Brunch and the Last King

I like this picture, which I took some time ago, because it gives such a strange impression of flatness and whiteness. This is totally without Photoshop manipulation (aside from changing the size)--it just looked like that when I took it, almost like an artichoke picture inside the bowl.

Yesterday Pocket of Bolts and I indulged in one of our fondest weekend temptations and had brunch at a nearby diner. This is bad on two counts: first, it's paying roughly $20 for food we could make at home for a fraction of the cost, and second, WE make it in a much lower calorie version, with olive oil instead of butter and so forth, so its a tremendous caloric indulgence. On the other hand, it is lovely to sally forth from the house and sit in that relaxed diner atmosphere, drinking bottomless coffee and chattering a mile a minute.

After brunch, we went to one of our favorite coffeeshops and sat there working... almost all day! We'd eaten so much breakfast we didn't even eat lunch. I think we didn't leave there until four. Then we went home; I was suddenly ravenous and ate a big snack. Pocket of Bolts had a long workout while I digested. Then I had a short workout while he started dinner. We had a baked chicken dish, and when I got home I made biscuits. We didn't start eating dinner until after 9--a very decadent late schedule.

Over dinner we watched one of our Netflix, The Last King of Scotland. It was really good. It's a semi-fictional story about Idi Amin, given from the point of view of his personal physician. (The doctor was the fictional part.) The story was fast-paced and exciting (suspenseful, terrifying) throughout. PoB and I usually have a hard time watching an entire movie, but we were on the edge of our seats to see what would happen to the poor guy. Also, the working out of his character development was really skillful. It gave a good picture of how different motivations align and re-align, how a multitude of choices are open to you at the beginning and slowly the sum of those choices begins constrains you until there are no choices left at all.

The movie was also permeated with the roller-coaster of African dictatorship: celebration, hope, rhetoric, suspicion, violence, inexcusable brutality, terror, regime change, and then starting all over again with celebration. The next one promises to be different, and how earnest he is. You don't want to be cynical in case he's the real thing. But is he ever the real thing? Ever?

We didn't get to bed until after midnight, and I slept like a log.