#1 daughter and I had a doughnut and present birthday celebration with $2 son Friday and then came up to the Big City. We had a tea tasting (Snow Dragon Jasmine was the winner), inadvertently found ourselves in a dental convention, and met #2 daughter’s work colleagues. Then #2 got offf work and came home to find us sitting on a bench outside her building.

#2’s latest fellow had broken up with her. He had asked her to call him after work and when she did, told her it wasn’t working out and it wasn’t her, it was him.

I’ve never met him, but I wasn’t impressed with what she had told me about him, so my reaction was, “Plenty of fish in the sea!” but I know this is not the correct response. Fortunately, #1 daughter is good at this sort of thing, and #2 will be meeting up today with her girlfriends for drinking and crying, so I don’t have to work too hard at seeing this as a sad event.

We went out to dinner at a local Italian place. #2 had updated her facebook status, and so had sympathetic messages all night on her phone.

After dinner, we went out to the parking lot and noticed a sort of shrine set into the wall. We were wondering about it aloud, and a man came up to us and said, “Vito’s grandfather put it there.”

“Really? #1 daughter and I asked, moving closer to the man to hear all the details. #2 daughter was at the car, trying to hurry us out of there. It suddenly struck me that we were in the Big City, not in our little town where talking in a friendly fashion with strangers in dark parking lots might be okay.

We skedaddled.

Saturday morning we went down to the City Market, which I loved, and then to the Half Price Bookstore, where I picked up a bunch of SitePoint books on the cheap (naturally, this makes me think there are about to be giant changes in CSS which will make them all obsolete, but no matter) and also a book of clever ideas about how to make things with dead computers.

Then we walked around the plaza, admiring stuff and telling stories, and finished up with our business meeting at a Thai restaurant.

#2 daughter went on to the cathedral (her call was for an hour before the concert) and #1 and I moved all her furniture around and tidied and dusted her apartment. #1 also cleaned her kitchen.

The concert was extremely good, and the cathedral was certainly very beautiful. Afterwards, we went out to a pub with some old friends of #2’s who had stayed with us when they were all at school together. It was fun.