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Showing posts with label Chow's Lafayette. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Chow's Lafayette. Show all posts

March 15, 2010

Literacy in Lafayette? Or not quite?

Anna, the Lemon Lady, was cruising around our fair 'burbs--as she is known to do, looking for ways to help feed the hungry and to do her part to save the local environment--and she came across this sign in Lafayette. It was on a wall, behind which stood a Dumpster. She and her daughter Ava found it near a business on Mt. Diablo Boulevard.  Thanks Anna and Ava for sharing this with us!

By the way, Anna has a new Earth Day-related project, which you can read about on her blog. Basically, it involves collecting bottle caps and lids that can be recycled.

December 26, 2009

Things I love about a late December, rainy suburban night ...

My husband and I got a free hour to pop out and get something to eat ... the two of us.

We went to Chow's in Lafayette, and we went early. Wow! Business is bustling today, both at Chow's and in downtown Walnut Creek. Earlier in the afternoon, I dropped my son and two of his buddies off at the Century Theaters in Walnut Creek so they could go see the new Sherlock Holmes movie. He called my cell phone 10 minutes later (yes, he has his own phone ... ) to say the movie was sold out and he and his friends were "going to do stuff." I had thought I might do a bit of post-Christmas shopping, but downtown Walnut Creek looked even more packed than it had in the days leading up to Christmas, so I drove home.

As I thought about my son's vow that he and his friends would "do stuff," I can't imagine that these three energetic sixth-grade boys, alone on their own in downtown Walnut Creek, could pull off stunts any worse than I did when I was their age, and on my own with a girlfriend, wandering the streets of downtown WC.

My friend, at the time, was already a serious shopper, and she would go on to live in London and make fashion her profession and supposedly have Greek shipping tycoons as lovers.

Whatever. I could care less about shopping, now and back then as a Walnut Creek sixth- and seventh-grader.

Set free on Walnut Creek's downtown at that age, I just wanted to wander around and goof on people.

Yeah, how mature is that? But was it fun!

Hey, if you were in the old Bullocks (now Nordstrom) back in the '70s, and you had a wad of chewed-up gum fall on top of your head from someone riding the escalators above...

Well, it's possible it was me.

A belated apology. Sort of.

My son and his friends arrived home, and we left them to their own pre-teen boy devices (video games) so we could go out, and have a late afternoon drink, a bite to eat, and some couple time.

As we finished up dinner at Chow in Lafayette, as the early evening crowds starting to pour in, we saw the rain fall outside our window.

The rain was pretty heavy as we made our way east on Mt. Diablo Boulevard, to Pleasant Hill Road, and then to Olympic Boulevard into Walnut Creek.

I wish I had a camera with me, to capture the beautiful rainy December night images I witnessed as we drove by.

The most I can say is that I think it is rather magnificent to see, even post-December 25, people's outdoor Christmas lights shining, white, red, blue, green and gold, and to see those lights shining through the darkness and rain of a cold December night.

This vision--of Christmas lights, rain, night--on a night like this is one of my favorite things...