Avram's journal

Saturday started off with a massive kitchen-scrubbing session. Our counters and cabinets now look like maybe we aren’t cavemen.

ladymondegreen, akawil, and I met bugsybanana for vegetarian dim sum in Chinatown, a meal consisting chiefly of wheat gluten. Tasty wheat gluten, but still. Then we saw Napoleon Dynamite, a weird, charming movie about nerds, the assholes who torment them, and the women who improve them, with opening credits that James Lileks would love (and I hope you enjoyed that joke, because I hated giving that lying sonovabitch a link). If you go to see it, stay through the closing credits! Afterwards we had late-night snacks at Caravan of Dreams, a vegan restaurant with food so good that I’d consider eating there even if I wasn’t constrained by the dietary requirements of my companions.

(Synchronicity: Radio Paradise was playing Al Stewart’s “Roads to Moscow”, which I’d never heard before and wasn’t really paying attention to. Just as I was typing the name of the movie above, the line “In the footsteps of Napoleon the shadow figures stagger through the winter” played, with “Napoleon” coming out at just the moment my fingers were typing the word. Clearly the universe is telling me to conquer Europe. Or maybe just avoid Russians.)

Today Bugsy and I went up to New Rochelle for dinner with my family. My niece likes peas, but seems to feel a need to sacrifice the occasional bit of food to some floor-based deity or spirit. She’ll happily pluck the peas up from the table in front of her, and then every third or fourth pea she’ll quite deliberately swing her hand over to the side and drop it on the floor. At one point my sister positioned her hand underneath to catch the food, and my niece moved to avoid it. It’s a shame she won’t remember this when she’s old enough to tell us why she does it.

Got just about no drawing time in. Grrr. Well, a little, on the train.

bugsybanana and I missed the train we’d planned to take, so we were an hour late for Thanksgiving at my sister’s place in Mt Kisco, but it’s not like we were the last to get there. The public phones in Grand Central will call anyplace in NY state for 25¢, but cut off without warning after 30 seconds, not even giving you a chance to stick in more quarters. They’re Verizon phones; I don’t suppose I should expect useful public phones from a company that would rather I buy a cellphone.

So we got there eventually. Much food was eaten. There was not just one, but two massive-cheeked infants — my brother-in-law’s sister gave birth three weeks before my sister did, to a nose-nibbling bundle of energy. Did I mention that we ate a lot? Ooog.

Now I’m all tryptophan-woozy.

I'm trying to get all my Livejournal friends' locations plotted on a map - please add your location starting with this form. Username: (Then get your friends to!)

According to the 4x magnification version of the map, I and several of my friends are floating in the Atlantic Ocean, several dozen miles off the east coast of the US.

Just spent a big chunk of weekend with my family. I got to see my niece, who’s well into the giant-cheeks-and-bubble-blowing stage of infancy. My parents took me to Costco to purchase mass quantities. And I’m full of Italian food right now. November looks survivable.