Saturday I made chili, varying Grandmother’s recipe by replacing part of the chili powder with curry powder. It was not a disaster.

For two or three years I was never without a supply of navel oranges, because the Australian (or before that Chilean) crop came in just as the California crop was ending; but the antipodean goodies have not (yet) shown up this year. Is a weak dollar to blame?

Sunday: scurvy is averted: Chile came through.

I suspect my new glasses have more chromatic aberration than the old. In my computer background pattern, a fractal with lots of intense colors, the red seems to stand out in front of the blue.

In unrelated news, we had a good meal at Phương Thảo in Sunnyvale.

Madhu, on his way out of town, treated me to a tasty buffet lunch at Turmeric in Sunnyvale. I got there ahead of him and had time to loiter in the street, feasting my nose; the whole of Murphy Avenue between Evelyn and Washington was redolent (a word I’ve never used before) of temptations. A very good thing to know, next time I’m hungry in Santa Clara County.

Formative years in a college town in Illinois left me with definite opinions of what a pizza ought to be. I am pleased to report that Pizz’a Chicago in Santa Clara (the apostrophe is meant to suggest a pun with piece of) comes pretty darn close. My only criticism is that it’s a bit dry; it could use more tomato sauce.

Me: “Hamachi sashimi.”

Cashier: “It depends on what kind of fish, sir.”