Headed up to Oakland last night to cook dinner with Helen Jane. Without a recipe, we winged it on chicken parmigiana, which came out surprisingly well – particularly the homemade sauce. Apparently, the secret to cooking Italian food is consuming several bottles of vino in the process.

Helen Jane’s husband, James, is recovering from a serious fall that left him wheelchair-ridden for several months, though by now he’s up to crutching around with great aplomb. I was lucky enough to spend a lot of time with HJ on the set of I Love Your Work, enough to determine she’s one of my very favorite people, but I hadn’t spent nearly as much time with James. So I was particularly glad to spend an evening with just the two of them – sort of a chance to further feel him out. By the end of the night, I’m pleased to say he’d earned the official self-aggrandizement stamp of approval.

As the two had been unable to hit the bars (or, really, leave the house) for the past few months, they’d instead honed their card games skills to an impressive peak. Intermixed with cooking, drinking and eating, we blew our way through several games of Coolio, Egyptian Rat Screw, and an excellent variation of bullshit (possibly called ‘fourshit’?) that I taught. The latter game requires both strategy and the ability to seamlessly lie through your teeth, which left James and I to battle it out while Helen Jane – whose tendency to dissolve into fitful giggles when bluffing put her at a bit of a disadvantage – mainly egged things on.

Eventually, we ended up on their porch, where Helen Jane and I shared blogger gossip (accompanied by much eye-rolling by James), and we all generally shot the proverbial shit. It was one of the most delightful evenings I’ve had in weeks, and as HJ’s best friend Hilary (another recent addition to my very favorite people list) just managed to break her leg in three places and may consequently be coming to stay with Helen Jane for a few nights (thereby expanding Oakland’s apparent mini-Bellevue), I suspect I’ll be making it back at least once more through the course of this quick jaunt out West.

Ah, jet-setting, jet-setting.