What do you do on Sunday nights? After all the weekend activities are done, and before you turn in, ready to head off to work on Monday morning, what do you do?

Dean and I spent Saturday afternoon getting a prop made over on metalworking street. We asked around and found a welder, who sent us to another welder, etc., until we found a couple of guys who could help us. As he did so, it started to rain again. It’s always raining these days.

After we were done and had had lunch, I went over to Xiamen Street to look for a mattress. I couldn’t find any decent ones, and I’ve since realized I don’t really need a new mattress just yet, as the money could be put to better uses right now.

But as of this afternoon I still hadn’t come to this realization, so I headed up to Hola to look some more, but ended up taking the train all the way out to Danshui. The reason for this was that I didn’t think I could spend all afternoon looking at mattresses, and I was planning to try out the Post Home restaurant later for dinner. I’d heard good things about the place, now called Post 49 or something, from Brian Lynch, and I figure a man of such prodigious bulk must know a thing or two about dining.

After I came back from Danshui to Shilin, visited Hola and determined mattresses are too damn expensive, I walked up Zhongshan North Road, across the bridge and over to the restaurant. I was the only diner, indeed the only one in the place except for a lone bartender/waitress. Even the kitchen seemed empty, though it was only 7 or 8pm. I found out through her that several of the items on the menu weren’t actually available. I’d been looking forward to mashed potatoes, but she reported that the stuff in the fridge didn’t actually look too good, so I’d better not chance it. I settled for chicken fingers and fries, which ended up taking quite a long time, didn’t taste good, and cost me over NT$300. I immediately regretted my curiousity and declining of my friend Michael’s dinner invitation earlier that night.

So here I am now, back home, wondering what most people do on Sunday nights, particularly cool, rainy ones. I look at the yellow lights shining out of apartment windows and think people spend the time with family more than with friends. Maybe someday I’ll find out.

For some reason, I’ve been living in some middle eastern time zone lately. Every night I don’t feel like sleeping until 2 or 3 in the morning, and then I end up feeling groggy if I don’t sleep in until 11.

Last night I had a strange series of dreams. I would have one dream in which I found I could play the clarinet quite well without trying. Then I would wake up, go back to sleep, and promptly have another dream in which I would see a clarinet, recall the last dream and wonder if I could really play it in real life like I could in the dream. I would pick up and find I could. Then I’d wake up, fall asleep again, and repeat the process. It happened many times, though in different circumstances and environments, and each time I was convinced in the dream that I wasn’t dreaming, though I knew the last dream was a dream. When I woke up I almost went over to the Sandcastle, where I know Sandman has a clarinet, and proving to myself that I actually cannot play the clarinet or any other reed instrument, but common sense soon set in.

I wonder what I’ll think I can do when I fall asleep tonight. Architecture or something, probably.

I was over at JB’s on Friday night after work, having some really salty steak-and-ale pie with some friends when Matthew Lien walked in. Apparently he’s a friend of Dean’s, and we got to talking about the local music scene, as he’s looking for local musicians. He and Darrell got into a rather animated discussion of the technical aspect of a performance as opposed to the emotional aspect. I say animated because Matthew is very passionate about his craft, especially when he’s had a few. He asked when we our band was playing next, and I told him I didn’t know, but we were getting together the next evening for some music at my friend Chris’ birthday party at Bitan. He said he’d try to make it.

I opened my balcony doors on Saturday morning to discover it was a balmy 25 degrees out, quite a surprise after temperatures in the teens. I decided to take advantage of the weather by going to retrieve Gendoyun, which was still at the shop as the guy there couldn’t find any new shocks for it. I rode to another, larger bike shop on Beixin Road, the place where they have all the beautiful bigger bikes in the window upstairs, but they, too, said the RZR model has been out of production for so long, no parts are available anywhere. So I guess I’ll just have to keep riding it the way it is, for now, at least until I can scrape together enough disposable income for another bike, or even a car, at some point in the future.

The weather was so nice, I took a spontaneous jaunt up up the river and into the mountains on nice, smooth, winding roads. Gendoyun’s engine is just fine, and it was a great little ride. At one point I crested a ridge only to find a shocking site: suburban sprawl, apparently. Stretched out before me, almost as far as I could see, were new developments consisting of identical tan dormer-roofed, three-storey houses with winding lanes, parks, and small lawns. I wonder what it would be like to live in a place like that. Not very suitable for someone living alone, I’d guess, since it’s too far from the city for easy access.

Later, Darrel came over to check out the Water Curtain Cave and help me install some new software as well as some old hardware. By the time I walked him out downstairs, the sky had become quite a bit cloudier, blocking out the sun but making for a nice sunset later, as I watched from the roof.

Chris’ birthday party was supposed to start at around 8, so I took my camera down under the suspension bridge and took some pictures while I waited for Chris and Slim to come down to dinner.

We ate at one of the places that line the river below the bridge. It wasn’t too bad; good veggies and somewhat soggy fried rice. The weather was clouding up, but Bitan was still busy with swanboats. We went up to Chris’ pad, and not long after the whole band had arrived, we started playing some music.

The place filled up very quickly; I don’t quite know how so many people could fit in the tiny room and balcony, but they did. Chris’ cat, Rusty, flitted around between people’s legs and up into the foliage of the mountainside next to the balcony.

It began to drizzle around 10, and it soon became uncomfortably cool considering we were all dressed for the sudden onset of summer, yet the weather didn’t seem to have any effect on the crowd. The Saltwater Crocs (or rather the two remanining members) gave a little show, as well as one half of the former Incriminators. I found out that the baritone does quite well on solo work as well as standard oompha duty.

Slowly the weather worsened, and the crowd began to thin early in the morning. Matthew didn’t show, but then again I didn’t really expect him to, and in any case it was probably too crowded for him. I left around 5:30am, arriving home and getting out of the shower to find the sky lightening to a dull, cool grey outside. I heard later that things got a bit out of hand at the party after I left. Apparently I just missed a fight.

Sunday was a listless recovery day for the most part. I went out for rhoti and brought two tiny fish in a tall glass container back from Chris’ that she got for her birthday but couldn’t keep because Rusty, as cats are wont to do, eats any fish she can get at in the house. The fish got back ok and are still alive, but bored.

I went to the bicycle exhibit this morning at the WTC to see if they were selling any recumbent bikes and to pick up a new saddle a friend from Forumosa had waiting for me. The saddle seems nice; I’ll have to see if it makes everything south of the border go numb, as has been my experience with other saddles to date. I also found some recumbent bicycles, but they were either in the experimental stage, too expensive, or out of stock that wasn’t going to be replenished any time soon.

There were two classes of foreigners at the event. An inordinate amount of very fit-looking foreigners paced the halls, regardless of age, sex, race, style…they were all the picture of health, walking advertisements for two-wheeled exercise. Made me glad I wear baggy clothes, they did. The other group consisted of harried looking businessmen in suits, some just tired, some slimy, some frenetically energetic in a way that suggested they had chemical help.

Tomorrow might be our last bit of nice weather before yet another (told you) cold front arrives, so I am planning to go out and try out the new saddle while I still can.

I was talking with a friend of mine at the Legislative Yuan this evening when he got handed a memo that President Chen wanted to address the Legislature about his ceasing/freezing/abolishing/however-you-translate-it the NUC and NUG. “Isn’t this just like them, to send out a memo on Friday at 8:30pm, after everyone’s gone home, and then demand an answer on Monday or Tuesday,” he said, exasperated. I get the feeling that these little games are always going on between the executive and legislative branches. The Legislature already held an interpellation session with Su where they could ask questions, but Chen normally just goes there to make speeches, refusing to deal with questions, so something tells me the lawmakers aren’t going to be too keen on the idea of giving Chen another platform for another “Look-what-I-did” speech about the NUC.

Then again, maybe our dear leader was just having the same kind of day as I was: It was a strange, almost kind of day, as if I was constantly running a step behind. I went to get my pants back from the tailor only to find that she’d put the buttons on the outside instead of the inside. I just missed subway trains all day; they were always just leaving the station as I walked in. I missed lunch because going to the bike show took too long. I was late for work as well as an appointment. The bookstore had every book in the Raymond Chandler section except the one I was looking for, The Little Sister (I got another one instead, purportedly his worst, Playback), the food court downstairs was just closing when I got there. Just missed the showing of a movie I wanted to see, and when I got home I found that I had enough gas left in the cannister for about two seconds of hot water.

So maybe Chen was just running behind and didn’t get the memo out until the last minute. It happens.

Speaking of reading, I just finished Timeline, by Michael Crichton. Before that I’d just finished Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News, and I found that, after reading Proulx, Crichton feels like reading Dick and Jane books. Things are going on, but everything that matters is abbreviated and skipped over, and you wonder what the story would feel like if the author could actually describe it properly.