Summer days

Life is so good.

I used to long for ‘unscheduled holidays’ like those in Lois Lowry’s The Giver. Wouldn’t it be great to suddenly have a free day to do whatever you like? An entire day to do something fun or catch up on work.

Now I’m actually getting quite a few of these unscheduled holidays. Barry has given me random days off in the past before, but usually there was some plausible reason, like a final, or because I’d been working especially hard. Today, though, I totally didn’t expect a day off because I’m taking a day off tomorrow (I cleared it with him ahead of time–someone’s coming to visit me 🙂 ). But he said, in his English accent, ‘It’s your hours–you’re using them up like water!’ Imagine that… I’m working too much!

Everything else is going wonderfully too. Monday I practiced piano for three hours, then watched Billy Elliot with friends. Adorable movie, with lots of ballet in it! 🙂 Tuesday evening Erik and I started (but didn’t have a chance to finish) Some Like It Hot, an old comedy everyone should watch. It’s got Marilyn Monroe, Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis in it. Last night Erik and I went to the Berkeley-East Bay Humane Society for Level 2 cat training. They used to let all volunteers handle any cats but now they want a more structured approach, so I wanted to get trained. It was fun, though the woman who runs it, Sharon, is a little paranoid. I completely understand where she’s coming from–there are so many things to worry about, and it’s so hard to trust people because you don’t want them to get it wrong so you tell them every little thing they should think about–but I do think she needs to understand that we can’t process so much information at once, and that sometimes you just have to trust that everything will work out! Anyway, I’m glad now we’ll be allowed to do more with the cats. We’ve even been promoted to being allowed to change their litterboxes… ‘but only if you don’t mind.’ !

After the humane society Erik decided to take me out to dinner, so we splurged at Long Life Vegi House on University and Shattuck, one of our favorite places. It’s inexpensive, gives good amounts of food, and makes generally very yummy Chinese vegetarian food–without using untoward amounts of tofu! What’s not to like? They also have seafood for people who are vegetable-phobic. 🙂 Anyway, we got fried wontons as an appetizer, vegetable fried rice, ‘Chinese greens with fresh mushroom,’ and ‘Long Life House Special Vegi Lion Head.’ The wontons were little crispy things and were really fun to eat. The fried rice was really yummy; their fried rice always is (although Great Wall Vegi and Seafood Restaurant at College and Claremont does much better fried rice). The ‘greens’ turned out to be large quantities of bok choy, carrots, and bamboo in a yummy sauce. And the ‘lion heads’ (Lion heads, or shizi tou, are big meatballs… they’re not really lion or even anything bizarre) was made of tofu, so I didn’t have any, but they came with a lot of yummy vegetables and rice noodles in sauce so I ate tons of that instead. All that food came out to be $21 without tax and tip, so we were quite pleased.

At Long Life we saw someone who looked like Ying. Long Life is one of those places we used to run into Ying, so it was weird seeing someone who looked like her but wasn’t. It felt like it should have been her, and she should have been eating with us. But Ying’s in Germany now. We miss her like crazy. The three of us used to spend so much time together, now that Ying isn’t here, sometimes, when we’re doing something we used to do with Ying, we really feel like we’re missing someone. For instance we used to order takeout from King Dong on Shattuck a lot with Ying, and last time Erik and I ordered for the two of us it just felt strange. We’re still in touch, but I still really, really miss her. I miss my other Friday night girls too… well, I’d better stop otherwise I’ll be spending too much time talking about everyone I miss! I’ll make this Ying’s entry and we’ll stop right there. 🙂

[This post was imported on 4/10/14 from my old blog at satsumabug.livejournal.com.]