Saturday for me today meant sleeping in. During the week I’ve been staying up late, working on projects and blog posts, and of course it’s eating into my sleep.

I think I haven’t really absorbed the fact that my walk+bus or bike commute still takes about 50 minutes door to door, the same since I started driving to Sausalito from Santa Rosa last June. For all intents and purposes, that’s two hours of my day, and compared to the 15 minute drive to Sebastopol, a daily loss of an hour and 10 minutes—which I seem to be subtracting from what I allocate for sleeping. This is the story of my life.

If I had a choice, I’d like my commute to be less than 20 minutes. I think the national average is something like 25. Somewhere around 15 would be real nice, just long enough to listen to 3 or 4 songs in the car and pass the transition from home to work.

Even better would be 10 minutes by bike. In about 10 minutes I could cover a mile and a half, the distance represented by the pink circle at the top of my post on the (in)efficiency of cities. We’re talking Nob Hill, Chinatown, North Beach, Russian Hill, Fisherman’s Wharf, The Embarcadero, the Financial district, Downtown, most of the Marina, and most of South of Market. That’s a lot of San Francisco (for FM to consider moving to when we outgrow sunny Sausalito). Man, if that were the case, I could bike to work (and home!) every day.

Anyway, I slept till about 10:45 this morning and lazed around for another hour. The importance of leisure. It was supposed to rain, but the sun and wind were out in full effect. The apartment and laundry have been needing some attention, so I decided I would make my goal focusing on that (and get Stephanie to go along). We got 5 loads of laundry running in parallel, Stephanie worked on dishes, and I worked on finding homes for things that needed homes.

I think we were better about doing a bi-weekly clean after moving in together, but lately (and mutually, I think) things have stretched out a bit. Stephanie says that in France they used to clean the house once a week, and give it a deep clean every one or two months. I tend to deep clean an apartment only when I’m moving out of it. So I prefaced my desire to clean up this morning by saying I thought the apartment needed a deep clean. I figured that would resonate. But by the time we’d finished some initial chores and put away the laundry, a tired Stephanie added that it might take two days (hand gesture: two fingers) to do a deep clean.

We had a little quatre-heure (4 o’clock snack) of salad and caramelized onion and goat cheese pastry bites (from Trader Joes) and started planning dinner, either a lasagna, or a cheese/mushroom/ham souffle. Went with lasagna, so we’d enjoy it more for lunch on Monday. Walked down to Cala Market to pick up some cheese, tomatoes, and Italian sausage.

Stephanie manned the stove while I did prep work, grinding parmesan, grating mozzarella, and pureeing many tomatoes (all thanks to Cuisinart). We were using the Culinary Institute of America’s 1000+ page tome, The Professional Chef as a guide, which meant we were making our own meat sauce from scratch. We added portobello mushrooms and probably not enough tomatoes. They called for more eggs in the ricotta mixture (3) than any of the recipes on the lasagna noodle boxes, and curiously said we should let the lasagna sit for 30-40 minutes (!) after cooking for an hour. I like these kind of instructions, because I’ve had many a lasagna get served straight out of the oven and settle onto my plate as a piping hot lasagna soup.

Not this time, oh no. Amazingly after 30 minutes of just hanging out in the oven, the lasagna was still quite hot, and kept its shape after we cut and served it.