Monica

ralphmelton

lorimelton

dr4b

Saturday night at a restaurant we were given a "pager", a gadget that would flash when our table was ready. (And this was with reservations. :-) ) The pager is a hunk of plastic that also serves as a coaster; it says so right on it. (I guess they want you to go into the bar and wait.) While waiting, we read the advertising on the coaster, which said that such-and-such brand (yeah, I've already forgotten -- not very effective advertising) was the perfect pager for restaurants, bars, something else, and church nurseries. Church nurseries?? Dani tried asking the hostess (she said she'd be happy to answer questions), but she had no enlightenment for us.

Saturday's mail brought a letter from my health-insurance company with a $7 coupon for Allavert, an OTC allergy drug. (If the coupon is for $7, I shudder to think what the stuff actually costs.) The letter first said that OTC drugs are better than prescription because you don't need to see your doctor -- and then went on to say that before changing medicines you should consult your doctor. Their spin-meisters need some remedial training. Of course we all know that the real reason they're doing this is that OTC drugs don't involve any insurance pay-outs. I think I would have respected them more if they'd pursued a "...and that helps us keep your rates down" line of reasoning, but they didn't.

We've now (re-)watched B5 through the end of season 3. I suppose you could say it ends on a cliff-hanger. :-) We have B5 season 4 and West Wing season 3 DVDs waiting for us now. We tend to be pretty busy and only see a couple episodes of anything per week, so this will last a while.

Short takes:

The bachelor and the dust bunny, via metahacker.

"There's an amazing variety of things to do in Pittsburgh. It's just that all those events share the same three parking spaces, and two of those spots are staked out with folding chairs." -- innerbitch_rss.

The descriptions of dishes, while being passed, suffered some signal degradation: "one of the lamb dishes", "vegetarian something-or-other", "meat, um chicken?, with spinach", and so on. Fortunately, we were all somewhat aware of what had been ordered, so we only needed to disambiguate, not fully specify.

Later my mother called to try to figure out when we can get together. (Her birthday is Saturday.) This turned out to be challenging:

Her: Saturday?
Me: It's Rosh Hashana. Sunday?
Her: Your father has [schedule conflict]. Next Sunday?
Me: Well, Yom Kippur is that night, but we could do lunch.
Her: If that's a problem, what about Saturday the 11th?
Me to self: Do I want to explain to them about eating in the sukkah?
Me to her: Um, that's Sukkot. Let's go back to that previous Sunday...
Her: What's Sukkot?
Me: One of several holidays that are going to complicate this exercise for the next few weeks. :-)

Later I ended up explaining Sukkot to her anyway (quickie version) and she said it sounded neat, so if we decide that next Sunday doesn't work, they'll come out for Sukkot lunch or something.

Last night, to celebrate lorimelton's birthday, a bunch of us went to a restaurant I had not previously heard of, Buca di Beppo. Now let's start with the name. For some reason, I had trouble maintaining this name in memory, because there were no hooks. Those weren't personal names or place names I'd ever heard before, and they weren't familiar-sounding words, and the pattern suggested that at least one of them should have been recognizable. I actually internalized it as "two two-syllable 'B' words connected by an article or preposition", and figured there wouldn't be two places in the same block that matched that description. So, off we went.

The neon sign out front said "elegant dining". We met ralphmelton at the door and said that we hoped we were dressed well enough (we were wearing jeans); he said not to worry. Lori then led us inside, where we got our first glimpse of the decor. She particularly wanted to show us their statue of David, to demonstrate once and for all that "elegant" had a different meaning here. Most replicas of classical statues that I've seen have not been painted bright purple. This particularly statue was not especially unusual for the place; I saw several others, all brightly-painted, some augmented with other decorations. (I believe it was Venus who had the flower garland draped around her neck.)

The walls were completely covered with photos, paintings, tchachkes, strange newspaper/magazine clippings, and assorted goofy stuff. I saw a sign addressed to the staff that said "food is not a weapon", and another that said "state law forbids threatening customers and their children". This does not begin to describe the decor, really.

The restaurant is on three floors and is divided into a bunch of small rooms. Lori said she hoped we didn't get the "pope room". Pope room? Yes, so-named because of the large statue of the pope in the center. We never saw it; I assume it wasn't treated any more seriously than the parts of the place we did see. We ended up in the "cardinal room". This did not involve birds. (There was no statue; the name derived from the hat hanging on the center wall.)

Really, though, "X room" (for any value of X) would imply far more of a unifying theme to the room's contents than is accurate. Maybe each room is simply named for its most prominent piece.

On our way to our table we walked past the kitchen, and the hostess made a point of saying that it's an open kitchen and we were free to walk in and look around. (I assume they had some areas blocked off from customers, for health-code reasons if nothing else.) I should have gone to take a look, to satisfy my curiosity about the logistics, but I didn't.

The food (Italian) was very good. Note, though, that this is not a place to take a date, unless you're double- or triple-dating. The food is served family-style, and each dish you order feeds 4-6. Our group of 11 ordered three entrees, two salads, and a couple appetizers, and there was some food left over.

The cheese-stuffed manicotti was very good, as were both salads (one mixed greens, one ceaser). The other two entrees had meat in them, so I didn't eat them, but those who did had good things to say about both. The garlic bread was tasty and actually had perceptible real garlic, not just garlic powder mixed in with the butter.

We brought our own birthday cake and the staff loaded it up with candles. They also brought a large candle in a two-foot-high holder and put that right in front of Lori. She had to stand up to blow it out. I wondered what the staff was going to sing, in these days of copyright/royalty demands on the traditional melody, but we started singing before they could take control. We sang and they shouted Lori's name at the appropriate time.

It was a fun evening. I would go there again, if we had a large-enough group. You could do it with six, if everyone can agree on one entree, but eight is probably better.

Perhaps ironically, my mishna study group, which is doing Tractate Pesachim, has just gotten to the practical details of how so many lambs can be slaughtered in such a short period of time. Every Jew was required to bring a lamb on erev Pesach, which would then be eaten at the seder. Obviously people could team up (you can't save leftovers), so that's one per large family or perhaps pair of families. But that's still an awful lot of lambs, and they only had a few hours in which to perform the ritual. I'm curious about how this will play out...

Friday night we had a guest speaker who is involved with the Holocaust Center in Pittsburgh. (I didn't know we had one.) Sadly, he was not a very engaging speaker; he kept talking about his opportunities to get to know survivors and so on, some of whom were there that night, and I found that I would have been much more interested in hearing them speak. Oh well. Sometimes the pulpit guests work out well, and sometimes they don't. It frustrates me when I realize that I've lost the opportunity for a good sermon from my rabbi to one of the ones who didn't work out. (Ooh, I feel like such a groupie! But it's true; I almost always find what my rabbi says to be very interesting, and I look forward to his talks.)

Saturday my parents stopped by shortly after I got home. They were in the neighborhood and wanted to drop something off (Dani's Christmas present, as it turned out), and I invited them in for lunch. (On Shabbat I try to make sure there's extra food in the crock pot, so I have the option to bring someone home from services.) This was the first time they'd heard kiddush and motzi and stuff, and my father ended up asking me a bunch of questions about Shabbat. I think it's pretty nifty that he wants to know about this stuff. Among things, we went partway down the "what is forbidden work?" path.

Saturday night Dani and I went out to Prince of India in Oakland. We'd never been there before, but we had a coupon from the entertainment book and I'd been craving Indian food, so we tried it. I thought the food was pretty good, though not as good as Sitar. The service was slow. And we ended up not using the buy-one-get-one-free coupon because when we got there we saw a sign in the window that said "dinners half off 7-10pm". It's kind of the reverse of the typical early-bird special, I guess. We asked if that applied on a Saturday night and they said yes, so we took it. (The coupon doesn't stack with other offers, in case you're wondering.)

The food in general was pretty good; the papadam was excellent. I want to learn how to make that, but I've never seen a recipe. (This is that thin wafer made out of lentils. It usually has a bit of a kick from pepper. This certainly did.)