Weekendy stuff

I was just about to make dinner last night when my cell phone bleeped at me. The ensuing struggle with attempting to text on my little Motorola Dumb Phone resulted in meeting up with James and Sylvia for dinner at Da Nang.

But first, a bit of history. Several years ago, when I was still living over in Oakland with Gaius, James would come out to visit about once a year (usually in conjunction with MacWorld). IIRC, I'd picked him up from the airport and the hour being late-ish and him being hungry, we were going to find a Denny's. We knew it was somewhere up on San Pablo. So it's about 9:30 at night and we're taking San Pablo Avenue north through Berkeley and James is doing his impression of an Airedale (window rolled down and enjoying the night air even though it's January) and suddenly he shouts "DA NANG!" "James, you're too young for those kinds of flashbacks." "No, Da Nang!" (Points at restaurant sign.)

Anyway, it's been a running thing for years and I've been meaning to try the place and the last time Sylvia and Lyman and I tried, there was a huge party in the place so we ended up somewhere else. Last night, I finally got to eat there. The menu is Thai and Vietnamese. The three of us split an appetizer combo of Thai fish cakes, crispy tofu, deep fried sweet potato, spring rolls and shrimp rolls. James had a "bird's nest" of crispy noodles with shrimp and beef and veggies. Sylvia and I had Vietnamese variants on satay. Mine was with beef and peanut sauce, hers with chicken and she opted for peanut/coconut/lemongrass sauce. Everything was tasty, the prices were very reasonable and I'd happily eat there again.

Went back to their apartment with a take-out curry and some Happy Donuts for Lyman and hung out for awhile.

I started my Saturday morning attempting to answer questions on Japanese bathing practices for a would-be writer who popped up on the Tousando about a month ago looking for information on the Sengoku period. I think she lives on the internet, because it seems to be the only place she does her research. I've been name-dropping book titles in the meantime. Anyway, the beauty book reynardine sent me last week was useful for memory jogs on washing with rice bran, ground adzuki beans and so forth. It has an impressive bibliography, but not a damn footnote in the thing and it's impossible to know how old some of these "traditional" treatments are. (The upside: the recipes - if you want to make a rice bran face wash or have a persimmon facial, there are instructions.)

I'd also offered to get another Tousando-ite some tea utensils from Daiso, so I got up, treated myself to a chai from the Beanery and was down the freeway by the time the Daiso in Union City opened. I was able to find him a tea whisk, bamboo scoop, bamboo water dipper, a wire strainer for sifting matcha and a couple of packets of kaishi (napkins) for about $12. Total. I also picked up three more teacups for the HOCM.

I used what was left of my Christmas gift card at Best Buy on a copy of "13 Assassins." I also stopped at TJ Maxx before going home because I discovered that both my favorite pairs of yoga pants (I like them for taiko, among other things) were disintegrating along the crotch seam. Unfortunately, they all seem to come with wide waistbands anymore, but I did find a pair that was the same brand as one of the old ones, so I'll give them a try.

Spent most of the afternoon on the overskirt for the Nara ensemble - light green silk with a sort of tone-on-tone ribbing. I just have to pleat it into a waistband at this point. The yellow linen for the underskirt has been laundered. The reconstructions on the Kyoto Costume Museum website have wide, flat pleats, but the reconstruction in the Nuikata book has a skirt made of two long strips  different lengths.  The shorter is pleated into the waistband with tiny pleats and the larger is pleated into the bottom of that with tiny pleats. I've got four yards of the yellow - I'm just going to pleat all of that for the underskirt in one big rectangle, rather than doing two tiers no one is going to see. EDIT - or not. I may have to see how much bulk it adds under the overskirt that way.

Sewing breaks ended up as my answering more questions for the writer. Grooming devolved into incense. Thank goodness my Japanese books are on shelves directly behind my desk....

I have to go up to Sacramento tomorrow for my English Civil War group's annual business meeting. Dale wants us to dress in our kit for photos for the website, which reportedly is FINALLY getting a face lift. Then lunch at some local Celtic pub. I am NOT driving all the way to Sacramento in a corset though. Nuh uh.