A Girl...

Chop Chop

This weekend afforded more opportunity for chopstick practice, as we had restaurant ramen for dinner last night and a dim sum brunch earlier in the day. Alas, I'm not getting any better with chopsticks and have blueprinted a design for a custom pair fitted with decoratively spiked ends not unlike the javelin spears in 300.* If I raise a war cry before stabbing my tofu, you'll know why.

For a person who is scared to eat, dim sum might seem the worst thing in the entire world (save maybe a timed jambalaya-eating contest), what with all the unidentifiable meat products wrapped in an opaque substance the texture of human skin and then fried to within an inch of its life. (Note: Don't make eye contact with the live sea creatures in the tanks by the front door.) Both times I've had dim sum, though, I've walked away with a fat belly, a smiling face, and renewed confidence in the ability of my digestive system to, you know, do what it was designed to do. We met up with friends we see every few months or so and passed a pleasant hour with them and a few of their friends, alternately talking in English about geeky stuff with the Lucasfilm and Google employees or listening to others at our table talk in Japanese about who knows what. (I heart living in a cosmopolitan city.) One thing I'm sure of is that the Chinese language as spoken by the dim sum ladies offering to scissor me up some pork buns is a hell of a lot better than listening to the Chinese language as yelled outside our bedroom window at 8 a.m. ever.

Saturday night we drove down to the South Bay to attend the baby shower of one of Simon's (smokin'-hot) twin cousins. I'd met the sisters separately last summer and fall, and while it was great fun to see them together at last and thereby finally understand Simon's incestuous tendencies where they're concerned (they're actually second cousins, so it's totally okay!), mostly it was great to talk to them again because they're simply charming and lovely people, as are their husbands and parents and friends. Plus, one of the people there owned the restaurant where the (non-)shower was held, which meant all the free Sprite I could drink!

We had a good, busy, social weekend, and it served two lessons worth serving. For Simon, it backed his theory that going out and spending time with other people is fun and rewarding! For me, it backed my theory that going out and spending time with other people means the dishes don't get done. Noble though my goal may be, however, I have to admit that even I prefer smalltalk with strangers to cleaning out the food trap at the bottom of the sink.

In related news, we watched the first three episodes of the Discovery Channel's Planet Earth last night, and if you have the opportunity to see it, you should. The only thing that disappointed me about it was that during the episode on ocean life, I didn't see any shots of something I recently got curious about but was unable to identify via both Google and Google Employee: it's a large tan clam, about a foot across, with a fat, round, tapering appendage sticking from one side (like a turnip on a parade float, which is to say IT WAVED AT ME). If anyone knows what it might be, please let me know as I think I may have come across bits of one wrapped in rice paper and greedily popped it into my mouth.

*It was just okay, but everything you've heard about the abs is True.