Crepuscular critters

[muckefuck]

I left work with a craving for gỏi ngó sen, so I made a beeline for Tiền Giang (whose name does not mean, as I erroneously thought, "Heaven River" but rather "Front River"; it's the name of a province in the Mekong Delta) only to find out that they're closed Thursdays. Dag! I mean, I like the fact that the restaurants all have different days off--otherwise we'd never have been able to sample such a variety at our post-class Monday night dinners--but it blows when you've got something very specific in mind.

I'd almost resigned myself to Tank Noodle, when I spotted Phở 888 and reasoned that they might have it. The place seemed deserted, but I'd barely picked up a menu before one of the owners came out to take my order. There was a huge pile of burrito-sized rolls wrapped in foil on the table furthest back. "Bánh?" I asked. "No," she said, "chả lụa. Sausage. Pork." That's all I had to hear, so I bought one of those, too. There was also a mound of chả chiên, but I figured that was enough perishables for now.

But my salad turned out to be enormous (not mention generous on the shrimp), so I stowed my meat log away for later. By now the sun was setting, so I went to roof to check it out. It was a great red-orange globe balanced on the horizon and I thought about how it both looked bigger and seemed to move faster now than at any other time of day. A crow circled me in the air above my head three times, cawwing all the while. (Any augurs who can tell me what that means?)

The tuckpointers had filled most of the roof space with their roped-off equipment, so I was forced to stand on the gravel outside the railing. Shortly after the sun had disappeared completely, I began to heard a chirping and noticed lots of tiny black birds high in the sky. A first, I counted only a handful, but before I left there were at least 20-30, swarming from all directions.

I was wondering if they were swifts coming out to feast on insects, but I saw they didn't have a forked tail. They didn't really have much of a tail at all and that's when I realised they must be bats. Why hadn't I noticed bats at dusk before? Funny how the thought gave me a little shiver, but maybe the crows had unnerved me a bit.

Before I went to bed, I got it into my head to reorganise my bookshelves. It's been over a year since I decided to abandoned the Li Yu-tang method of shelving; the "unexpected juxtapositions" never did give me any good ideas and I was weary of having to hunt around for my damn books. I was trying to get all the language reference into one range, but it turns out I might not actually have a range that's big enough. Plus, this still doesn't solve the problem of what the hell to do with the foreign lit.

Comments

[alcippe.livejournal.com]

> Any augurs who can tell me what that means?

"I want your meat log!"

[tyrannio.livejournal.com]

Shelving by LC call number still works for me.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

I just can't decide whether I want to interfile language reference and literature--as that would require--or keep them separate--as is generally done with Dewey. Or interfile original language texts and put all my English-language literature into a single alphabetic sequence regardless of original language--a common modification of Dewey.