4-Nov-99 Ming's Cafe
I fell on the uni today. With a bicycle, I count as a fall any time my foot touches the ground when I didn't intend it to. That happened once this summer when I made too sharp a turn in the Cabot school driveway. On the uni, I count that kind of thing an unplanned dismount. Today, though, my hand hit the ground. That has to count as a fall. I always wear leather work gloves on the uni, just in case, but don't expect to need them. Today they saved me from a scrape.
I was on the river walk, about thirty yards from the end where I would have gotten off anyway. Darn. It bothered me less that my hand hurt and more that I didn't get back to the end of the ride.
Darn! When I checked my trapline the peanut butter was gone from one mousetrap next to the washing machine. Catching a mouse is bad news, but having the bait stolen is worse. That mouse is still around. Last year there was a hole in the bottom of a bag of bird seed, and seed along the walls before we noticed. This year I proactively set the traps out about a month ago and hadn't seen any sign of mouse activity until now. In case you want to beat a path to anyone's door, Victor makes better mousetraps than Eaton, as far as I'm concerned. I go with the old fashioned spring traps. Snap, dead mouse, no struggling with glue.
Well, the interesting thing about the day was that we went out to dinner in Chinatown. Or not really Chinatown, maybe the South End, almost next to the southeast expressway. At the elementary art reception last week we had seen Carolyn, one of Arlene's colleagues, and her husband Bill, who like to get together enough people to get a variety of dishes at good Chinese restaurants. They suggested that we go to Ming's Cafe, and today was the time. They had a houseguest, Jacuqeline from Marseilles, and asked if Anne would like to come along, too, so there would be at least someone else close to Jacqueline's age. Anne had a houseguest, Carl, a guy she had met in Georgia (the one in the Caucasus, not the one next to South Carolina). Carl had flown in from England the day before with zero luggage. His intention was to spend a weekend shopping in the US, where everything was less expensive than the UK. He figured that if he bought a new wardrobe the difference in price would cover his plane ticket. The price difference for a laptop computer could cover another transatlantic flight. So, picture us: two fifty-something couples and three twenty-somethings: a woman visiting from Marseilles, a woman who had been living for almost two years in Moscow, and a guy who had just been working on the pipeline between the Caspian and the Black Seas, and was going to fly back to work in Azerbaijan in a few days. Eating calimari and bok choy with fish sauce in Chinatown. You could feel like a citizen of the world.
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