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Sep. 25th, 2006 08:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stormdogI have a clean house! Alright, a clean half-a-house. Perhaps I should call it Eric? The lovely ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
wooisme and I spent most of Saturday working on it. It's a very nice thing to come home to and I'm looking very much forward to doing so tonight. I might just sit down at the dining room table with Moira's dad's reading lamp beside me and do more translating from my copies of からからやま. After some exercise. I need to revisit Healing Vision and Orion 78 on Max 1 I think.
But the first thing we did to enjoy our nice, organized entertainment area was entertain. My dad was sick and my brother James and his girlfriend were busy, but we recruited my youngest brother to come over and watch the second disk of House that we rented. We were looking for the original Mad Max, but Blockbuster didn't seem to carry it. It's ok. Tim had never seen any of the show, and the group of us stayed up 'till about four in the morning, at which point we'd made it through all eight episodes. I'm now so intrigued by the developing plot that we went out the next day hoping to find the third and last disc of the season, but it was out. As I've noted before, I don't think I'd watch it if it was on TV; the longer I go without it, the more I think that TV and I really would not get along. There's a part of me dreading the time when we have some money to spend on cable; I'm really much happier without! But when I have it in an easily controlled format without commercials, and when it's an opportunity to spend time with family or friends, then it's worth it to me.
Sunday morning was spent in bed. I think we finally woke up about half past noon. We were planning to spend the day road-tripping somewhere and got started a little later than we'd planned (about one-thirty), but that's ok. We had a really wonderful time, evoking memories of a very magical fall day that my mate and I spent walking about Ann Arbor.
We had a late lunch at a new-to-us Chinese buffet called, appropriately enough, New Buffet, in Racine. I was impressed by the selection. While the food wasn't really stand-out, they had, at six, the most varieties of soup I have ever seen at a buffet, including hot and sour, which was also a first for that sort of establishment. I actually didn't try it though. I had the seafood soup. I also had chocolate pudding and ice cream. I note those items specifically because they were the only ones that I consumed with western utensils. Everything else was eaten with the aid of my はし. On multi-bite items I was about half and half for being able to hold on while I took a bite, and I had very little trouble using them to pick items off my plate, dip then in sauce, and transport them to my mouth. I'm really making progress!
After that, we decided on a whim to drive west. Not too far outside Racine proper, we happened upon a place that seemed half farm, half gourmet food shop, and half greenhouse and garden store. I'd never been there before, but I'm glad we found it; there just seemed to be something special about it. We wandered about racks of exotic chocolates and specialty pasta sauces, wandered through a small hay-bale maze with an antiquated tractor at it's center, and ate some roasted corn provided at the expense of the owners. That's what originally caught our eyes; the free corn roast sign. I don't think I've ever had corn that fresh; it was so good! The pen with sheep, geese, chickens, and calves stole some of my time to, if you can apply that word to a more than willing surrender. I was actually nervous about going at first; I'm a lot better than I used to be, but I still have that people phobia that's probably never going to go away entirely, and I was worried that I wouldn't know the right way to behave at a corn roast. Worry about being in a group situation is far too ingrained in my to fully get rid of, but I can still enjoy myself.
From there, we continued further west, picking up a bunch of state and local tourism brochures on the way to keep in the glove box. Lots of places we'll have to go! We ended up in a beautiful old downtown that somehow felt very out of place; as though it belonged in a time gone by. We walked along railroad tracks to get to a low but wide dam where I skipped rocks off the side of waterfall-covered concrete. We drove, slowly and carefully, through the lot of the same classic car place that we'd found on our previous drive out to see where Andrea will be going to school. I don't remember much more than that; I started falling asleep to the noise of the road as my raccoon drove onward.
I finally woke up as we were getting in to Kenosha. We stopped on the way at Blockbuster again. As I noted before, they didn't have what we were looking for, so instead we stopped in to see my family and borrowed their set of Firefly from them, which we spent a good part of the rest of the night absorbed in.
And now, I'm almost toserinthia's place, so I will leave off for the moment. It's hard to drive home while writing a Livejournal entry. More to come as time rolls on....
wooisme and I spent most of Saturday working on it. It's a very nice thing to come home to and I'm looking very much forward to doing so tonight. I might just sit down at the dining room table with Moira's dad's reading lamp beside me and do more translating from my copies of からからやま. After some exercise. I need to revisit Healing Vision and Orion 78 on Max 1 I think.But the first thing we did to enjoy our nice, organized entertainment area was entertain. My dad was sick and my brother James and his girlfriend were busy, but we recruited my youngest brother to come over and watch the second disk of House that we rented. We were looking for the original Mad Max, but Blockbuster didn't seem to carry it. It's ok. Tim had never seen any of the show, and the group of us stayed up 'till about four in the morning, at which point we'd made it through all eight episodes. I'm now so intrigued by the developing plot that we went out the next day hoping to find the third and last disc of the season, but it was out. As I've noted before, I don't think I'd watch it if it was on TV; the longer I go without it, the more I think that TV and I really would not get along. There's a part of me dreading the time when we have some money to spend on cable; I'm really much happier without! But when I have it in an easily controlled format without commercials, and when it's an opportunity to spend time with family or friends, then it's worth it to me.
Sunday morning was spent in bed. I think we finally woke up about half past noon. We were planning to spend the day road-tripping somewhere and got started a little later than we'd planned (about one-thirty), but that's ok. We had a really wonderful time, evoking memories of a very magical fall day that my mate and I spent walking about Ann Arbor.
We had a late lunch at a new-to-us Chinese buffet called, appropriately enough, New Buffet, in Racine. I was impressed by the selection. While the food wasn't really stand-out, they had, at six, the most varieties of soup I have ever seen at a buffet, including hot and sour, which was also a first for that sort of establishment. I actually didn't try it though. I had the seafood soup. I also had chocolate pudding and ice cream. I note those items specifically because they were the only ones that I consumed with western utensils. Everything else was eaten with the aid of my はし. On multi-bite items I was about half and half for being able to hold on while I took a bite, and I had very little trouble using them to pick items off my plate, dip then in sauce, and transport them to my mouth. I'm really making progress!
After that, we decided on a whim to drive west. Not too far outside Racine proper, we happened upon a place that seemed half farm, half gourmet food shop, and half greenhouse and garden store. I'd never been there before, but I'm glad we found it; there just seemed to be something special about it. We wandered about racks of exotic chocolates and specialty pasta sauces, wandered through a small hay-bale maze with an antiquated tractor at it's center, and ate some roasted corn provided at the expense of the owners. That's what originally caught our eyes; the free corn roast sign. I don't think I've ever had corn that fresh; it was so good! The pen with sheep, geese, chickens, and calves stole some of my time to, if you can apply that word to a more than willing surrender. I was actually nervous about going at first; I'm a lot better than I used to be, but I still have that people phobia that's probably never going to go away entirely, and I was worried that I wouldn't know the right way to behave at a corn roast. Worry about being in a group situation is far too ingrained in my to fully get rid of, but I can still enjoy myself.
From there, we continued further west, picking up a bunch of state and local tourism brochures on the way to keep in the glove box. Lots of places we'll have to go! We ended up in a beautiful old downtown that somehow felt very out of place; as though it belonged in a time gone by. We walked along railroad tracks to get to a low but wide dam where I skipped rocks off the side of waterfall-covered concrete. We drove, slowly and carefully, through the lot of the same classic car place that we'd found on our previous drive out to see where Andrea will be going to school. I don't remember much more than that; I started falling asleep to the noise of the road as my raccoon drove onward.
I finally woke up as we were getting in to Kenosha. We stopped on the way at Blockbuster again. As I noted before, they didn't have what we were looking for, so instead we stopped in to see my family and borrowed their set of Firefly from them, which we spent a good part of the rest of the night absorbed in.
And now, I'm almost to
serinthia's place, so I will leave off for the moment. It's hard to drive home while writing a Livejournal entry. More to come as time rolls on....
