Away for the Night

View from the Hyatt Santa Clara April 2010
Originally uploaded by suzipaw

I write to you from Santa Clara, bad TV and Silicon Valley traffic noise in the background, the stressful week and pleasant weekend activities fading into the past. But before it goes:

M had knee surgery on Tuesday. It went well--as well as surgery can go--and thank goodness he's now on the road to recovery. It's a bit like sleeping with Frankenstein, between the cpap machine and the little cooler-like contraption that circulates ice water to a wrap around his knee. I took part of the day off on Friday and we met with the surgeon for a follow-up. We were treated to photos of the inside of his knee joint. Eew. We went out to dinner on Saturday and afterwards took a stroll around the block to the cupcake shoppe for dessert and thence to peruse the stacks in the used bookstore, and that pretty much wiped him out. But, he's getting stronger, slowly spending more time back at the office.

On Saturday I abandoned my invalid to spend much of the day with a dear friend, her daughter and niece, wandering the radiant Cartier exhibit at the Palace of the Legion of Honor. There was SO much jewelry on display, case after case, a bling binge--decades of diamonds designed for duchesses, sparkling stomachers, glittering gilded 'gator necklaces done for a Mexican actress, Grace Kelly's 10 carat engagement ring. I didn't realize that it was Cartier who pioneered the use of platinum rather than silver and that apparently the practice of American heiresses snagging titled British husbands was pretty common, not just fiction from Edith Wharton. Thank goodness there are museums to pass on this kind of learning.

It somehow ended up being a very spendy weekend. I think I've been pretty good about reining in the spending lately, but fell off the wagon. I was interrupted from an email reverie on Friday by two young men ostensibly selling magazines, ostensibly for an educational trip to Germany and they managed to finagle $40 out of my wallet. They really had an impressive sales spiel. I somehow found myself at Ross later that afternoon and clothing somehow ended up in a shopping bag that belonged to me. On Saturday, it wasn't just the trip down to the City that I spent hard-earned ducats on--in a fit of magnanimity, I became a member of the Legion of Honor, and of course there was the audio tour and lunch in the gourmet museum restaurant. And on the way home, I stopped at a high-end mall to finally buy one nice small area rug at Pottery Barn but shopping bags branded Williams Sonoma and Anthropologie also managed to hang from my arm like bracelets as I headed back out to the parking lot.

Time to call the husband and curl up (sadly) mutt-free under the covers. Glad to be going home tomorrow.