WELL, I kicked my heartburn finally and got myself recaffeinated and sane again, and then went back to the Garden of Tranquility, as promised, to try and give them a fair shake. This time I ordered all spicy stuff: Mongolian beef ($6.95), hai nan mango prawn ($8.95), and General Tsao chicken ($7.50). Asterisk city. (Asterisk = hot and spicy.)

Last time, heartburned and headached, as I might have mentioned, I had to order all bland stuff: Hong Kong delicatessen ($8.95), green onion pancakes ($2.25), and sizzling rice soup ($5.95). Thanks to my sister and brother-in-law, who didn't have heartburn, I also got to sample the somewhat spicy sunflower chicken ($7.50). Asterisk.

What do you notice? Right. That's a lot of dishes. Two trips to a place, people to eat with ... adds up to a lot of stuff sampled. If I were to talk about each thing individually, I'd run the risk of writing a real restaurant review, and I don't get paid the big bucks to write real restaurant reviews, so let's get this train off the track right now, before someone gets hurt.

Sad but true: Every last one of my chickens – Neno, Neno, Neno, and so on – was massacred in their home by some satanic sect of weasels or foxes or something. This happened over the weekend, while I was in the city. Sunday morning I found them: one without a head, another colorfully cross-sectioned like something out of a biology class trash can, and the rest just generally brutalized to death, not even eaten, which leads me to think: al-Qaeda. In response to recent speculations, Osama bin Laden is apparently alive and well in the woods by my house, running terrorist training camps for wildlife. Bobcats. Foxes. Weasels ... Sense-of-humorless sons-of-bitching evildoers, every last one of them. Especially weasels. Weasels will wipe out a whole houseload of chickens in one meal, I hear, lopping off heads and only sucking out the brains, the elitist snob pig fucks.

So ... nature sucks is my point, and we're clearly in over our heads here. My first impulse, after cleaning up the feathery mess and crying my eyeballs out, was to give up on farming and move back to the city immediately. However, Crawdad de la Cooter selfishly insists on finishing her last year of grad school first, so I guess we're stuck up here in Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom until June.

That's – what – 10 months. Well, I'll be damned if I'm going to go 10 months in Sonoma County, the chicken capital of California, without chickens, so my current impulse is to go buy another batch of peeps and spend the upcoming academic year more-or-less sitting on the porch with a shotgun across my lap and a weed in my mouth, squinting.

What do you think?...

Really? I apologize. I didn't know you felt that way. All right then, the green onion pancakes were great, the mango prawn dish and the sunflower chicken one were pretty good, the sizzling rice soup and the General Tsao'd Nenos were decent, and the Mongolian beef, as Deevee put it, tasted like "cleaning-out-the-oven scrap scrapings," or something like that. It was pretty bad, in fact. All stringy onions and even stringier strips of meat. I couldn't tell if they were overdone or underdone, but it was one of those rare times when you actually feel guilty giving your leftovers to a homeless person.

All of which adds up and evens out to so-so, second chance included. So-so minus, maybe, or ho-hum plus. Which is too bad, 'cause it's a nice place, with nice homey touches like old-style lanterns hanging over half of the tables, a counter, wood-beam ceiling, and general friendliness. And I'd heard from two different sources it was going to be good.

I think maybe my sources must've went for lunch, when everything's four-fifty, five bucks. I'll forgive a lot for four-fifty, five; but seven-fifty, eight really raises the bar.

Speaking of bars, I was sitting in one the other night, trying to drown my chickeny sorrows ... Oh, wait, I forgot to tell you the rest of the story, speaking of drowning. So Crawdad had stayed in the city Saturday night too, right? So by the time she comes home, I've got everything all cleaned up and all, and I'm ready to get my mind onto some prettier subject, if possible, so we decide to go to the beach, right, big bodies of water being pretty damn pretty and relaxful and whatnot. So on the way to the beach I run over a cat, and already – just like that – my chickens are the second gruesomest thing I ever seen. Some day. Garden of Tranquility. 2001 17th St. (at Kansas), S.F. (415) 861-8610. Daily, 11 a.m.-11 p.m. Takeout available. MasterCard, Visa. Beer and wine. Wheelchair accessible.

Dan Leone is the author of Eat This, San Francisco (Sasquatch Books), a collection of Cheap Eats restaurant reviews, and The Meaning of Lunch (Mammoth Books).