The last weekend in Advent

Yesterday, I finished my shopping. I mean, there's more I could pick up, but as of now I've got something for everyone back home. I leave early tomorrow afternoon (which really means I leave tomorrow morning, travel time and airport delays being what they are--grrrr!!). Today is a moment of calm and reflection before the headlong plunge into family Christmas fun.

Last Friday was probably the last Yankee Gift Swap at monshu's work. The group has gotten too large and some of the staff are just too goddamn tenacious about going after certain gifts. I joked about pursuing with antisocial intensity the paper shredder monshu lusted after, but in the end I bowed to the increasingly restlessness of the crowd and grabbed the laser pointer Todd had spent half-an-hour unsuccessfully trying to flog. monshu ended up with a clock radio, which he promptly handed over to me. Score! Omigod, does it has the BIGGEST NUMBERS EVER! You can practically READ by them. The important feature it has over my old one, however, is that it also gets more than one station!

Afterwards, we hit the Christkindlmarkt. Sadly, I was too stuffed full already to get me any of the Bambes mit Speck Nuphy discovered during our pre-operatic dinner last Wednesday. (That time, I had the "Gourmet Plate" of goulash--technically, I think it may have been pörkölt--bratkartoffeln, and creamy mushrooms, so I'm hardly complaining.) Instead, we shuffled back to monshu's and ordered pizza.

All talk of meeting Nuphy in Chinatown on Saturday morning was dropped and I just hung out until it was time to leave for bunj's and e's extravaganza. Since the D&D game died, there's a whole clutch of people that, to my shame and disappointment, I never see much any more. There was good news to spare: I was stunned by one couple's physical transformation (as e's told me afterwards, "They're an encouragement to us all!") and another's preternaturally well-behaved baby (the secret, apparently, is to consecrate them to the god Ba'al) and pleased to hear news of his_regard's new digs and o_nut's big plans for her new-ish ones.

All the joy culminated in a late-night ride home in his_regard's care. The snow fell magically as we blasted Green Day and made slow progress eastward across still mostly-unsalted streets. It all left me too excited to sleep, so I plugged in the new clock radio--At last! Liberation from the tyranny of NPR!--and discovered a late-night Hindi pop show on WNUR to listen to as I haphazardly leafed through princeofcairo and mollpeartree's gift. I paid for the excesses of the day on Sunday, but then I was untouchable in a haze of cookie sugar, Balvenie, and the fresh memory of excellent companionship.

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Last night's Chinese class party went as well as could be expected though, in the end, no one tried to enforce the "no English" rule, which is a dang shame. We did learn to sing one Chinese song: Liu laoshi taught us words to "Twinkle twinkle little star", which I promptly forgot. I tried googling them today, but got confused by the plethora of variants, none of which seemed to match her version.

She brought a very tasty seafood lo mein (or, I suppose, I should say lao1mian4) and yow choy (you2cai4 or "oil vegetable"). Xiaofei brought more greens, kong1xin1cai4 ("empty heart vegetable"), and Jin xiaojie contributed dim sum, including ha gow (xia1jiao3) and siu mai (shao1mai3). Thanks to Shang taitai we had hot and sour soup (suan1la4tang1--the Chinese order is reversed for some reason, "sour hot") and Yu xiansheng brought us more sweets then we had left room for, from winter melon cakes (dong1gua1bing3) to lotus paste buns (lian2rong2bao1) to butterfly cookies (hu2die2su1). For drinks, we had wine--Korean Baekseju (bai2sui4jiu3) courtesy of yours truly--and Sprite (xue3bi4qi4shui3 or "snow jade gas water").

We did do a little brainstorming about next year's classes, which will no longer be based on a text, but not nearly enough. It's great that we all get along so well, but all the convivial chatting makes it easy to lose sight of learning objectives.