema.  I love these Indie film places, and i have yet to see a bad movie at one of them.

Lars and the Real Girl is beautifully and delightfully bizarre.  Who came up with such an idea??  The premise is that an awkward and shy introvert in a small town orders himself a life-size woman doll named Bianca, and believes that she is real.  We learn that his delusion is how he is dealing with certain things in his past and his present.

The film is quite funny in parts, although it’s definitely more drama than comedy.  The characters were so real and normal, not your normal flashy cliches.  For example, the main female character is pregnant.  But instead of being wrapped up in herself and her baby and baby “things” (typical for any movie involving a pregnant woman), she is compassionate and worried about her brother-in-law.  All the characters are like that - REAL.  Combine that with fantastic acting (Ryan Gosling was very good) and a very well-written script and you have one excellent movie.

What is especially heart-warming is how the town rallies around him and supports  him.  Bianca gets a job, volunteers at the hospital and at the library, and has friends of her own.  The interaction of the town with Bianca is one of the great points of the movie.

I loved it and highly recommend this unusual but truly enjoyable film.

It is so beautiful outside right now.  I just noticed it the other day, and i’m enjoying it as much as i can, because i know that it won’t be long, maybe a week, before the leaves all fall and we are left with bleak instead of beautiful.  Already some of the colors have lost some of their vibrance.

Yesterday i was walking to my car and a brisk wind blew by, sending a cascading of leaves all around me.  The sun was peeking out behind the heavy clouds in the late afternoon, giving everything a weird color.  It was as if the world was a big box and someone had just opened the lid for a moment.  In that brief moment, as the leaves whirled all around me, i was a girl again, delighted by the simple wondrousness of nature.

The Almost Moon was the first book chosen by a newly formed book club, made up mostly of ladies i know from work, with a few additional friends mixed in.  I had no idea what this book would be about.  I loved The Lovely Bones, also by Alice Sebold, so i was looking forward to this book.  That is, until i started reading it.

The Almost Moon is an exploration of insanity.  The first line of the book, “When all is said and done, killing my mother came easily,” draws you in, and you think the main character, 50-year old Helen, is the one who is insane.  Quickly, you learn it is her mother who has been mentally ill for her daughter’s entire existence.  Through many flashbacks and memories, you learn what it was like to live with a parent who is crazy, and what kinds of effects it had on this character.

But wait!  Then you discover that, in fact, her father was also crazy!  and that has profoundly affected her as well.

How to describe it?  I did not particularly like it, although it was definitely interesting.  It left me depressed at times, and i was increasingly annoyed at the main character’s bizarre behavior.  I can tell it was very good writing because of how i reacted, but i did not like it.  I would also say i did not get emotionally involved in the book as i could not identify with any of the characters.  And thus when the book ended with a sort of cliffhanger, i was only briefly annoyed that the end wasn’t tied up neatly, and then i promptly moved on with my life.

All in all, it was pretty dark, and not a very enjoyable read.  I can’t say that i recommend it.  But it was interesting, and i’m not sorry to have experienced it.