It's just something that we do
Tell me everything I'm not
But don't ever tell me to stop

Madonna, "Don't Tell Me"
---

This weekend was filled with a lot of good food, strong drink, and scary dreams. Grant was nice enough to come over and help me hook up my sexy new stainless steel fridge to the water line, granting me the ability to make ice and have water spit out of the thingee in the front. Good times, indeed. For our reward, the two of us hopped, skipped, and jumped over to Crown & Anchor, where Grant got to meet such luminary characters as Big Andy, Drunk Dan, Sleeping Tony, Floozy Suzy, and Dirty Old Man Thomas. You see, another regular, Matt, was just married that day, and he and new wife Karen decided to have their reception there at the pub. Everybody appeared to be dressed in their Sunday best. Grant and I looked like we just moved a fridge. After a few drinks, and a little champagne (I prodded Grant to make a toast), we quickly swung by my house so that I might change and resume the festivities.

I actually brought an extra shirt; I would change later in the evening when I just didn't feel like wearing the prior shirt anymore. No reason. Wanted to change, so I did. This is the wonder and mystery that is Me.

Suffice to say, combining a boisterous wedding reception, which such dignitaries as the bartenders Russ and Amy (and special guest appearance by Jane), as well as waitresses like Kylie and Bree, with my usual Friday activity resulted in me not having the most glorious Saturday evening or Sunday night. That night, I had a dream I was at a concert-type event with Anna, and the two of us were in an arena of some sort, like the Pond. I, for some reason, had to bury a coffin (of whom I don't know or remember) and all she wanted to do was look for raspberry iced tea. I found a suitable dirt pit, but it's filled with all of my old toys and memorabilia. After I finished doing a little bit of rearranging, I was able to bury the coffin as well as the old toys and be on my way to a wonderful and soothing hangover.

I really do want to tell you about Fabrizio's, which was the restaurant that I was about to review last week, since this restaurant is notably bad. I'm fairly certain that between the 11 of us, we could put together a better restaurant that this one. If I ever become a sommelier, I want a shirt that says, "corktease". And here at work, Joe is designing a module called the "clockblock." I can't make these things up.

Another restaurant, which competes in the coveted "Thousand Oaks Gourmet" space, is Cafe Provencal. Quite good. About 15-17 tables all told, so it's very small, though not as small as La Valencia. The menu and wine list were underwhelming volume wise, but I believe they make up for quantity with quality. I enjoyed the terrine maison (which is French for "house meatloaf") and saumon en papillotte (a dish I remember Paul Novak and I tried making once when we lived in Redondo Beach. We didn't know how to poach fish back then. I'm pretty sure Higbie ate it anyway). I was pretty excited to see they had one of my favorite pinot noirs on the list, but they were sold out of the Pommard Joillot (poh-MARD zhwah-YO), so I settled on a trusty Gigondas (ZHEE-gon-dah) instead. When visiting a new restaurant, I like to try "blue chip" items off the menu, things that I've tried before in other places so that it may serve as a baseline for my food. I have to say, the French Onion soup at Cafe Provencal is pretty tasty: they top it off with a little too much gruyere for my taste, but still nice. And the creme brulee had a hint of lavender in the creme anglaise, but by that point I couldn't finish a thing, though I did manage to find room for a nice muscat to close out the meal.

Sitting next to me were these three supremely wonderful women who were in town to see their niece, who is an actress in a production at the Civic Center. This niece, I'm told, has appearend on Broadway, playing my favorite role in all of theater, the role of Eponine in Les Miserables. (And one of their husbands teaches tai-chi at Caltech. Strange and small this world is.)

Sunday night's dream was no better. I went to bed at a reasonable hour and yet I still managed to have kind of a chilling subconscious experience, but this one was a little bit more interesting. The dream was about me and maybe 3 or 4 other people riding in a car through a campus-like setting where there are speed bumps every where through curvy thoroughfares. We were talking about a scary movie, starring that kid from Terminator 2 who plays the young John Connor along with 3 or 4 other boys. It's odd, I remember the beginning of the (fake) scary movie: a single football player is on the field at night and he all of a sudden realizes that he's in some sort of freakish Twilight Zone universe where time has stood still. I also remember the ending of the (fake) movie: John Connor and his 3 or 4 friends, all from different cultures, learn to live together in peace and harmony in an underground network of caves and waterfalls. The end.

In the dream, this movie was being analyzed by the 4 or 5 of us in the car as we drove through campus, but the road itself was filled with haunted-house-style accoutrements, like a guy in a scary costume would come up to the car window and yell, Boo! That sort of thing. Except I was sitting in the driver seat of this car, and I'm genuinely afraid of a lot of these things coming at me while we're sitting talking about a scary movie. At one point, one of the passengers said, "Don't die," and all of a sudden, a zombie of some sort appeared on the passenger side of the windshield. I freaked out and I actually proceeded throw the objects in hand at this apparition. The objects were a domino and a cube of some sort, about the size of a six-sided die. Apparently, I like to combat the undead with pips. My actual response in the dream was, "Perhaps someone who's less of a spaz should be up here." At that point I woke up and felt really eerie. Not really relieved at all that I was awake, but tangibly shaken. It was 4:30am. I laid in bed for about ten more minutes and the eeriness never really did subside, so I thought to myself that I might be totally wigged out, but I'm not going to just lie in bed and be wigged indefinitely. At 4:45am I got out of bed and began my workweek. I had ample time to make snow crab with black bean sauce served on jasmine rice and a malbec reduction. This constitutes breakfast in the Ron household.