Ok, I’ll get the whine out of the way first.
Pain-wise it was a terrible weekend. Bad.
Enough said.
The first good part of the weekend was hanging with my daughter today. I was working on a piece of vine for stationary. GirlHead, who is seven and already shows all the signs of being a very good artist someday, came up and said “You need to change that color.” So I started asking her what she’d do next. Pretty soon what had been a simple ivy vine without leaves was tweaked and leaves added and color changed… here’s the upper left corner of the stationary where she took the flow of the design, and where I’m keeping it.
She had it looking better than I did…
The second good part of the weekend was that my friend (the uber-smart PhD lady) came out and took me and Cruel Wife to sushi lunch yesterday. Yes, I was bummed that her significant other could not come, as she is back home still recovering from a very serious condition but on the mend. It would have been way cool but there will be other trips. They are two of the best scientists to work for – period. You say to them “Gee, I really don’t know that I’d do it that way.” Normally a PhD would say “Eh. Do it anyway.” But no, they’ll ask why you feel that way and listen. They might decide to do it their original way anyway, but as often as not will say “Let’s give that a try instead.” I’m not used to PhD’s that value an engineer’s gut feelings.
Anyways…
So we had a huge sushi lunch. I had a Godaiko roll – it had salmon and tuna (hamachi) which are two of my favorites. Cruel Wife got a sushi lunch – a spread of multiple things including the ubiquitous California roll and another nigiri-style dish with eel (unagi). Sushi-Q got both maki and nigiri sushi and I cannot for the life of me remember what they were. They were all fantastic and we shared them around. The kids were at home with the sitter and so we spent an hour and a half just tasting, savoring, and pausing to enjoy the food. If one is going to ingest high levels of mercury, one should enjoy it.
While we ate, we talked about work (which is what geeks do), motorcycles, California, and whatever came to mind.
After, we stopped off at work and showed Cruel Wife the project that has been consuming my life and will for a while yet.
Then we went home and got ready for dinner. Sushi-Q left work after several hours and drove out to our house and we hung out again. I pulled the smoked pork off the smoker – it had gone for 15 hours, just sweating it out in applewood smoke and steam. I made some couscous and some rice and there was corn on the cob, too.
We talked and drank tea and discussed archaeology, food, dogs, remodeling, and even the pitfalls of camping and in lieu wiping one’s hindquarters with poison ivy accidentally (and how that takes months to heal from).
It was just a pleasure talking about whatever came to mind and it felt strange to not have your guest’s eyes glaze over and roll back in his/her head when something gets real geeky and technical. The kids loved having company, too. And the dog, Zoe-pup, was eating the attention up big-time.
First weekend in a long time where I felt like I had a weekend. I didn’t know you could hurt like hell and still have a good time, it’s been so long.
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Hoyer and Pelosi get closer to see if it is Reid's farts that smell so rancid or just the man himself...
Lemur King's Folly 