The Tweets you see when you forget your phone

I went to the grocery store after work today armed with a list of things I need for the First Annual Baking Extravaganza here at Chez Vee. I was really wishing I'd remembered to put my cell in my purse before I left the house this morning. I can be much more tolerant of irritations when I am able to secretly snark about them to Twitter.

1) I need a bag of white chocolate chips. I'm finding every kind of chip but that. Chocolate in various forms (dark, semi-sweet, milk, with mint, miniature), butterscotch, peanut butter, cinnamon, but no white chocolate. Am I the only person in town who wants this? Surely there's more than just the recipe I'm using that calls for 'em.

2) I need raspberry preserves (same recipe, as it happens). I find the jelly aisle (after passing it twice), and am to stuck behind a man who is...well, the only word for it is bogarting. Yep. He is bogarting the jelly. I need one 12-ounce jar of raspberry preserves. I can see them but I can't get to them. He is standing in front of me (us, really. Other people are trying to get at the jelly, too) and a little off to my left, swaying, weaving, browsing, dreamily oblivious of anything except the burning question of what should go on his toast. He has a jar of something in his hand already, but he is (I guess) trying to decide if this is the right choice. Dude, it's jelly. Pick something and go. Or at least get outta people's way. He sways a little to the left and I see my chance. I dive in, snag my preserves, turn around and smile grimly at the mother of two (one child in the cart, one hanging off of the edge) who is about to take my place, and move on. And yes, before you ask, people have tried speaking to him. He doesn't respond to "excuse me."

3) Hey look! A whole display of baking items! Three tables' worth! One whole table is covered with varieties of chips from Nestlé, Hershey, Ghirardelli...and still no white ones. Blast.

4) I am now stuck behind a mother and son tag-team of slowpokes. They're meandering cartless up the aisle, looking at everything and finding nothing in particular. They put just enough room between them that I could almost get through, and then close up the gap again right before I decide to try. Mom mentions something to the boy about snacks for his hockey team, maybe something individually wrapped, so I'm guessing that's what they're looking for. As we get to the end of the aisle I will them to turn left. My mind to your mind, your thoughts to my thoughts..... Crap. They're turning right. And I still can't get round them. I duck down an aisle I don't need just to get away from them and get stuck behind them again two aisles later. What on earth are they doing in the frozen foods section? Are they gonna give the hockey team succotash?

5) Just for the heck of it, right before leaving I go back to the baking aisle one more time in search of my white chips. There's a cardboard display that I don't remember seeing before, and on the bottom, shoved way in the back there is one bag of what I'm looking for. I grab it, toss it in the cart, and scurry towards the check out line. Oop! The Slowpoke Hockey Mom just picked that line. Keep moving, try another one. Hey, look! Bogarter made it out of the jelly aisle. Out of curiosity, I get behind him and see what he chose: store brand grape. Aw, c'mon. For all that wavering, he could have at least bought something by Bonne Maman or Trappist.

6) Passing me on their way into the store as I leave it is a mother-daughter duo, going over their list of baking needs. I hear mother say just before the door shuts,

"Don't let me forget, we need white chocolate chips too."

Rotsa ruck, ma'am.

I am going to be useless by about 4pm

Good morning.

Take a look at the time stamp at the bottom of this post. That is not a mistake. 3:14 in the bleeding a.m. Why am I up this early? Bus leaves in three hours. Taxi was called for 5:30. Traveller's anxiety set in around 9 last night, and will elevate to panic levels around 45 minutes from now. I set three different alarm times on my cell phone (which I'm still using to get myself up in the morning. I've very effectively hidden my alarm clock in one of the still unopened boxes), and then set the timer on the TV as back up. And I set the coffee to brew at 3, in case I needed a smell to wake me.

I beat them all. I was awake for fifteen minutes before the first alarm went off, and I lay there in the dark waiting for it. The cat followed me around for a bit to see what was going on, but has since decided sleep is much more interesting right now.

I don't know why I get so worried about sleeping past the time the bus leaves. In all the years I've traveled, I've never once missed the bus to due oversleeping. I did miss it once because of road conditions. One year before Christmas we got hit with sleet in the wee hours, and it made the roads very slick. Because of that it the taxi was horribly late and we skidded into the terminal parking lot just in time to watch the bus pull away and disappear. I still had a couple of days before Christmas, so it wasn't such a big deal to try again the next day. Mom was relieved, actually, because she was worried about the bus on icy roads, so it wasn't a big deal. Except that yes, the driver made me pay him for the trip back to my apartment even though his lateness was the reason I needed a ride back.

So for reasons I can't explain, here I am at a quarter past dark, nose in my coffee cup, trying to prioritize all the stuff I need to do before I leave. Some of my clothes are still tumbling around in the dryer, so I definitely need to finish packing. Extra food out for cat, check. Turn off coffee pot, not just yet. Change litter box -- need to do that. Hide Christmas presents that are scattered around the living room -- my parents are driving me back here. Mom needs to go to Lowes. At least, that's what she told me. I think it's an excuse, but well, as long as they're headed this way and they don't mind...which reminds me, I need to finish cleaning the upstairs bathroom. Pack up laptop. Will do that after I hit "publish."

The TV just turned itself on. Hurray! I finally figured out how to use the timer!

All right folks, time for me to go. Happy Thanksgiving to those who celebrate it, and happy Thursday to everyone else.

Photo Sunday 2

Last week I promised you proof that I do go outside once in a while. The weather since then hasn't been very cooperative. It's been gray, rainy, and cold all week. Today it even flurried a little.

I did go out today, though, and as I got off the bus I saw what I should be photographing. The sky was gorgeous:



See? And here's one that shows what I got when I pointed the camera almost straight up:



And then, on my way to the parking lot of the shopping center, I saw a little bitty maple (I think), fighting to live in the middle of another shrub, and not quite ready to let go of its leaves:



There you go. I haven't decided yet what I'm taking pictures of next Sunday. I guess it'll be a surprise.

1,2,3,4....

There is an ornamental gate on campus, right at the point where the college ends and town begins. It's located in a very central location -- one of the main streets of town empties right into another one right at this gate. All of the bus lines stop there. I guess you could call it the heart of town.

This gate is a popular spot for a number of groups--itinerant preachers (most notably in recent days the one I've dubbed Biblemouth. I've mentioned him before. Three months later, he's still at it) as well as other, more organized religious groups who sing hymns and hand out leaflets to passersby. Fraternities and sororities set up at the gate to fund raise for their charities. On election day last week, people were there organizing rides to the polls for anyone who needed one. Periodically Quakers for Peace stand there protesting the war in Iraq, with signs asking you to "Honk for Peace," and "Bring Them Home Now."

And tonight a huge group of students, some of them members of the LGBT community, stood at that gate with rainbow flags and signs that say "Marriage is a Right" and "Honk for Equality" -- protesting California's Proposition 8. Shouts of "1,2,3,4, open up the closet door! 5,6,7,8, don't assume your kids are straight!" were punctuated by car honks from drivers who read the signs as they went by. The car horns were greeted cheers from the protesters.

Usually the students don't start protesting until spring. Something woke them up early. I wonder if it was the election.

I love watching students protest. They throw themselves into it with such vigor. And I prefer their youthful enthusiasm to some dude in a straw hat screaming through his Bible that we're all going to Hell.

On a completely unrelated note: I've never had fifteen entries in a month before. Woohoo, landmark!

Street painting

The Central Pa. Festival of the Arts was last week. One thing I had forgotten about last year was the Italian Street Painting Festival that is held over on Heister Street, away from most of the foot-traffic. I wouldn't have remembered it this year, either, except that I went over there to go see "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" Thursday evening, just as things were getting started. Lucky I remembered to pack my camera in my bag that morning.

I went back Sunday evening to see how things turned out, and just finished posting a whole mess of pictures on Flickr.

Just in time

A few weeks ago I decided to bite the bullet and call the Circuit City protection plan folks about my poor blind camera. I was all set for another couple of rounds of "Chase the FedEx Guy," but it seems their policy has changed. They no longer repair cameras under $25o (mine was $249). What they do instead is get you to send the camera back to them, and they send you a gift card for its full purchase price. You can use that card to replace the one that broke, or for anything else you want.

So I did that, and last Wednesday I bought a new camera. Same brand, but a little bit of an upgrade. I have a 12x optical zoom now. I think the last one was 6x. This one also has the option of focusing manually, which eliminates a problem I used to have with the old one--sometimes the camera would focus on the background instead of what I wanted to be the foreground.

Got it just in time, too, because my friend's birthday party was Friday. I took a ton of pictures, some of which I put on Flickr. The set isn't complete yet, mostly because dial-up takes forever. I did bring the laptop onto campus yesterday for a wireless connection, but only got done about half of what I wanted.

I've been up to my neck in a project for my Mom's birthday. That's where I've been lately, by the way. There was a fair amount of hand-dirtying work, and no matter how many times I washed up I still felt sticky. I really didn't want to accidentally prime/paint/glue/varnish myself to the computer, so I just stayed away from it. As soon as Mom's birthday has passed, I'll show you what I did.

P.S. If you were here earlier, this photo was smaller and darker. I've been editing 'em and replacing 'em. The pictures looked fine on the camera's monitor, but a lot of them seem a little too dark everywhere else.

Games night

"Did I tell you," Chief Loon asks as I tally up our scores, "that we received another $25 donation for the Wasp? That brings our total to $844."

"Awesome!"

"Yeah. I have half a mind to go down to the library with a check for six dollars, just to make it an even $850."

"You're still winning, by the way." I deal the cards. "By an embarrassing amount."

"I think I kinda like this game." It's a card game called Five Crowns. I bought it last winter from one of those games-and-calendars stands that pop up in malls all over the country right around November and vanish by the end of January.

"Me too. It's like a kinder form of gin, except with five suits and really nice artwork."

"I don't play gin." She picks up her cards and starts to rearrange them.

"No, me neither. Not with people, anyway. Gin makes me swear."

"What does vermouth do?"

"Don't know yet."

"Ah. Working your way through them alphabetically, are you."

I nod, concentrating on my cards.

Games night is something the Chief came up with last fall. At 7 pm on the first Saturday of every month, we (the Loons) open up the teeny little ex-train station that serves as Bellefonte's Chamber of Commerce building, hang out a sign that says, "GAMES NIGHT!" and play board and/or card games for three hours. The idea is that people can drop in and play with us, bring their own games, whatever. It gets announced in a couple of the local papers, and the Chief puts out a come-one-come-all message over the libraries' email the day before (did I mention we're coworkers? We are. Different departments, same building). So far, the only time anyone who wasn't a Loon (or a Loon's spouse) showed up was accidental. People asking directions, looking for info on Bellefonte, etc. Nobody stops in to play with us.

Here's the thing: I don't like playing games. Chief knows this, and thinks that I'm either extremely kind, I'm slightly masochistic, or she's a lot better with the guilt than she thought she was. I keep showing up because I have this image in my head of her playing solitaire for three hours or (as she put it jokingly at the last games night, when this subject came up) playing rock-paper-scissors by herself all night and losing.

It's not really accurate to say that I don't like playing games. I do play them, see. I even own a few. I don't like competitive people. I want to play just to play. My childhood friend Suzanne and I used to drive her mother crazy with the way we played badminton. She'd sit on the porch and watch us bat the birdie back and forth, back and forth.

"You do know that you're never going to score if you keep hitting it to each other," she'd point out.

"Are you keeping score?" Suz and I would ask each other in unison. Our unspoken common goal was to keep the birdie aloft as long as possible.

My family is full of poor losers and worse winners, and I still bear scars from a Monopoly game where my father swore at my mother. If I run into someone who must win, I get put off. At first. Then I feel the Beast rise within me and I need to win. I need to crush this person who presumes to think they can beat me. I want to send them home crying. That disturbs me.

And so, I play games online at Pogo against a computer whose feelings won't get hurt. Or I play with the few members of my family who are gracious winners and losers. I try to model my playing after my Grandma Ruth, who died a year ago this past April. She was an excellent game player -- anything you wanted to play she'd try, but she really liked cards, scrabble, and yahtzee best. She taught all of her grandchildren how to play some of the games she liked, and now the whole clan (and there are hordes of us. We could populate a town, these descendants of Grandma Ruth's) plays canasta, at least. Most of us play shanghai rummy, backgammon, and hearts as well.

She was cutthroat. If she saw an opening she'd take it, and she'd expect you to do the same. But when she won (which was most of the time) she didn't rub your nose in it. She'd just reshuffle the cards, or collect the dice, or slide the tiles back into the box, and say, "Again?" And whether she was winning or not, she always complimented the good moves you made, marveled with you over your stroke of luck if you rolled 5 6's as a double yahtzee, applauded your seven-letter word.

I try to be like that, and most of the time I can silence the Beast and be a gracious winner or a good loser.

As long as I don't play gin.

Blogging remotely

For a number of reasons, the main one being that my desktop machine is on its last legs, I bought myself a laptop last week. It has a hard drive twice the size of the old machine, a wireless card, a 17-inch monitor (the main selling-point, really. Yes, it's heavier than most others, but I have all sorts of room on the screen! I consider that a fair trade), and this nifty little camera above the screen. I can use it to take pictures of myself, but I can also flip it round and take pictures like the one to the left.

This is the room I'm blogging from at the moment. It's my favorite place in the library. Before the renovation (back in the late nineties), it was the Maps library and was just jammed full of map cases, with a section in the back that had tables similar to these. No lamps, though. Then the football coach donated a huge chunk of money to the renovation project, so they turned this room into an old-timey looking reading room and named it after his family. Those brass and green glass lamps house electrical outlets and laptop ports in their bases. The ports were used much more frequently before they installed wifi in the whole building, but it's still a pretty neat idea.

You can't see it very well (the camera only has 1.3 megapixels to it, and was definitely made to take very close-range pictures), but the trim near the ceiling is a series patterns in plaster-- the largest one has been painted red and gold. Back when this was the Maps room, all of those fantastic little details were all painted the same color as the wall. I was so happy to see this room finally get treated the way it deserves. It's in the oldest part of the building, and one of the few places that hasn't been hacked apart or partitioned off into smaller, pokier rooms.

Well, that's about it for now. I just wanted to try out my camera and my wireless card. I suppose I should pack everything up and go get myself some supper before it gets much later.

Trust

Two young women (late teens, early twenties) were alone on a large expanse of lawn on campus yesterday, taking turns falling backwards into each other's arms. I was passing at some distance, and didn't like to interrupt, but I really want to know what that was about. I recognize it as a trust exercise--my Mom used to work in a drug rehab center for teens, and I remember her describing this to me. Were these ladies Psych students? Participants in the same group therapy session? Preparing team-building exercises? Was this the result of a conversation on trust? Were they just goofing around? No idea.

Interesting to watch, though.

Watching the tumbleweeds blow by

It's been like a ghost town since Friday of finals week. Graduation was this past weekend, and summer classes started this morning. It's still very, very quiet out there. And so I give you "Stray Bits II"

Bumper sticker: "EARTH FIRST! We'll screw up the other planets later."

Best Underground Newspaper/Alternative Press Title Ever: (So far. I'm only in the B's) The Buddhist Third Class Junk Mail Oracle (has the variant title of The Barking Rabbit)

With Friends Like These: Overheard on a bus. The young lady was discussing the return to town of her "best friend from high school" with (I assume) her boyfriend:

"You remember Bob. Dirty, skanky, hippie Bob?"
"Ohhhhh. Yeah."
"He's back. Still filthy." Silence for a moment. Then, "You wanna go over and say hi?"
He shrugs. She pulls the cord, and they get off at the next stop.

Desperately waiting for fashions to change

Clothes-shopping makes me grumpy.

All I wanted was a skirt and blouse to wear to the hafla today. The skirt was easy, I found that right off. Apparently the long, flowing "bohemian" style is back in. Great, wonderful, that'll be good to dance in. Now, finding a top, that's another story. How come all the summer tops are sheer, or have these teeny tiny little spaghetti straps? Call me old-school, but I really don't want my undergarments showing through or peeking out from under my clothes. It took 10 minutes to find a skirt, two hours to find a blouse. Thank goodness I wasn't looking for slacks, I'd probably have been in the mall until the place closed for the night.

Part of the down side of living in a college town is that most of the clothes you find in shops are aimed at the twenty-something set. I haven't been twenty-something for a while, and even if I did want to dress younger, I don't much care for the style right now. Almost everything looks like it's been shrunk in the wash. The clothes are too tight, and the waists of the bottoms don't even attempt to meet the waists of the blouses. You get about 1/2 to 3/4 of an inch of exposed skin. It looks all right on a certain body type (that of a stick insect, I mean), but for those of us who aren't a toned and fit size 6, it just looks horrible. We keep getting told that the U.S. is the fattest population on Earth, and then we're expected to wear sausage casings. Is this to prove a point? Are they trying to embarass us into looking better? 'Cause it ain't working. Most people just wear that horrible stuff whether it looks right on them or not, and when I walk down the street I wonder whether no one checks a mirror before they leave the house anymore.

I'm not what you'd call slender. In fact, I'm a bit chunky. I'm working on fixing that, and since I started a couple of years ago I've lost 100 pounds. Then my Grandma died, I got a bit depressed, and 20 of those lost pounds found their way back home again...but I am resolved. They are not here permanently.

I'm nowhere near my goal weight yet. The losing of those pounds only brought me down from "obese" to "overweight." I'm still not in any sort of shape to be wearing clothes that expose my belly. Funny, then, that I should take up belly dancing as a hobby, where the end result (supposedly) is to get up and dance in front of people in a costume that shows a lot of skin. I figure by the time I'm coordinated enough to do that, I'll be closer to the way I want to look. It's a very, very long-term goal.

And in the mean time, I guess if I want to find an outfit, I'll need to take a day off of work to do it. Oy.

Must dash. Going to go paint my toenails. If I'm dancing barefoot, my feet should look happy, no?

Adventures in Dining, or: No More Chicken Broccoli?

I decide it's time to go back to the New Chinatown restaurant. I have studied the little take-out menu I took home last time and picked out a couple of possibilities. I will not be done in by a man with a knowing smile or the words, "Hi! Chicken broccoli?"

Prepped, ready, and wearing my game face, I take a deep breath and open the door. The man I'm expecting to see behind the counter isn't there. It's the younger man, the one who seated me last time, and who doesn't know anything about my ordering history. I settle myself into an entirely different booth, and make a show of perusing the menu. I've already decided it's going to be either the Chinese mixed vegetables or eggplant in garlic sauce. I'm leaning more toward the second choice. I've had eggplant cooked a number of ways, and liked them all. My mom does a breaded, fried eggplant that's tasty, and I know I was served eggplant parmagiana somewhere. There's another Chinese place up the street that does something called "Wonderful Eggplant" that's pretty good.

I order eggplant in garlic sauce, steamed rice, and a big glass of diet cola, and settle down with my book (Revenge, by Stephen Fry -- I believe its European title is The Stars' Tennis Balls). As the waiter brings me my drink, a question flits through my mind: why it is that you could throw an egg roll in this town and probably hit a Chinese restaurant? We have at least 5. We're not really that big a town.

A few minutes later, the woman I always think of as "Ma" comes out of the kitchen with someone's take-out order. I don't know whether she owns the place, but she certainly runs it. She is always around here somewhere. I can't tell whether all her employees are relatives, because when not talking to customers they speak in Chinese and I can't tell what they're calling each other. But if body language and tone of voice are anything to go by, she's definitely the matriarch. She sees me and waves.

A bell rings in the kitchen, and she disappears into it, returning a moment later bearing what must be my order.

"Hi, how you doing? No more chicken broccoli?" She plunks down the plate in front of me, along with a little bowl of rice.

"No, I, um. I'm getting kind of bored with it." I'm staring at what she's brought me.

"Ah. Well, enjoy." And off she goes.

It looks like whale meat. Whale meat? Where did that comparison come from? I must be accessing some half-remembered memory from a sixth grade social studies movie about Eskimos. I wouldn't know whale meat if you pointed it out to me. Nevertheless, that is the phrase that leaps to mind: whale meat.

They must have used a whole eggplant. It's in big cubes, and it hasn't been skinned, so it's part black and shiny, part almost colorless. And the garlic sauce has added to the glossiness. It looks...weird.

Well, try it, for pity's sake. Quit acting like such a baby. Plenty of things that look strange turn out to be pretty good. Take caviar for example. I wonder who the first person was caught a female sturgeon, cleaned it, and said to himself, "Mmm, I bet that'd be good on toast." Mind you, I've never had caviar, and I doubt somehow I could make myself eat it.

I take a bite, and immediately wish I was dining with someone. Somebody should at least enjoy this experience. I'm sure the face I'm making is priceless. It's distress. It's an I-can't-spit-this-out-I'm-in-public face.

Have you ever had potato soup out somewhere, or maybe just a soup with potatoes in it? Maybe the soup has been simmering in a pot all day, maybe it was microwaved just after you ordered it (depends upon the sort of place you're in, I guess). Your first taste tells you that the broth is at the right temperature, and subsequent bites are all about the same. It doesn't occur to you that the bits of potato would be any different, right? And all the time, those potatoes are lying in wait, ready to make you cry, hoping you'll be stupid enough to not test them first before biting. Potatoes don't just retain heat, they hoard it.

Guess what? So does eggplant.

It is hot. It is eye-watering, palate-blistering, this-will-scorch-my-throat hot. Radioactive. I take a swig of soda, and that manages to cool things down enough that I can swallow it. I realize it was so hot that I couldn't pay attention to anything else, so I still don't know what it tastes like. I play around with a couple more pieces, opening them up a bit so that some of the steam (or whatever) can escape, and then I try again.

We have a texture problem. The skin is very chewy (just call it tough, why don't you), and the flesh is mush. As for taste...there is none. You'd think with the sauce, this stuff would have developed a garlicky flavor. Nope. Nothing. The sauce is great, though. Goes well with the rice.

I eat a few more pieces, because she's watching me. Probably because I think of her as "Ma," I feel I can't just leave it there on my plate. It would hurt her feelings. So I move it around a bit, trying to hide the fact that I'm mainly eating the rice, and go back to reading my book. All the while I'm watching her out of the corner of my eye. The second she heads back into the kitchen, I take the plate over to the trash can and dump half of it in. By the time she comes out of the kitchen I am back in my booth, looking like I never left. Whew.

When I go up to pay, she asks me how it was.

"It was okay," I answer. I don't say what we both know.

I'd have been better off with chicken and broccoli.

Chicken Broccoli?

Walking to the New Chinatown Restaurant for dinner after work, I resolve to not get the same old thing. Every time I go there (and it's been off and on for a couple of years now), I end up with chicken and broccoli. Nothing wrong with that. I like chicken. I like broccoli. Ergo, I like chicken and broccoli. But I've fallen into a sort of rut with this place, where that's the only entree I order.

They don't even bother to give me a menu anymore. As a matter of fact, every time I walk through the door, the fella who's usually running the cash register smiles at me and says, "Hi! Chicken Broccoli?"

Not. This. Time. I mean it. I'm tired of being that predictable. There must be plenty of things I'd like on that menu. I should choose another one. I shall choose another one.

When I walk in, he's writing down a take-out order from a youngish dark-haired woman in a navy wool coat and really nice boots. Dressy boots. Boots you only wear when there is absolutely no possibility of bad weather. Looks like she's taking dinner home for the family. Another young man who I don't believe has ever waited on me asks me whether this is for here or to go. As I tell him "For here," my friend behind the counter glances over the young woman's head, sees me, and says:

"Hi! Chicken Broccoli?"

"I don't know yet," I grab one of the xeroxed take-out menus from the counter, and go sit down -- in exactly the same booth as always.

All sorts of stuff here. I skip the beef section. I don't really like beef in Chinese restaurants. Too chewy. Egg Foo Young (I pause briefly and consider the spelling. Shouldn't it be y-u-n-g? I shrug. Spellcheck gone wild, I assume)? That's just a Chinese fritatta, isn't it? Kung Pao chicken? Only if I want to blow the back of my head off. Pork with mushrooms? I don't really trust pork that hasn't been cooked by my Mom. Trichinosis, and all that. Lemon chicken? But that's just meat in sauce. I should eat some vegetables. Broccoli and bean curd in oyster sauce? That's just chicken and broccoli with a slight replacement.

Flip over to the back, to a section entitled "Chef's Specialties." Peking Duck must be ordered in advance. That's just fine, I don't even know if I like duck. Moving on. Stewed fish with brown sauce. What kind of fish? Fresh squid in black bean sauce. Um...no. Happy Family. Nice name, no description. Dragon and Phoenix. Ditto. Ground pork with winter melon. Hmm. There's that pork thing again. Oh dear. Pork stomach soup with sauerkraut. Shudder. Immediately I think, "Chinese haggis!" but then I remember that haggis comes from a sheep. People sure do eat some strange stuff.

The fellow from the counter is at my table now. Smiling. He knows. Oh, yes, he knows. I hang my head in shame.

"I guess I'll have chicken and broccoli," I admit. He reaches for the menu, but I clutch it to me.

"Oh, can I keep this? I want the phone number," I lie. I really want it for my blog entry, because I have nothing with me on which to make notes, and I want to remember the pork stomach soup thing. I also want to read up for the next time I come in here.

As he walks away, I have one little glimmer of an idea for being different:

"Could you maybe have them do that..."

"...in garlic sauce?" He finishes for me. "Sure."

"Thanks." Apparently I've been doing that a lot too.