I walked over to the new Domain today for lunch. And passed the old rusty IBM building that has been thoroughly demolished and is now a large pile of sand. What is it with IBM selling off its properties and developers making way more money on the land?

I wouldn’t say that the route to the Domain is safe. Not with all of the temporary fencing around here. It makes quite the maze. I cut through the parking lot for the Texas Culinary Academy and was fortunate to find a gap in the fencing to make it towards the Domain. I can understand fencing that stops people from going to an active construction site. But why is there fencing on the right where there is just parking lots? Flawed! And, they create this road from Burnett to the Domain that is lined with fencing with no sidewalks for people to walk. Not very friendly for pedestrians.

I had lunch at a new restaurant called Jasper’s. It was a little odd when they asked for both my first and last name to seat me. In an empty restaurant. But I doubt that they spelled my last name correctly. So I don’t have to worry about Big Brother. The lunch was nice, if expensive. I tried out some Raspberry Quince tea from the Republic of Tea. It was nice and light. And also unsweetened, which is nice.

In a strange coincidence, I noticed that I had a dilemma in determining which shaker held salt and which held pepper. Last Sunday, I was talking with my aunt and cousin. And they told me that they had a bet as to which one had more holes than the other. The web replied that there was no standard and the authorities conflicted each other. Mine were quite similar. One was half an inch higher and had twice as many holes (with 2) as the other. So, since pepper has more letters in it than salt does would it use the two hole shaker? Or, because salt is essential to life, would it use the shaker with 100% more holes in it?

I stopped by the new Border’s afterwards to briefly look at the books. And was depressed to see that some of my favorite authors only had one of their books on the shelves. Both Mike Resnik and Jack Chalker are both prolific authors. So sad.

Besides tearing down old IBM buildings, they are doing other construction around here. From what I hear, it is infrastructure work. Sewer, water, electrical work… that kind of stuff. I guess that the rocky ground around here is making this work take forever.