I'm not sure if honey is all that much better than caramel sauce, when you come right down to it (and I am trying to be moderate) but my rules have not been broken, and that's important. One infraction and I'm probably going to find myself on a slippery slope beginning with an innocuous square of chocolate and ending in death by pudding. What a way to go.

It really is kind of amazing that I haven't had "the chocolate" in over a week. I don't know if it's made a damn bit of difference, this no-sugar thing, but it's an exercise in willpower for sure. My body feels the same, though. My energy level feels the same. The only difference I've noticed is not one that I can report in mixed company. Mostly status quo.

It's not been that difficult, though, giving up sugar and stuff. Shockingly enough. Except when I'm very hungry, I've grown accustomed to the fact that I Can't Have the yumminesses, and I stop desiring them, because desiring something you Can't Have is a torment that I can live without.

I guess there are enough other things I like to eat. I don't have candy at the movies, but I have popcorn. I skip cookies and eat peanuts. I bypass caramel sauce and have honey.

Hmm. Maybe this system of loopholes isn't the best way to go?

How did I get on this tangent? I wanted to say I had a great holiday weekend. Here's the short rundown.

Wednesday. I was originally scheduled to close on Wednesday, but Tim was flying in at noon and obviously I didn't want to work, so someone switched schedules with me. I opened on Wednesday. At five in the morning! I went to sleep at eight the night before, no kidding, because I knew it was the only way I'd be able to function. And I was perky and everything; it was swell.

Then I picked up Tim at the airport, and there was much rejoicing (yay) since we hadn't seen each other in a thousand years. We went and ate, and then met up with Jen and Friend of Jen (Foj). We all wandered around Golden Gate park for a while and then Jen had to go to class. (Boo.)

While Jen did that, Tim and I kidnapped Foj and we all went to the science museum and the planetarium and stuff. We saw a wall of skulls and a Gary Larson gallery and boring alligators. And vine snakes, which are the cutest. And we spent an embarrassingly long time trying to put together a giraffe puzzle designed for five year olds.

The next day, the fourth, I had to work. Tim knew this going into it, but it still sort of sucked. In order to make it up to him, we planned to go see Men in Black II after I got off work, which he wanted to see. Which he "had" to see.

Work itself was mellow, and we saw a celebrity! Daphne Zuniga, of Spaceballs fame, came in to buy some coffee. Man, I didn't even know San Francisco had celebrity sightings aside from the Danny Glover/Sharon Stone/Robin Williams trifecta.

And then we went to see Men in Black II. We would later call it "a blight on humanity," which is probably a generous assessment. In fact, it was a horror of epic proportions. It made us want to go home and give each other lobotomies to escape the post traumatic flashbacks. It wasn't great.

Friday ended up being the really crazy day. We started out at the Exploratorium and ended up in my backyard hot tub at four in the morning, with Jen and Foj, very drunk on Zinfandel, pointing out phony constellations to each other. ("And that cluster right there is the Crepe Myrtle...")

We also went drinking and eating with Josh that night, and we played a cutthroat game of Trivial Pursuit. I also did some things I can't quite remember (Foj told me I danced around in the bar, and I asked when did I dance? And he said, "After you had your second blue thingie and before you drank Josh's gin.") Good times.

On Saturday Tim and I went out and saw Minority Report, which was really great. I picked Minority Report. Tim picked Men in Black II. Tim said it would "rule." Between that and his increasingly tenuous grasp on the second law of thermodynamics, I'm not sure we're friends anymore.

Ooh, but he did scour the streets of Taiwan to find me the ugliest sunglasses ever. His purported goal was to find sunglasses that were so ugly, even I wouldn't wear them. But the giant bug-like pink things he came up with kick ASS. I swear to god, I will wear these things. I will build an entire Outfit Concept around them, and I will wear them.

It seems we are friends after all.

And finally, Spies (the wonderful host of mopie.com) was down this weekend as they upgraded their servers or something-- I didn't pay too much attention to the particulars, and I wasn't around anyway. If you tried to get here and couldn't, that's why!

"I can call her up in my head, so vividly that she's almost standing in front of me, slapping me on the butt and saying, 'Oh, Minikie, I am so proud of you.'"