adorable sense of wonder - Saturday January 02 1999    

Another sunny day, and Kim and I were eating barbecue chicken sandwiches down on Newport Street. Then came television. I never really knew how much I'd love just bumming around the house on the weekends watching television with the girlfriend back before I got a real girlfriend and a real job.

This evening Eric the database programmer dude from work is coming over; apparently he digs the kind of excitement my household represents. At first I thought we'd go down to Pacific Shores, but then I realized he's only 20. So I went and bought some beers (Red Wolf, a favourite of mine for a few months some years ago) to drink at home. I don't know what we'll do after they're gone. There's always the Brazilian girls I suppose.

later...

Eric came over while I was working on my long-in-coming latest painting. He wanted caffeine more than alcohol, so I fixed him a cup of tea. We talked about work, about programming web page back ends, about the performance differences between grabbing content intelligently with the file system object versus using a simple server-side include. Most of what we talked about in the non-computer world involved his love life, or the lack thereof. He told me about going out with a girl the other night he'd met inside the online community we've been hired to renovate (he actually found this girl using a search tool for which he did the database programming and I did the front end Active Server pages). Sadly, this girl was beset with a number of serious social problems. My understanding is that she was a dork who wouldn't stop talking.

Eventually Kim came home after a very lucrative night of massage. She'd done a house call that yielded hundreds of dollars worth of tips. I suppose I should be more curious about half hours yielding so much jingaling, but when it comes to matters of this sort, if she's happy, then so am I.

Eric gave her another foot massage and retold some of his stories, including the one where Jeffe, the owner of the Ocean Beach piercing parlour, called him at 4am and chewed him out for handing Jill his phone number. Evidently Jeffe feels he has some claim to the girl. We assured Eric that he should be flattered; Jeffe obviously feels threatened.

Eric's naive sense of wonder at everything in our world provides great entertainment value to both Kim and myself. Tonight the boy drank exactly one beer and decided to play it safe by crashing out on the Matt Rogers memorial couch. How adorable!