December 31, 2007 -- Monday morning

Reading 6,000+ Essential Spanish Words, published by Living Language. It's a book I could have used later, in the early hours of the New Year. As the party I was at came winding to a close, a few of us sat in the kitchen, and under the influence of the champagne we'd been swilling from the bottle on the top of Bernal Hill--tiny champagne glasses which keep you from drinking a lot much are too fragile to carry--we were inspired to speak in tongues, until, that is, we got stumped. What is the Spanish word for camp stove....would that be considered one of the 6,000 essential?

His favorite book--Love in the Time of Cholera, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. He likes it because Gabriel Garcia Marquez does not judge his characters.