Fifth Day of Christmas Dinner

 

Today was a quiet day at work again, and I saw nobody but Hardingfele when we went on a long walk at lunch. It was a beautiful day today - it got up to 50 F. She insisted on stopping by the geology building to try to find the cat again, but all she found was evidence of homeless people living by the building. We went into the Geology Museum because it has a cool room with blacklight shining on crystals. It also has tons of awesome fossils, but we didn't have time to look at those. Then right at the end of the day, our chair stopped in, which really surprised me, especially since it's her birthday today. Who goes to work on their own birthday, right? I had decorated her office door, and she appreciated that.

The one crazy thing that happened was that a package came in the mail for an emerita professor. I emailed her to ask what she wanted me to do with it, and to my surprise she replied right away and said she had no idea who that sender was, could I open it? So I did, and it was part of a play for children. The professor said she had no interest in that, so I took it. The package had some cool stamps, so I took those too.

Travalon picked me up, and we went to the Great Dane so he could get another stamp in his beer passport. Now he has four of the twenty-five, and that's probably as good as it's going to get. The bartender gave Travalon his beer right away, but I was having trouble deciding between a hot pepper pilsner and a mango weissbier, and then I decided on the mango beer, but the bartender ignored me. Finally the guy next to us got me the beer, and then when we tried to pay for it, he said it was on him. He was the brewer, and we had a good conversation with him.

Then we went to Rich's house for a Fifth Day of Christmas dinner. There was a Third Day of Christmas dinner too, but Travalon and I couldn't make it to that one. This was a bigger crowd than the Christmas dinner, because almost everyone came back, plus Cecil Markovitch, the Single B-Boy, and the son of the guy who makes fabulous desserts. We had all the same food, and I have to say that the apple cider reduction caramel sauce on the cheesecake was amazing. Cecil was cutting up my cassata in really weird ways, but everyone raved about it anyway. After dinner a bunch of us did Night Prayer, then Rich and I gave a dramatic reading of the play I had brought, which was not a whole play but just one scene where a zebra wanted to go rescue some rhinos and was arguing with a little bird about why this was a good idea. Kathbert thought it sounded like a typical conversation between her and Rich. She also was laughing about a text he sent her on Christmas Eve, and he said I could post it on this blog, so here it is:

To be fair to Siri, Rich is sometimes kind of hard to understand. Years ago I had a roommate from Indonesia, and I asked her if I spoke too quickly for her to understand. She said no, the only one she had trouble understanding was Rich, and I replied, "Honestly, even we native English speakers don't always understand him." And then sometimes he just says the wrong thing, like when people were leaving he asked if they wanted any leftover "stressed leche" cake. What would Siri have done with that?

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