On the way back home at around 7pm, I hit a bank machine for money, the first time in my life I had ever done such a thing. I almost left my card behind, that's how stupid I am about modern conveniences that almost everybody uses every day.

On the way back to Kim's apartment, I stopped at the party store across the street to maybe buy a bottle of vodka. It was dingy, full of strange merchandise, and operated by a seemingly clueless oriental dude, but who knows? Maybe the guy has exceptional business savvy. Still, it looked like the set for a Spike Lee film and I kept thinking that it probably gets held up on a regular basis. There was no hard liquor, so I contented myself with 1.5 litres of Livingston Cellars Burgundy. It only cost a little over seven dollars.

The burgers Kim cooked were excellent, even if I am forced to admit that the vino was not. We talked a little about her day. She told me of the surreal experience of Mother answering the door of her smoke-damaged house in a gas mask. It seems the cleaning solvents used to reverse the smoke damage are the sorts of things best left uninhaled. Kim complained all night about what she'd inhaled while there.

In other news, Sophie is back from the Pet Ritz. She's a little on the quiet side since coming home, and she looks different because she was groomed during her stay. Unfortunately, now she's suffering problem skin on her face and throat, like some hormonally over-ripe adolescent. The Pet Ritz had tried to charge Kim $96 for Sophie's stay, until she informed them that Sophie was part of Mother's insurance-funded party. I'm continually amazed at the comprehensiveness of this fire insurance windfall.

Let's see, Forrest Gump: Kim got this movie because I'd appreciated the historical-fiction qualities underlying Boogie Nights. Forrest Gump is a celebration of dumb luck. Here's a guy who stumbles into good fortune no matter what ill-informed action he takes, ending up a zillionaire living in a mansion with his childhood sweetheart (though he barely knows what to do with a girl). It's a cute movie, but it left me yearning for drama a little more substantial. In some ways it seemed to be the movie equivalent of decaffeinated coffee or non-alcoholic beer: good on a swallow-by-swallow basis, but unsatisfying as a whole. The movie tried to make up for its dramatic shortcomings by creating genuine tragedy at the end (the sort that might have made me cry on a bad day), but Gump's suffering by this point all seemed justified on a cosmic level, like he was owed a little bad luck after all his dumb luck. I don't feel challenged by feel-good movies, and this was basically a feel-good movie, albeit a gorgeous and appealingly cute one.

But the way Bubba pronounces "shrimp" is priceless. Shrehlmp.