One More Day to Bake

Thursday, May 4

After Tuesday's disappointing Bahia buffet and Wednesday's foot-crippling walk to Mission (due to my flip-flops, not the distance), we decided to skip breakfast on Thursday. We caught up on this journal, took our time showering and dressing, and took off for Pacific Beach, where Jill trekked shoelessly to the ocean and put her feet in (still cold, very cold).

Having held off until almost noon, we took another trip to Luigi's for yet another pitcher of Red Trolley and a pizza. Our favorite waitress, Caitlin (probably), had moved on to a better summer job, as evidenced by the "Goodbye, Caitlin" banner behind the counter, but our server was adequate, and our meal as delicious as Sunday's.

We stoped on the boarwalk for a shaved Hawaiian ice and returned to the room to take advantage of the first full afternoon's worth of sunshine. We laid out on the private bay beach just behind the sliding door to the living room of our suite, me well-lubed and Jill stubbornly sunscreened only on her face and torso. She would pay. After a few hours on the beach, a quick dip in the pool (where the air was much cooler than the water), and a brief stint of poolside ray-catching, my wife's arms emerged painlessly charred, but her legs weren't so lucky.

We took some time to write out postcards to family stuck in the cold, rainy East (and my parents) before jumping on the 34 bus back to La Jolla for dinner. We browsed a few art galleries on our way, one of which almost got me in trouble. Before being approached by a friendly shopkeep, Jill and I agreed that we were very impressed by several European landscapes and seminude portraits by Maher Marcos, a featured Sicilian-Egyptian artist with a knack for creative lighting and a feish for almost-bare breasts at the dinner table, but altogether unimpressed with the cubist nudes of Clair, the gallery's other featured artist. "Imagine being another cubist?" might have been my exact quote.

The shopkeep greeted us and walked us around, raving about Marcos's work, over which we continued to fawn while ignoring Clair's cubes for greener pasteurs. Finally, just before I made a snide remar about cubism (while Jill and the 'keep talked about Picasso's $90 million sale earlier in the day), we were introduced to Clair, the Ithaca-born cubist and our host for the evening. I swallowed hard, thanked Ms. Clair for the tour, and we left for the bar next door at George's on the Cove.

While waiting for a table, we sipped SoCo Manhattans with Manhattan socialites and watched Padres pitcher Clay Hensley take a broken bat to the back of the head. We went on to dine on La Jolla's most famous cuisine in front of La Jolla's most famous view, then moseyed our way bac to a bus stop and put a quiet end to oru evening, watching ER and finding out that the pool and hot tub closed at eleven. Alas.

See Jill for Friday.