House, Food and a Movie

I went over to the new house today and saw the progress that's been made. It continues to look great. Not a lot has changed over the Christmas holidays, but that's perfectly understandable. One of the most interesting things that I find about the process is how the house, which is just under 1900 square feet, seems to change size during the different stages. It's all an optical illusion and I'm thankful that people warned me about the effect before the building started. When only the foundation was finished, it all looked very small. When I drove up to the house when just a few of the walls were up, it looked small, but when I got out of the van and looked around, it looked like a decent size. Now it's looking huge and individual rooms feel different from how I expected. My studio, for example, looked on the floor plan as if it would be long and narrow, but it's actually nicely proportioned. The nine foot ceilings probably help with that.

I only had a few minutes to take a few pictures and then I headed off to see a movie with a friend of mine. We wanted to see Something's Gotta Give, with Jack Nicholson and Diane Keaton. Once we finally got a parking space, the movie had sold out. From what I noticed, it was the only movie that sold out. We decided to just eat dinner and call it a day. We should have better luck tomorrow, since we bought tickets while we were there.

One of the advantages of being at a shopping center, like Southpoint in Durham, is that restaurants seem to be open all day long. It was around 3:45pm and Big Bowl was roughly half full and filled up by the end of our meal. If I remember correctly, Big Bowl proclaims to have Chinese, Vietnamese and Thai cuisine. I'd been there once for lunch before and I had the Crispy Orange Peel Shrimp, which were excellent. Despite the fact that I wanted to try most of what was on the menu, I decided to have that again, because I'd liked it so much. We also split a combo order of potstickers, with three chicken and three vegetable dumplings. It came with three sauces, a duck sauce, the standard soy ginger sauce and a creamy sesame. I thought all were excellent, but I was surprised how much I liked the sweet duck sauce. I was also surprised at how good the vegetable potstickers were. I'd heard friends recommend them before, but this was the first time that I'd ever tried them.

Of course, the shrimp were nicely crisp and tangy, just as they had been before. I also had a glass of their ginger soda, which was very good. It tastes strongly of real ginger and lime juice, a lovely combination. Before, I had tried their iced hibiscus tea, which is basically red zinger. While I enjoyed it, it's not nearly as good as the iced red zinger that Pyewacket used to make,because Big Bowl added the sugar to the boiling water, just as you would make regular southern sweet tea. After some experimentation a few years back, I determined that you have to make the tea and chill it so it doesn't get diluted by the ice. Then you add the sugar afterwards. Red zinger is acidic enough such that the sugar (Sugar in the Raw is best) will dissolve, with stirring, when it's cold.

Not long after I got home, my parents and I took one more step forward toward joining the 21st century or even the previous one. We ordered our first pay per view movie! Direct TV was offering a coupon for one free movie a month, December through February. We saw Anger Management. I thought it was pretty funny and it was the first Adam Sandler movie I'd ever seen. I was pleased with how easy it was to pick out a movie. It certainly beats forgetting to take a movie back to the video store!