For the first time in several weeks, I took a full day off. To get my mind off a recent personal setback, I decided that I’d treat every day as Tuesday. On Tuesdays, one doesn’t have the expectation that one should have a date that evening. On Tuesdays, one works, eats, sleeps, works out. One rarely laments loves gone by on a Tuesday.

But I treated yesterday as a true Saturday, starting off by meeting someone for coffee, then stopping by a nail salon for a quick eyebrow mowing. Next I called an old friend and asked him to lunch.

We ended up looking for coffee in ritzy, beautiful La Jolla, CA, about 25 minutes from downtown San Diego. Turns out you can’t really find your standard coffee hangout spot in La Jolla. The real estate is so high that all the coffee shops are really expensive little specialty cafes.

One we passed had a couple dozen giant, painted cookies in the front window. I mean big a** cookies, perhaps 8-10 inches at the widest points. Lots of them were La Jolla themed, including a surfboard cookie and a big blue whale and a tropical fish.

One cookie really got to me, though. It was a big red fire truck emblazoned with “2007.” It was on the biggest pedestal, right up front. Since most of the other cookies were animals of some sort, I couldn’t figure it out at first, thinking that maybe they were trying to appeal to little boys with fire truck fetishes.

But then I realized that they were capitalizing on the recent San Diego fires, which threatened to sweep through the whole region from the East to the West, stopping only at the sea.

Poor, poor, poor taste, fancy La Jolla bakery. You’re using a cutesy representation of a natural disaster to attract attention and to sell more cookies? Wouldn’t it be more appropriate to have a sign saying you’ll donate money to the cause for every cookie sold or something?