Busy Weekend
Mar. 10th, 2008 01:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chomijiThe sis-in-law (the one who's married to a minister) had a rotten week: her employer is transferring her, with almost no notice, to a different facility, and as she runs a senior center (basically, daycare for senior citizens), it means leaving behind not only staff, but also clients. So she decided at virtually the last minute to come down (with our nephew in tow) and see the Young Lady's play (our daughter is crewing her school's not-quite-spring musical, Beauty and the Beast) Friday night, because she thought it would cheer her up. This meant I had to clean up the guest room, which was wall-to-wall wrapping paper bits and rolls still, from the last installment of Xmas. But when I got home, there was an Amazon box waiting: I have Samurai Deeper Kyo 27, xxxHolic 11 [thanks, megan!!], and Takumi-Kun 2!
Saturday I was not feeling well - malaise about sums it up - and nothing much happened except meals out (lunch at Oriental East, which has great dim sum and forgettable service; dinner at Austin Grill, which is quite good for a chain) and the week's grocery shopping. The Young Lady was crewing again and had to eat leftovers for dinner. Oh well - it builds character!
Sis-in-law left early Sunday morning, and then sanada came to visit! We had brunch at Jackie's (retro American cuisine in a groovy-funky 1960s industrial setting) and talked manga nonstop. A good dose of fangirling makes one feel ever so much better. Then we went and saw the matinee of the play ourselves. Energy level good, one or two really good performances, scenery very uneven (the Beast's castle was very, very good, the village scenery was pretty lame), costumes pretty nice (althought the dinner plates were awful), and the special effects were much fun ... during the Beast's transformation at the end, petals fell from the catwalks onto our heads. They were meant to be rose petals, but all I could think of was (a) Sakura of Doom and (b) Nanao dumping baskets of petals over Shunsui. And the casting was the usual marvellous Blair High School racial mix: Oriental Belle, African American Gaston, Hispanic (I think) Beast, and so on. Dinner was what the Mr. calls "the meat place" - Brazilian BBQ.
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Date: 2008-03-11 03:07 pm (UTC)You a fan of the fantasy works of Diana Wynne Jones, by any chance? In one of her children's books (Charmed Life), a bitchy young girl is berating her cousins for being fat. They smile placidly and say "Fat is comfortable. It's much more of a nuisance looking like a china doll, like you do!"
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Date: 2008-03-11 03:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-03-12 08:27 pm (UTC)You might want to check out the DWJ recs I did for smilla a little bit ago ... your mileage may vary on Dogsbody, which is a very sweet book but rec'ced here mainly because of the dog angle. The rest are things I'd happily rec to anyone who likes fantasy/magical stuff.
(And there are C.J. Cherryh recs there too, but I have no idea if SF is your thing at all.)
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Date: 2008-03-13 08:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-03-17 03:24 am (UTC)You might like the light space opera The Witches of Karres, which I just talked smilla into reading, as well!
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Date: 2008-03-17 08:25 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-03-18 08:23 pm (UTC)I'll take your word for it ... I generally don't watch TV, which means I miss even things I suspect I'd like (including that).
(I got out of the habit, and now have so little free time as it is, TV is just not something worth adding back into the mix, I think. I'd rather read, write, communicate with friends, or even play Civ.)
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Date: 2008-03-18 08:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-03-18 10:11 pm (UTC)The Mr.'s idea of watching TV almost always (90% of the time at least) involves flipping channels. A lot. I have to be just wanting his company, period, to put up with it! (And our daughter won't deal with it at all.)
To give you an idea of how out of the habit I am: I got the complete first season of Avatar on DVD for Xmas. I watched the first episode (I used my Mac, not the TV) and liked it ... and haven't touched it since. It's pathological at this point. Maybe I'll manage to convince one or the other of those clowns who live at my house to watch it with me - that might do it.
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Date: 2008-03-19 11:55 am (UTC)I swear there's a gender factor here. All the guys I know are like that. WhyTF can't they use the programme guide?!!! I feel seasick as Mr Kis whizzes through the channels.
I watched the first episode (I used my Mac, not the TV) and liked it ... and haven't touched it since.
Shame!
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Date: 2008-03-20 03:58 pm (UTC)XD
I really need company if I'm going to watch something movie-ish!
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Date: 2008-03-11 07:25 pm (UTC)Anything by DWJ is better than the best things by almost anyone else ... but my faves are actually not part of the "Chrestomanci" books. Of those, my favorite is The Lives of Christopher Chant.
Aditi Indian Kitchen on the lower level (food court) is where I get mine. How good they are in the absolute sense - I don't know. I'm a tyro when it comes to Indian food. I only like mild heat, and the Mr. doesn't care of Indian-style spices at all, so I rarely get it.
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Date: 2008-03-12 05:50 pm (UTC)> cringes <
We'll have to get the Peruvian roast chicken from the Chicken Place in Wheaton for you then, and you can dress it to your hot-blooded heart's content with their amazing green chili sauce. I have to dilute it 10:1 with ketchup ... .
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Date: 2008-03-12 08:10 pm (UTC)Not to worry ... I'll stick with my beloved Hong Kong/Cantonese and occasional forays in to Hunan, thankyouverymuch!!!
Sometime we'll finally get you to one of the Hollywood East locations and you can have their lovely shrimp wontons both in soup and in mild- to medium-spicy "XO" sauce. (Are you sensing a theme here? Yes, I must feed my friends ... I have to make them try everything I enjoy eating! And then I have to make them read everything I like reading!)
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Date: 2008-03-12 09:02 pm (UTC)Oh shoot! > whacks self in head < I forgot about the seafood issue, totally! :-(
For the XO sauce, yes - you can get XO sauce on the usual range of main dish stuffs: chicken, tofu, etc. (as well as scallops, but that does you no good). But "Hong Kong Wonton Soup" with the shrimp dumplings is one of their signature dishes.
Yes, there's a Burmese place in Silver Spring that we've visited a couple of times with my friend Kat and her family - Mandalay. The Mr. and I sometimes have a yen for Korean, but the Young Lady is perfectly content to limit her Korean to the house-made veg mandoo at our local crazy family- and hippie-friendly cafe, Mark's Kitchen, owned and operated by Korean-born Mark Choe.
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Date: 2008-03-17 03:29 am (UTC)Well, I certainly don't want to have you check out your zen again for the sake of some shrimp dumplings, even if they are wonderful!!!