Brad and Bill came over last night with a bottle of gin and this morning I paged through my call log to make sure no one got an impressive drunk dial. I hurt. Apparently technology has caught up with human nature in this arena (thanks to death for the lowdown).

Yes the cell phone is working again. Ten minutes in the hands of my nephew T and the sim card was beating its technological wings like a humming bird of spring ready to dip its’ beak into the nectar of your consciousness. Well, if I had your phone number it would be ready to. I spent an hour fashioning tools from pen caps in an attempt to get that phone open – silly me, I am become my uncle of old who used to hand young me the gizmo to get it to work.

I finally got some more ornaments for the tree so we’re looking more up to speed there. Sorry, no digital camera. So until Beth or Vanessa drop by you’ll just have to imagine the tree.

Brad, “How is it that you don’t have many ornaments?”

Karl, “I’m not really sure, I must have lost them when R moved out. But if I recall our last tree together we did lights and only used little drink umbrellas as ornaments, so maybe they never made it out of the ville.”

I’ve been in a getting rid of things mood so I gave Bill the ten-gallon fish tank that was just sitting in the basement. Earlier yesterday I took an old piece of luggage stuffed with linens and clothing up to Goodwill. It feels good to just get some of that stuff out. I guess I am literally getting rid of baggage. I’m on a waiting list to have a booth at an antique mall, but I wonder if it’s worth the trouble. I’ve decided that I don’t really have the patience for ebay.

I got an email from a teach-abroad program that I am chewing on. My grad school applications are floundering and I seem to have little interest in giving them the attention they deserve. Do I really want to take years of tests and write hundreds of mostly meaningless papers so that I can give tests and grade papers? Factor in running myself another eighty thousand in debt so I can make forty thousand a year. It all weighs on me and I’m just not sure if it’s the best course of action. The whole world is in a certain sense open to me. Maybe I should be more ambitious; though finishing the Ph.D. for its own sake is quite ambitious. The hook on the teach-abroad email was “find yourself.” I am certainly the target market for that little barb.

It’s been a drop by catch up week. Karen stopped by on Monday night and we talked about her impending marriage to John at the Unitarian church near here – August twentieth I believe. R’s ex Steve is also getting married there. Jason, getting married soon himself, is agitating for Karen to start a blog. I don’t see that fitting into her schedule all that well. Her conceptual construction cells are all occupied on class planning for the kids and I think she’s rounding an identity corner into perceiving herself as a full adult. Getting what you’ve always wanted is a tricky thing because it’s rarely what you had in mind.

So Tuesday night I got a call from Glenn who wanted to check out this new Sushi place over off Lindberg, just past Watson and the Home Depot. I met him out there for dinner and I guess it’s been awhile as he didn’t know I’d left my old job and he hadn’t seen the van.

With the exception of the mildly annoying digital Christmas music emanating from a cheap plastic toy carnival sitting by the front door, it was quite a nice place experientially. They served our sushi on this tray designed to look like a wooden bridge in a traditional Japanese garden, each piece of the roll got its own step. The nigiri hung off one side and the wasabi and ginger sat on the other.

It’s a much further drive for me than I Love Mr. Sushi or Tachibana, but worth it for a slightly different ambiance and an excellent selection of rolls. The nigiri come two to an order so that’s an added bonus and they covered the edamame in a heavy coating of sea salt – odd, but quite tasty.

Yesterday was Sebastian’s (my dog) eleventh birthday. I should post some pictures. Eleven years ago Brad and I wandered up to the kville pound, just to look of course, and these puppies had come in that morning. They’d only been there a few hours. Sebastian was just waking up from a nap and he looked like the calmest dog in the bunch, an insight that proved erroneous when he ate my couch and my parent’s gazebo – he turned the balsa wood lattice work into toothpicks. It’s sort of appropriate that Brad and I went and picked out his dog just the other day. Yup, time to sort through some pictures to give you a little “boy and his dog” retrospective.