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Phad Thai
It is well, when judging a friend, to remember that he is judging you with the same godlike and superior impartiality.
-- Arnold Bennett
Thursday, October 14, 1999
One year ago: Deciding
Mmmm, Phad Thai! I decided on the way home from work tonight, that the only way to make myself get something done this evening would be to start the laundry as soon as I got home, then go get some food while it was in the washer. This strategy actually worked! I dragged one of the piles of laundry downstairs (two large piles have been sitting by my front door since a week ago Tuesday!), sorted it into two loads (one reddish to brown, one bluish to grey), and started it off.
The Bangkok on Fifteenth restaurant is just a few blocks from my house. It didn't take long for them to cook up some good chicken phad thai for me. While I waited in a chair near the front door, I was amused to see a large Buddha statue, with a post-it note incongruously sticking to its upper arm. "Please don't touch!"
Phad Thai always reminds me of the time I spent working at the awful Book Publishing company in the early nineties. This legal publishing firm printed and maintained municipal codes for cities all over the country, and I was a proofreader there until we all lost our jobs in a strike, which was one of the best things that ever happened to me. One of the fun things the gang of proofreaders did there was to walk to a Thai restaurant in a nearby hotel to pick up lunch, and bring it back to the office. (We didn't want to take a long lunch break and actually eat out, because that would have taken too much time and we were paid by the hour.)
So I ended up tonight with ten of my rayon batik dresses hanging up to dry, and a load of folded, clean clothes. Tangible progress!
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But I'd started my day off with a dental appointment. It was supposed to be replacement of two existing fillings, but one tooth was so badly cracked that we decided to go straight to a crown. There were cracks from front to back and side to side. This change of plan meant that Dr. I----, the assistant, and the rest of the office went into heads-down mode, shifting other patients around, quickly taking molds, and doing a "build-up" on my poor tooth. I'm left with an aluminum temporary crown, but it's not visible when I'm smiling or talking, I think! I go back in a few weeks for the permanent crown seating. This is my third crown. Yikes!
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I had a very nice letter from Nancy "Perforated Lines" Hayfield Birnes. She's a published novelist and writer, but hasn't been keeping her journal online very long. Of course, the first email I sent her was correcting a mistake, since I'm the net nag. But I'd also commented on the gorgeous photos of her former residence. These were pictures that had been taken for a wallpaper catalog, so they might not have represented all the reality of the place, but they certainly were pretty!
I've been digging through her archives, and she's been doing the same with me. I'm interested to hear her impressions after reading this whole thing! That's more than two years of my life. Of course, I like getting email from any reader; you don't have to read from the beginning to comment.
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I also got some email about an item I put in my weblog. The tugboat races were a random find from the server logs at my ISP, but I loved the pictures and it's a local, Puget Sound thing. A reader let me know that the espression "a bone in her teeth," when referring to a boat, means a large bow wave. I don't get much mail about the weblog, and I don't have access to server logs (and I snobbishly don't use an external tracker) so I have no idea about number or identity of readers there. I'm sometimes listed at the eatonweb weblog portal as a frequently clicked log, but that, while gratifying, isn't hard numbers.
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