[ WHOLE ENTIRE EVENING lost to last-minute revisions of the album. I will grumble about this at extreme length later. ]
Friday as alluded to we gathered for my brother-in-law's birthday. He wanted to eat at one of those ``tavern and grill'' places that tries to claim the male demographic by having the waitresses dress in cut-off jeans not long enough to conceal the pockets and having their shirts tied tight around the rib cage and the bathrooms are lined with black-and-white pictures of languid women in bikinis labelled ``DETERMINATION''. It's the sort of place which makes me wonder why women put up with men, really.
It's also a place staggeringly far from both my parents' and from my workplace, which I had to be at because of the lingering project-completion issues. I got out of work late --- the owner stopped in at 5:00 to engage in a 20-minute discussion of how he hoped to fix something which wasn't really the problem, and to explain this again in case I was out the first three times he explained this --- and of course driving up what Google Maps pretended was a 40-minute drive (apparently they are unaware of this thing called ``traffic'') took about 80 minutes. I kept getting text messages from my sister asking where I was, and warning me they'd ordered appetizers. Well they might have.
It was also, of course, a very loud place. My voice doesn't carry at all in noise, and my brother-in-law's doesn't, so we had a night of approximate conversation. It's also a place which puts bacon in its macaroni-and-cheese, which worked out better than I expected, but didn't shake my conviction that tuna fish is about the most meat that can be added seamlessly to macaroni-and-cheese. It also disappointed my sister, the vegetarian, who figured they probably get their macaroni-cheese-bacon out of industrial-sized tubs and couldn't make a bacon-less order for her. Instead she got the French toast, hold the bacon (which would otherwise have been in the mix, honest). And somehow we didn't get dessert.
My sister said she and he did go to a Japanese restaurant once since my birthday dinner, because ``we had to go to the dollar store''. There's reasons for that.
Trivia: On 18 October 1963 a cat named Felicette was launched on France's Veronique AGI47 to a height of 97 miles. Felicette is the first, and maybe only, cat to be in space. Source: Animals In Space: From Research Rockets To The Space Shuttle, Colin Burgess, Chris Dubbs.
Currently Reading: The Grand Idea: George Washington's Potomac and the Race to the West, Joel Achenbach.