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Last year: Colleen said quietly across the table to me, "I'm goin' to hell for that..." to which I responded, "Dear, we've been goin' to hell for years!" |
Matt and I went with Braz and Kris to Samurai, a Japanese hibachi restaurant down in Newport News, for dinner. (There used to be a good hibachi restaurant in Williamsburg, but it was replaced a while back with this ersatz Americanized place.) We tried some sushi (I was surprised to find I liked the crab, but I wasn't excited about anything else) and waited for what seemed like forever for our meal, which was fantastic. I even liked the shrimp appetizers, and seafood is not my thing.
After we were done eating, they brought me a fancily-cut orange with a candle in it and banged a drum while they sang "Japanese song of birthday and happy" which turned out to be "Happy Birthday" sung in a Japanese accent. It was fun.
After that, we went back to our house and had the peanut butter pie I'd made for myself. It wasn't quite as rich as I'd come to expect from my pie. I think the next one, I'll go back to using real cream cheese and real whipped cream. Not that I had any trouble eating it...
I got a bunch of great presents, too - even my grandmother's (her choices are a little touch-and-go) wasn't too bad. Matt was upset to discover that he and Karen had both got me the same book (Within the Fairy Castle, about Colleen Moore's dollhouse castle at Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry), but I'd rather have gotten two than none! So I'm not disappointed; I'll exchange one of them for store credit and get another book or two I'd like. And I have a nice stack of new CDs to listen to at work today.
Hey, do me a favor: If you sent me an e-card yesterday and I didn't post it, would you let me know? I know at least one never made it, and I'm wondering if it has something to do with our network here at the office.
Yesterday evening, just as I was opening the last of my packages, our doorbell rang. The woman who lives across the street was standing there holding a bag of wrapping paper. We'd ordered some from her son back in September, and she wanted to know if we remembered what we'd ordered.
The incompetants who'd organized the fund raiser had given her the bag of things people had ordered, and a list of names and phone numbers, but no addresses, and nothing to indicate what each person had ordered. We were flabbergasted. Luckily for her, her son hadn't been very enthusiastic about hawking his wares, and she had a good memory. She'd come to us first because she remembered him telling her that we'd bought two rolls of wrapping paper. I recognized the designs, and agreed. I also remembered ordering some gift bags, but couldn't remember what they looked like. It was no problem, though, because she only had one set of gift bags. And she knew the lady next door to us had ordered a candle. But she didn't even know who some of the people on the list were.
I hope she got it all straight eventually. Furthermore, I hope the school doesn't go with that fund-raising company again.
But Matt and I now have some very pretty wrapping paper for the holidays.
Word of the Day: ersatz - an artificial and usually inferior
News of the Weird: Chicago Museum Returns Borrowed Books 92 Years Late
-- Talk about overdue books. The Field Museum of Natural History recently returned 10 volumes to the American Museum of Natural History in New York -- 92 years late.
It seems a researcher from the New York museum took the books with him when he accepted a job at the Field Museum in 1908. American Museum officials suspect anthropologist Bertholt Laufer was using the books for research when he was hired away.
"He was a scrupulous individual, so I'm sure he intended to return them, but somehow he didn't," said Princeton University bibliographer Soren Edgren, who was hired by the American Museum to determine the exact content of its Laufer book collection.
Laufer had purchased 500 volumes -- including texts on medicine and natural history -- for the American Museum during an archaeological expedition to China from 1901 to 1904.
The American Museum didn't even know 10 of the books -- each belonging to a larger set -- were missing until it decided in 1990 to computerize its collection.
An earlier inventory of the Laufer books completed in 1918 showed that some of the books were already missing then, so Edgren said last week he began to wonder if Laufer might have been using the missing books for research when he had moved 10 years earlier.
They were returned to the New York museum this autumn.
- Such A Pretty Face edited by Lee Martindale
- Within the Fairy Castle by Colleen Moore
Current Projects:
- Mom's Christmas stocking
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