Mother’s Day

Mom never cared much about Mother’s Day that I can remember. Not while I’ve been an adult, anyway, and I don’t remember it ever being a big deal as a kid, either.

One thing Mom was really good at was finding fun and clever greeting cards for holidays and birthdays, and even when she moved into assisted living where her greeting card options were basically limited to a single CVS, she was still able to find some great ones. So over time I started putting a little more effort into finding good cards for her for holidays, too. So for me, Mother’s Day involved sending her a card, and giving her a call.

Today is the first Mother’s Day since she passed away, and it’s definitely melancholy because of that. No more phone calls. (In fact, if you call her phone number – which she had for almost 44 years, it was kind of hard to call to cancel it – you get a recording directing you to my phone number.)

I’m planning to call my sister later today, though (not only because she’s a mom, but to discuss some stuff about her estate), and it seems appropriately congruent with the (Hallmark) holiday.

Off The Grid

On top of getting married last week, today was Debbi’s birthday. We haven’t done a lot to celebrate our birthdays in recent years – neither of us has a lot of stuff that we want, and sometimes we take a day off or go away, but usually all we do is get a card and go out to dinner together.

Tonight we decided to try something new, going to the Off The Grid gathering of food trucks in Palo Alto. Well, it took us a little while to get there as something was wrong with the left turn light at a major intersection, but we did finally make it. Debbi drives past this location on her way home from work so she’s seen it setting up for a while. And I wanted another go at Rocko’s Ice Cream Tacos, since my work catered them in a few weeks ago and they were delicious!

It was pretty quiet when we arrived a bit before 7 pm, probably because it was also getting chilly out (a far cry from the 90 degrees it hit on our wedding day last week!), but within half an hour there were a couple of dozen people milling around. There were – I think – 7 trucks plus a guitarist, and the hotel hosting the event was smart enough to have a tent selling beer and wine, too. We were both in the mood for barbecue, which we got from Roderick’s, and it was good! Debbi also got some clam chowder from Lobsta Truck. And then ice cream!

Off The Grid has a bunch of locations where they set up around the Bay Area, and some of my San Francisco friends know them from their presence up there. I like the idea because I see a lot of food trucks around, but some of them look pretty dodgy, and I figure a larger organization like this is a good way to be exposed to the better-quality ones. (Sure, there’s no guarantee, but there’s no guarantee with a restaurant, either!) I have tried following some food trucks via a Twitter list, but haven’t had much luck with it mainly because I haven’t figure out how Twitter lists fit into my online workflow.

Anyway, we’ll probably go back this summer as the weather warms up – it was a nice change from our usual weeknight dinner fare!