Here is a photo of Dan and me on one of our Wild Nights on the Town. We went to Cascal, a great new restaurant in Mountain View. Very hip, delicious food and drink.

I like Mountain View. It has a fairly bustling downtown that seems to actually stay open in the evenings for post-prandial strolling, what a concept! Lots of funky, independent shops and restaurants, darn near chain-free from what I can tell.

Then again, I've been so deprived of urban (as opposed to *sub*urban) experiences for the past two years that pretty much anything seems wildly sophisticated to me these days.

For a girl who spent 13 happy years in San Francisco and 1.5 happy years in Madrid, it blows me away that I haven't been to the city (which means San Francisco in these parts) in more than two years.

Actually I did go twice, but only very briefly....once for an African party thrown by my friend Elizabeth (who is now living in Menlo Park, a fellow suburbanite!), and once with my friend Lisa to get our makeup done for her wedding reception later that day.

Anyway, Dan and I enjoyed ourselves at Cascal, and finished dinner around 8:30pm, so we still had time to kill before heading back home! What to do?

We were kind of buzzed, and the concept of baby-free adult evening time so intoxicating..we immediately thought about going out to a club and going dancing. Woohoo! We be clubbin'!

But then it sank in that it was EIGHT-THIRTY P.M., and even if a club existed nearby, it was so early that only super-dorks (like us) would be there, or it would be the Under-18 Britney Spears Hour or something. Sigh.

So we browsed in a cool bookstore, bought some Putumayo CDs and a book on organic gardening, and then happened upon a salsa nightclub! Alas, there was a $10 cover, and we only had about 15 minutes left before we turned into pumpkins and had to go back home to relieve Ashley the SuperSitter.

Ah well. I did get to bust out my new/old shirt, one of the batch that I dyed. Look at those groovy sleeve patterns! Too bad the thing is a size too small, but it still looks cool. Not bad for a shirt that I was going to get rid of. Now I like it.

When we got home, Ashley had put Julian to sleep! Apparently it was quite a long, tedious, somewhat infuriating process (yeah, NEWSFLASH!), but she did it!

More power to her, because as I write this I am on the edge of exploding into a furious fireball over a LACK OF FUCKING NAPPING happening right now.

I nursed/bounced Julian to sleep on the exercise ball, but then he woke up during the transfer to bed because he had to pee, and then peeing *really* woke him up, so now I'm back on the ball bouncing in front of the computer, my boob AND arm are about to fall off, and he's nowhere close to going back to sleep.

I'm soooooooo ready to just throw him on his bed and close the door, but that would only mean extending the torture and listening to nonstop screaming with *both* of us being traumatized, so I'm barely managing to just stay here and keep bouncing for now. FUCK! I HATE THIS! There is NOTHING that makes me more angry than when J doesn't sleep...especially since I was REALLY looking forward to naptime to get some things done. Grrrrrr! Sleep, dammit! SLEEP!