Shirt-sleeve weather – unusual in this area. It was unthinkable for us to spend the day inside so after some discussion, we decided to ride down to Napa, something we’d been talking about doing for months. We needed some maps because ours had vanished after someone rummaged through the car last night. We decided to go out to lunch and pick up some on the way.

We walked down to the Rand McNally store on Market.

An enormous revolving globe about five feet high turned slowly in the window as a clerk ran a brightly colored duster over it. Maps and globes were everywhere, but they lack the comforting thickness of books, so the inside felt pale and skimpy to me. There were a few travel books, including a beautiful picture book of Bali. Tim mentioned that once his product is released he wants to take some time off and visit New Orleans. I may have trouble getting time off unless it’s between issues, but I would love to see New Orleans again in the spring.

Perhaps inspired by the store, we went looking for a restaurant called Globus that was mentioned in The Thrifty Gourmet. We found it on the corner of Bush and Grant, just inside the Chinatown Gate, a shabby little place but with a nice atmosphere. Our table near the window looked out onto a high rise across the street, which included a palmist where a blonde woman sat in the window talking on the phone.

The waitress barely spoke English, but she got our orders right and the food was delicious. Tim had unagi-don and I had the sesame chicken. We were the only people there because, the cook told us, most of their business came from office workers and they got little custom on weekends. He was young with a ponytail, very informed and friendly.

This was the 1980s, so the woman talking on the phone in the window would have been using a landline, IOW, a stationary phone hooked up near wherever she was sitting. She was likely the palmist herself.

The Rand McNally bookstore with its enormous revolving globe in the window was a sort of landmark on Market back then. Globus, which was good but no landmark, barely even noticable in fact, is long gone.

Our plans for what we would do when “the product comes in” was Gold Rush talk. As an 80s-era software engineer, Tim was constantly working on what he and his boss hoped would be the next important product that would make tons and tons of money. Most of the time, this never panned out. Like I said — Gold Rush talk.