brainylady

I'm back

These one-and-a-half-day holidays are really not cutting it. It's always good to get away, and given the choice, I'll always choose to get on a plane and spend the weekend somewhere else. Still, it's pretty quick, and it means there's not much you can do when -- for example -- you are only in Kuala Lumpur for one full day, and that day includes a five-hour afternoon thunderstorm and an allergy attack that lasts from morning till night.

Mostly we slept and ate. Fortunately, these are two of my favourite things. We had the best meal in recent memory on Friday night at a Lebanese restaurant: falafel, tabouleh, hummus, baba ghanouj, labneh, pita bread. That dinner was worth the price of the flight. We did have a great view of the twin towers from our hotel room; I'll put up some photos tonight.

I did quite a bit of sock-knitting, too, mostly on the plane. I'm making a pair of toe-up socks for myself with Patons Kroy yarn, in "flax," which is a gray-brown. People who are knitting bright colours for summer can join the candy-along; me, I'm knitting porridge. I'm knitting whole wheat bread. It's visual relief from my Retro Prep. (Yes, it is finished, thank you for asking! Photos soon.)

Not only did Beatrix get her stitches out and cone off last week, but she's clearly no worse for wear. On Thursday, Billy and I were awakened at six in the morning by a series of thumps and strange noises in our bedroom. Any guesses? Bea the Cockroach Queen had brought a live bird into the house and released it in our bedroom. So the bird was flying around the room, and Bea was running around on the bed. I grabbed the cat and basically had to sit on her while Bill went after the bird and corralled it down the hall and out the front door, at which point it flew away. I think all four of us -- Bill and I, Bea, and the bird -- were equally surprised by this whole event. (Come to think of it, any neighbours awake at that hour must've been surprised as well, at the sight of a naked white man chasing a bird out of an apartment.)

Instant Messenger Office Theatre
starring Alison and her coworker Danny

alison: Help me finish a sentence? "We ate typical Chinese food: noodles, dumplings, ???, and so on."
danny: McDonalds.
alison: Stop it.
danny: Tofu.
alison: Xie xie.
danny: Good thing that having been immersed in a Chinese culture for years you've been able to learn two of the local dishes. You should be an anthropologist.