incidents and accidents, hints and allegations

Last weekend we spent in Michigan with friends of Chad's from college, which was low-key fun: much grilled food, and hanging out by the Lake, and so forth. This weekend can be summed up in three letters:

Dear Local Independent Bookstore,

I was planning to support you by purchasing Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows at your establishment. However, when I arrived at your store at 9:30 a.m. and found that you didn't open until 10:00, I said to myself, "If I go to the Borders across the street, I could be home by 10:00."

And so I was.

Very truly yours,

A missed customer

* * *

Dear bathing suit manufacturers,

Thank you for finally realizing that it's often much easier to find a comfortable and well-fitting bathing suit if one can mix and match tops and bottoms. Now that you've made lots of non-bikinis available in two pieces, I actually finished my Quest for Spare Bathing Suits in a good mood.

Love,

Me

* * *

Dear Eddie Bauer,

No company that sends me as many catalogs as you do has any business carrying "store-only" items. You could have sold four or five pairs of shorts today, instead of just the one that the local store had in my size.

Very truly yours,

A mildly peeved customer

The shorts were going to be for Japan, but Chad suggested that maybe they wouldn't be appropriate, because he didn't recall seeing a lot of people wearing them and felt that the general custom was a little dressier. Thoughts, anyone? (I was thinking shorts because (1) it's going to be hot and (2) I'd like to wear sneakers rather than sandals, and my personal dress code does not include sneakers with skirts.)

Earlier in March, we went to New York City on the occasion of relatives' birthdays and saw a musical called The Drowsy Chaperone about which I intend to write more, really, I promise. Getting half-price same day tickets makes for a really long day, but if we got tickets ahead of time, going down for a matinee would be quite workable, so we'll have to keep that in mind. Any particular recommendations? I should note that Chad's not much on musicals unless they're metafictional or have some other reason for people bursting into song.

We've also booked our Japan flights and hotels. All we need is the rail pass (90 days ahead) and our flight seat assignments (ditto; not that I have any great hopes of getting an exit row, but we'll try). Now I need to start thinking about learning the language . . .

And as discussed previously here, I started taking a yoga class. It's certainly exercise, but I haven't decided if I'll take another one; the instructor hasn't been very useful in telling me which exercises I should avoid or modify because of the bursitis in my hips, and I'm not suited to the less-concrete parts of the class. On the other hand, having a scheduled class is a good thing for a procrastinatory Kate. We'll see when it's over.

Last weekend we went to Boston. We spend all day Saturday at the Museum of Science, as it was hosting the Darwin exhibit that originated at the American Museum of Natural History. It had all the stuff you would expect, documents of Darwin's and fossils and specimens, all of which were informative and interesting—plus two Galapagos tortoises that I found terribly comic in how very slow and deliberate they were. As a complement, we went to the IMAX movie on the Galapagos, which includes some great underwater footage. After a break at Papa Razzi, a local chain Italian place, we just wandered around the Museum. Lots of the hands-on stuff still needs fixing, alas, but we still found plenty to entertain ourselves before having dinner with prince_eric and spouse. Sunday morning we put in an intense two hours at the Museum of Fine Arts: Japanese Bamboo Art, Tsutsugaki Textiles, really cool marbled paper made by Sufis, and a fascinating exhibition called "Women of Renown: Female Heroes and Villains in the Prints of Utagawa Kuniyoshi." According to information in the exhibit, the MFA has thousands of Japanese prints and is starting to digitize them; you can see some online.

Finally and very belatedly, papersky tells me that I am Bapchild. I have what is "thought by many to be one of the finest Village Halls in Kent"; a cricket club (with fantasy cricket!); and a spring named after St. Thomas a Becket. I was the site of the Synod of Baccanceld in 694, and am currently involved in a controversy over the construction of a Kent Science Park.

(And now to post this while the borrowed wireless connection has faded in rather than out, since our DSL went out last night and Verizon doesn't know why . . . )

I think I can best give the flavor of my work week by describing dinner on Friday night, tapas at Cella Bistro, at which I deliberately ate deeply acid-reflux-unfriendly food, on the grounds that stress had regressed my acid reflux all the way back to late November, when I had two weekends full of unfriendly food, and so how much worse could it be?

And it was worth it. Our menu:

• Small balls of goat cheese, deep-fried until melty under a light crisp crust, and then drizzled with honey (so good);
• Shrimp in a sherry sauce (and then a lot of bread to scoop up the remaining sauce);
• Spanish tortilla with lemon-caper aioli (not what I was expecting, but good);
• Mussels with saffron sauce (I've decided I don't like mussels, saffron sauce or no);
• Clams meuniere (which I didn't have because I don't like clams either);
• Beef rib with BBQ sauce (that was all Chad).

(If you're keeping score: alcohol, tomatoes, and onions in the sauce for the shrimp; onions and citrus in the tortilla. If they'd had anything I wanted with garlic, chocolate, or mint, I could've run the table, as it were.)

Yesterday, I got quite sick when giving platelets; I appear to overreact to the calcium deficiency caused by the citrate anticoagulant (yes, I'd had a milkshake beforehand, taken my usual daily calcium supplement, and eaten a good breakfast). Unless plasma donation involves less of the anticoagulant, I'll have to stop donating, which I'd feel bad about, but I can't keep wrecking my own health for this (whole blood is no good either, it's just too high a proportion of my total volume).

After a nap and a cautious meal, we headed to our friendly local travel agent, and assigned him the task of finding us options for accommodations in each of our projected stops in Japan. Speaking of which: we're thinking of either Kanazawa or Takayama for the last few days; anyone have relevant experience to relate?