Candice and I went to Mexicali Rosa’s at the Dow’s Lake Pavilion for fajitas and margaritas tonight. I am full of both and thus a happy mendel. Olé.

There’s a shelf near the elevators on the way in from the parking garage here on which people in the building leave things that they don’t want anymore but think that other people might need. It’s a bit of an odd thing, doubly so because the stuff left out there is often firmly in the “garbage” category: old beat-up shoes, piles of plastic bags, broken alarm clocks, that sort of thing. I figure that most of that is because there are a lot of senior citizens living here, the sort of habit that came from living through the scarcity of World War II and never quite went away.

But two things that do show up regularly is magazines and books. I’m a big magazine addict so it’s fun to find back issues of things I don’t read regularly, and there’s someone who regularly leaves out food magazines, which all find their way into our kitchen. Usually the books people leave down there are Harlequin romances, Stephen King novels, and that sort of thing, but tonight was odd: someone left Teach Yourself C In 21 Days and Teach Yourself SQL In 21 Days, both of which I grabbed. I don’t really need either, but the SQL book will go in my “here, read this instead of asking me” library at work, and the C book will be a good quick read-through to force me to get back up to speed in C before joining the SQL one. Not a bad find!