Biermond

It was an ambitious weekend--German Day, followed by Pre-Bear Night Cocktails, and then a Chinatown trip the next day--which became even more ambitious with the news that one of the Madison bears was coming down to crash for the night. I survived it all, but I expect a reckoning tomorrow.

I'd forgotten all about our annual repayment of our debt to General von Steuben until Nuphy mentioned to me he was going. I passed his invitation on to monshu, who was surprisingly receptive to the idea. That's how we found ourselves on the roof of Gene's Sausage Shop on one of the most heartstoppingly gorgeous days in recent memory noshing on sausage and holding a seat for the Funny Little Man. Naturally, we weren't the only people to hit upon this idea, and when a polite stranger asked if there was room at our table for her and two of her friends, we invited them to join us.

Before they began speaking, I took them for ordinary whitebread Midwesterners. Wrong. They were all Pacific Northwesterners. Two had grown up on Bainbridge Island, the offspring of transplanted Californians with roots in the Azores. The third, who was married to the woman who first approached us, was an ethnic Latvian from eastern Washington. He had an adorably broad accent which you could easily have taken for Canadian. The woman's brother lives in Chicago now with his Iranian wife. He speaks some Chinese from his semester abroad in Beijing, so Nuphy got to try out both his rusty Mandarin and his rusty Latvian. No rusty Swahili, however, to try out on the Azorean Bainbridgian who'd done her semester abroad in Tanzania.

We could've chatted with them for another hour, but I could see the Old Man was getting antsy, so I took us to ground level for some gelato at Paciugo. We checked out the fair itself almost out of a sense of duty. I found myself fascinated by the controlled chaos of the midway, but after monshu had spotted his Karnavalprinz in the pheasant-feathered hat, there was nothing more to distract him from the enervating effects of the press of bodies, so I hustled us into Merz Apotheke and thence back to Gene's for some quark and rye.

Meanwhile, Madison Bear had made it to town and was having a cider at Nôrse while he waited for word from us. I took him to our local Thai for dinner and he retreated downstairs to "freshen up" while I putzed the upstairs clean. The expedition had taken more out of me than I'd thought and I found myself almost exhausted, but I figured I'd perk up when guests began arriving. Scruffy was first, looking almost as worn out as me now that he's back on his term-time schedule. Meanwhile, Fig, who was supposed to arrive early in order to inspect the garden had some kind of CTA crisis and bailed.

Compensating for that, the Tamaulipeco kept his word and graced us with his presence. Even more surprisingly, Scruffy confessed to me and interested him later and began pumping me for info. We were at the bar at this point, and it was becoming crushingly obvious that the second wind I'd hoped for hadn't arrived and wasn't going to. Given my druthers and the absence of any feeling of hospital responsibility, I'd've stayed home altogether. I was glad I'd gotten out if only for the opportunity to see clintswan as perky as a Pikachu, but after the umpteenth yawn, I told our out-of-towner to let himself in when he saw fit and came home to crash.

Fortunately, we were doing dinner rather than dim sum, so we didn't have to depart the North Side until after 3 p.m. the next day. This gave me the chance for a nap after I'd seen our houseguest off to his brunch date. We made excellent time and we able to hit a grocery and a teashop before our scheduled rendezvous with Nuphy at Feida. He'd caught some wild hare and taken Shank's mare all the way, which left him oddly belligerent as we made our way back to Chinatown Square to consider possibilities. We didn't know what we wanted except somewhere we hadn't been before.

We managed to pick someplace new and familiar at the same time: a place we'd never been that was at the same time a fiefdom in Tony Hu's culinary empire. The name Lao Mala means "old spicy", so I knew I was in for it despite ordering only the blandest food on the menu (tong choy, potato shreds, and unseasoned chuanr) and sneaking only a few bites of what Nuphy and monshu were eating. The food was good, but not better than the best we'd had in each category (something the FLM kept reminding us of incessantly).

As they tried to figure out the bill, I dashed up to the top of one of the towers to try to spot the rising moon. I was foiled by the skyline to the east, even once we'd climbed back up to the El station. Only after the train started moving did our lovely moon pop out from behind Hilliard Towers. It was all but full, but pale in intense sunlight of a cloudless dusk; not until the train reemerged on the North Side did it begin to come into its own. We made good time back home and finished the evening with some mooncake and fresh lychee on the porch. The Old Man had a glass of Piesporter Goldtröpfchen; I contented myself with some ginger tea--and the satisfaction of a weekend spent out and about for a change.