Another bloody freezing night here in San Francisco. I just got home and honestly it's like I remember London in the Winter. And foolishly I'd left all my apartment windows open.

An odd day today. Woke up in a foul mood. I spent most of the day battling my various computer systems. My desktop PC refused to let me see my email. When I finally managed to get it to disgorge a small trickle of messages, with the help of one of those wonderful, friendly, polite Microsoft technical people (you know!), I still couldn't send any. So who knows.

I also rode into battle with Quantex, the makers of my new laptop. It has a DVD player - which doesn't play DVDs! They tell me that the only way they can get it to play is for me to return the hard-disk. Huh? I've just spent two weeks setting up software and now they want me to return it for a new hard disk because the DVD player cannot play DVDs? I'm starting to hate computers.

So my mood towards the end of the day was not exactly much improved. I had a training session with Cecilia at her other gym. This other gym is not in the Castro (the gay area), but you wouldn't know it from the clientele. It's a warehouse for the pumped up, Adidas-clad, gay men around town. I noticed a lot of the same men who go to my own gym, which seemed a trifle strange, but then I remembered what Larry had told me about how "it's just like your parents, when they joined two country clubs to meet ALL the right people."

Still - Cecilia cheered me up as she lets me be silly, and I was in a much better mood by the time I met Tony for dinner at Lulu, a posh restaurant a couple of blocks away. After dinner we walked over to the Yerba Buena Gardens (one advantage of living in the scary neighborhood I live in is that downtown is close!) to see the Joe Goode Performance Troupe. I'd seen them once before and loved them. The guy is a genius, I think - combining song, athletic modern dance, speech, a warm humanity, and an incredible, sly, dry sense of humor. The first piece was called "29 Effeminate Gestures"! The second was my favorite - "Doris in the Desert" - a fantasy about a girl in the fifties who got married to some guy who looked like Rock Hudson, and moved to Oklahoma, thinking her life would be just like Doris Day's. It was hilarious. The final piece was a moving trio of stories about the bonding between people of the same sexes in the Western frontier. I really wanted to bond with - I think his name was - Felipe, a tall, slim latino dancer! Okay that was crude! I wonder if I become a doner I can get to take him out to dinner :)