facing days without lunch

I must have been in a good mood this morning, for when I heard from downstairs a cat sound we hear too often, though less since we've restricted Pandora's intake, instead of groaning I burst into song, to the tune of Eric Bogle's "Nobody's Moggie":

Somebody's barfing by the side of the road
Somebody's pussy who forgot her eating code
Someone's favorite carpet has run clean out of luck
For Pandora is upon it and beginning to upchuck

Fortunately there wasn't much of it, but she did not have a good day, for I gave her nothing else to eat till dinnertime. As usual, food-deprived or not, if I sat upon the couch she came and sat on top of me and would not be dislodged for more than a moment.

My own good mood only lasted until lunchtime. Having a task at the Mountain View library, and knowing this would be my last chance to have lunch out for a few days, I was looking forward to my favorite Chinese place downtown, only to discover that it closed down a couple weeks ago, victim, as I learned on looking this up after coming home, of Rapacious Landlord Disease, the well-known phenomenon whereby a commercial landlord would rather have an empty storefront - sometimes for years on end in past cases - than refrain from inflicting punishing lease increases on a well-loved existing tenant. So no more Marni's Chicken for me. This is, I think, the third time in the current century that my current favorite Chinese place in downtown MV has closed, and it could easily happen several more times.

At least I got my car's broken wheel fixed, while I sat on a bench outside the nearby mall reading a biography of Catherine the Great that treats human psychology like little clockwork toy dolls. Catherine is deprived of her mother's love, therefore she is unable to show love, yadda yadda. Except when she does, but let's ignore that. Accounts of the development of relationships between pairs of people show so many random pingpong fluctuations of emotion as to rouse a suspicion that the author is gamely trying to find large-scale patterns in fragmentary and misleading surviving documentary evidence. At least there's a clear explanation of what was going on with the partitions of Poland, which have always puzzled me.