Friday night I met Dave's mom, Cris, and sister, Jessica, at Palomino for dinner. It was pleasant enough I suppose, but I am more quiet in the recent stress and I was aware that when an extrovert shuts down, a gathering sits in much more silence than usual. Cris is usually quite talkative herself, however, which was not the case on this night. Two extroverts, usually vying for airtime, sitting quietly, meant a lot more silence - uncomfortable silence even. Food was fine but we didn't have the world's best tiramisu because Cris said she didn't like it! Could there be such a creature?

We left there, (me unsatisfied at having entered the restaurant without eating my favorite dessert), for a movie: Meet Joe Black. He's not worth meeting, trust me. However, if death looked like that.... Eye candy for three hours, even if the acting was poor, the dialogue sappy and reeking with the usual social mores around love, living, and dying. It was all very sickening. As beautiful as he is (those lips and eyes!), Brad's hair was bleached too blonde and his bangs were so long that they kept getting caught in his blinking.

After the movie I learned that Cris had assumed the tiramisu at Palomino was like other tiramisus, and it is those she doesn't like. In fact, neither she nor Jessica had even tried tiramisu at Palomino! Of course, we returned to the restaurant to finish the experience properly. They were not disappointed, but not overly enthusiastic either, which was par for the evening I guess.

Besides that, I worked hard this weekend toward completing all these unfinished things I'm juggling. Home is not a place where I can focus, so I left early Saturday morning for a café, staying for several hours. The problem with going to a café to work is there's no where to go to take a break. A walk around the block, I guess. Still, the fun part of breaking is getting to eat and that was out since I'd been snacking the whole time I'd been working. So I read a little. Napped awhile at home. Read email. All those little indulgences.

This morning the mountains peeked through the cloud cover for just a moment as I was walking by the window. I stood there in front of the wide wooden blades of the window blinds watching clouds circle around once more to obscure them. I told Joan that I really want to start mountain climbing again. I do. (I will.) Then I resolved to go out during daylight hours to admire the ruggedness sharpened by a powder dusting. So I did. Drove down to nearby Shilshole where others sat in their cars looking too, and still others strolled by with their necks craned toward that jagged outline. The fine detail of mountain faces sharp with all those fine veins of snow accumulating in fissures and cracks between protrusions of chunky black rock. The patchwork on some of the lower ridges is more apparent in the snow, as are the roads sliced into the hillsides. I looked up there to vast snowfields and I could imagine myself in one, a single flake of color among the blinding white, kicking and sinking slowly up through black and crumbly arms resting over the belly of the sleeping giant. The peaks wrapped and re-wrapped themselves in stoles of silver vapor until eventually they just covered themselves from head to toe in it. Then I left.