For an East coast transplant like me, the long weekend for Cesar Chavez day was an unexpected surprise and a chance to catch up with home improvements. After a series of strategic coupon purchases, we dropped a few hundred bucks at the local Home Depot and Lowes to deck out the backyard. While Melody plucked weeds and planted a small herb garden, I was replacing old defunct path lights with new LED ones. After the sun went down, we hoped to relax to the new Game of Thrones video game by Telltale, which also produced the Wolf Among Us. But like the TV series, the game’s harsh decision trees and unavoidable calamities made the whole exercise seem rather futile and us feeling constantly defeated. I felt a similar feeling after spending 2 hours with an electrician unsuccessfully trying to locate a voltage drop in the landscape lighting. On Tuesday, we attended a special showing of the movie After Tiller, which did not lighten the mood, but gave me a better sense of how important and special my wife’s work truly is. We concluded the show with a Q&A session, followed by tapas at Aioli Bodega (and not at Plan B, as I had predicted). With our upcoming weekend trip to Napa, we can’t wait for the week to be over.