it's days and months before I see you again

I had a fabulous day out with malelia_honu yesterday, and you all wish you could say the same. I picked her up a little before twelve-thirty because I caught the drawbridge on the way down Davie Boulevard (my dad: "she's still at her place in Ft. Lauderdale, right?" me: "I hope so, because that's where I'm heading") and we went first to lunch at the little restaurant tucked in the back of Neiman Marcus (motto: "At Least You Can Afford Our Sandwiches!") in the Galleria mall for tomato bisque soup and grilled cheese sandwiches with tomato and avocado, MMMM. As good as promised. Also as good as promised was the tea store—Teavana—home of the best smell in the WORLD. It's like, I'll have one of everything, please, if it'll make my house smell just like this. They sell tons of gorgeous cups and mugs and saucers in all kinds of shapes and colors and textures, expensive but very pleasant to hold on to. I picked up a tea infuser and a couple of tins (stays fresh for a year!) of tea; they keep the teas in great metal canisters behind the register and they're happy to take them down, whip the covers off, and offer them to you to sniff them out. I ended up with a Thai blend and a Rooibos chai. I have only the smallest idea what that means! but they smelled delicious.

They've redesigned the Galleria, for the better: new food court, new tile, better lighting. I picked up a $48 Gap sweater for twenty bucks on the sale rack, which means I WON. No luck finding a moisturizer at Sephora, but I didn't look very hard before we headed out to Gateway to see Kinsey. It was a good movie. I wouldn't call it spectacular; I didn't rush out of it wild-eyed and grab strangers by their lapels and insist they buy tickets IMMEDIATELY!! or anything. They acting was wonderful; the story was important. Get it on video maybe.

After a detour to print some of Mal's pictures, some beautiful, beautiful pictures, across the street at Wolf's (after an actual detour wherein we stubbornly insisted on not making illegal U-turns and therefore for a while couldn't actually get across the street), I dropped Mal back at her place, where I got to see her scooter, her knitting project (it's everywhere!), her room, her redecorating, and some (a very little some, unfortunately) of her photography. We insisted we'd be meeting up again before Intersession was over, and we WILL. There's talk of a knitting night being organized. So punk rock omg.

And then the day ended in the best possible way: with masses of Chinese food with the parents et al. at our patron Chinese restaurant. It's still home to the world's best egg rolls (and I feel it's my duty to check on that everywhere I go—you know, for SCIENCE). I had some of the leftovers for breakfast this morning. Breakfast of champions.

Here's what I did today: I watched M*A*S*H and I crocheted scarves. End list. I put in the first tape to start watching with my mom (who is sick as a dog, but at least she's on vacation now and can hopefully start sleeping it away) after the last of the houseguests left, at around two. I watched the entire first season, twenty-four half-hour episodes, breaking only to get my sister off the bus at five, and to run to Michael's at seven-thirty for a hook to make Mal's scarf. An hour or so ago, at about one in the morning, the scarf was done, and just a few minutes later, so was the first season. Go me omg. plumsnickety's scarf was finished earlier, and I should, like, get that in the mail. vongroovy, your scarf was started first but is currently on hold due to a yarn crisis caused by incompetence in dye lots which the manufacturer is hopefully rectifying even now.

Speaking of M*A*S*H, by the way—hi, I love that show! It's interesting to see how many episodes I remember from watching them over dinner when I was younger; it's interesting to watch them now, after I've seen it slashed. In my mind, Hawkeye and Trapper don't have to be together, but they certainly could be. And the scene in "Showtime", the first season finale? Where they're all clustered around the patient Trapper was so worried he was going to lose ("you can pray for me to become a better doctor in the next five minutes" eeeep), and then he doesn't? Hawkeye beams at him and crinkles his eyes up, and puts a hand on his shoulder and squeezes, shaking him gently, and I was just waiting for him to pull him in and kiss him. Not even in a sexy, full-on makeout session right there on the patient's bed in post-op (the likes of which I've seen Kirk and Spock engage in right there on the bridge—when they're both on duty!) kind of way, but just a sweet, full kiss on the mouth, an expression of Hawkeye's overflow of joy and relief and pride. I can also see something bigger, sexier, and more serious starting that way, but it wouldn't necessarily have had to. Anyway, I love them. Also, Hawkeye's the best surgeon on either side of the Pacific, have you heard?

Season Two starting tomorrow, perhaps! I've got fuzzy red yarn for silentfire's scarf (and isilya, I think I was planning the same for you, until or unless I think of something else or you say otherwise).

With the company gone, I've retreated to my bedroom, a room with a door! that closes! and a conspicuous lack of glass doors that let the morning sun stream in. I started moving some of my stuff in from the family room, talking to my dad as I put things in drawers, and then I noticed the cat was sitting by the closet; and then the dog came in too, and I was like, it's a PARTY. So the dog started padding over to the cat, and I started muttering oh no, here comes the dog, this should be interesting; they sniffed each other's faces a little and the dog licked at the cat once before turning away, all really cute. I turned to my dad and said, "isn't it nice when the kids can play together?"

And now I have to kick the animals out, as I am going to sleep and don't particularly relish stumbling out of bed to open the door for whining pets in the early hours of the morning. Or the later hours, as it were.

life is a game and true love is a trophy

leksa revived the questions meme. It goes like, I comment and say "ask me questions" and she does, and then I post the answers here:

1. What's the most beautiful-sounding language you can think of that you can't speak at all? Or the most interesting? Most beautiful or interesting language overall? Is it possible to rank languages like this?
To answer the last one first, of course it's possible to rank languages like this! that's how Bill Bryson can write a book saying English is teh best language evar omg, and other people can rise up in righteous indignation and say their language is best because, etc. That said, hmm. I need to listen to more people speaking foreign languages more often; I live somewhere where I hear English almost exclusively, all day, every day; people who speak other languages generally don't speak them around people who don't, not in the U.S. (see: domain analyses). I hear Spanish most often. What I find most interesting is that almost all languages sound liquid and beautiful when native speakers speak them. Even German, which has this ick-blick reputation, is all fricatives and shaped white noise. And (like most languages) I can't speak it at all, so I might just go with that one. There was an NPR feature one afternoon on a contest in Berlin looking for the most beautiful German word. One man's suggestion was Schwerelos, not pronounced at all as it looks, meaning something like metaphorical weightlessness (we all float down here), and the sound of it was spoken water. Gorgeous. As for most interesting language? Then I get into syntax and additive morphology, and then my problem is what language isn't interesting?

Am I doing this right?

2. Where would you most like to go?
Oh. Back to London and burrow in. Or, like, Sweden? Where they're socialist and kind and frown on really wide income gaps.

3. Do you like bright colours on walls. Why and why not
I do. It's context-dependent, as most things are, but I love, absolutely love color, deep pure colors that I feel I can sink my fingers into.

4. Two songs or pieces of music you could listen to over and over forever (if you had to). Why?
Okay, off the top of my head (because otherwise I'd either come up with a thousand songs, or none), would be Green Bird from Cowboy Bebop; and this Bach piece for the cello, but played on the guitar (Suite No. 3: Bourees I & II). Not the whole thing, because it's just a little bit slower than I always expect it to be, but the eight seconds between 2:16 and 2:24? I could listen to those forever.

5. If you could, or had to, change the ending of one book you love - which book, and why, and how.
I would make Jane Austen actually show us what happened to Mr. and Mrs. Darcy, et al. in Pride and Prejudice instead of cutting it all short with andthentheygotmarriedtheend. Because that's a book where I turn the last page and feel as though I've lost a friend every time I get to the end.

I'm terrible at coming up with questions to ask, but if you want to play too, comment here and I'll try to cook something up. If anybody wants to ask me anything else, that's cool too.