Altschul!

My hands feel strange; I wonder if it's because of my pants. See, I'm wearing a pair of shorts I bought last year. They're okay except they have only one pocket in the back. Instead of putting my wallet on the left and my hankie on the right, both have to go into the right, which further means that I have to wear my shoulder bag on the left shoulder so I can access my farecard more easily. Now I'm typing and it feels wrong. Like every time I move the mouse, I'm like, I don't normally use a mouse right-handed, do I? But that's the only way I've ever used it!

The office is pleasantly cleared-out right now. The whiner babies in the next department wheedled a one-hour offsite break out of the muckety-mucks due to jackhammering going on above our heads, but it's much less disturbing where I am. In fact, a co-worker likened it to listening to Einstürzende Neubauten (old school, natch). The thumps and bumps from the forklift loads are much more annoying, IMHO.

The best thing about scoping out construction workers is the deniability. Stare at a group of shop clerks or food workers going about their business for more than a moment or two and people will begin to get suspicious. But people understand that there's something enthralling about watching buildings being torn down and erected. So you can let everything think you're only gawking at the forklift when really you're ogling the forklift driver.

Another thing my parents somehow neglected to tell me: My Uncle Chris is named "John". I think I've mentioned before that I have an exceedingly rare surname--so rare, in fact, that Googling it brings up nobody who's a more distant relation than a first cousin. So imagine bunj's surprise when he used it to test out a new search engine and found a "John C." that neither of us had ever heard of before. He asked Dad about it, who revealed that it was none other than his younger brother. We're not close, but how is it possible that in thirty years time no one mentioned that his first name was really "John"? Dad also pointed out that his parents "named him after St. Christopher because they had a near miss while driving," a bit of family folklore I wasn't aware of. Makes me wonder: Do any of my other relatives have names I'm not aware of?

Qing xie yizhang shouju...

Monday night, we celebrated the end of the term with dinner at Lao Sichuan. As language practice goes, it wasn't a zit on the bum of the previous dinner, where we did a fair job of speaking only Chinese. With all the background noise, my comprehension was shot to hell. Our special guest, Liu Laoshi's sister, gamely tried to chat with each of us about our Chinese names, but eventually capitulated to the inevitable--though she did teach me to say, "Please give us a receipt in the amount of $20" [the portion paid for by the CMAA]. Too bad the waitress almost immediately turned to Liu Laoshi for clarification.

She was outraged by our insistence on treating her (her sister assured us she's always been like that), so we let her buy us all bubble tea at a Vietnamese place closer to the centre of the mall. (My young coconut shake was probably the best Asian fruit drink I've had anywhere.) We sat on the tower steps to drink them and chat about this and that, such as Mozhu's spider research. (According to one of her colleagues, "You're never more than three feet from a spider.") I saw some kids down below playing the slap game and springboarded from that to a discussion of what games the sisters played when they were little. Liu Laoshi ended up teaching me a simple, Schuhplattlen-like dance for two (which I did very gingerly, lest my steel-tipped boots send an 80 year-old woman tumbling down a flight of concrete steps).

It occurs to me I should say something about the dishes. The tea duck was okay, as were the Chinese-style edamame, but the excellent boiled pork in chili sauce was too spicy for me to eat very much of. Liu Laoshi was disappointed that the mussels were freshwater; they had no texture. The standout dish, as far as I'm concerned, was the salt-and-pepper smelt. They were cooked and served with an equal number of chili peppers, so the dish actually had some zip to it (although without taking the top of your head off).