Yesterday I had lunch with a friend from high school who's now out here and I hadn't seen in several years. We went to Cafe Intermezzo, which was quite tasty and quite crowded. So crowded, in fact, that we couldn't find a table and were forced to share one with a couple of other people. This wasn't so bad, however, as those other people were a pair of attractive undergrad girls. I then spent most of the next hour catching up with my friend, trying desperately in the back of my mind to figure out some way of opening up the conversation to include our tablemates, and cursing my introversion.

I then went to San Francisco to hang out with John, where we played Scrabble (I broke 400, bingoing with 'novella' and 'falsies') cooked dinner, and then went with his roommate to 'The Buddha' in Chinatown, where we played 'Liar's dice' and drank numerous different kinds of bad American beer. At one point I helpfully interpreted the order of a British girl who was trying to order a 'vodka and lemonade' and getting only confusion from the bartender (she meant 'vodka and sprite') but she didn't seem particularly interested in conversing.

At some point during the course of the evening we engaged in a game of 'blind chess,' which invloves two players who can't look at the board and have to determine everything by touch, and a referee whose task is to inform players whether their moves are legal or not. It was great fun. Bishops, we discovered, are incredibly difficult to move, and taking your opponent's piece with your piece of the same type is quite a good move. It also pays to figure out what your opponent is doing, as we discovered early on when Nathan lost his queen to John's knight after 4 moves.