It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like

On the Tuesday before Christmas, when all through the house, not a creature was stirring, because I went to Champa with CL, JL, GA, EB and MP. We had a very good time and I got to have my pad thai with shrimp fix. It was too late at night for Thai iced tea, unfortunately. We were concerned, because Champa has started having a live jazz band play every Tuesday night and we though it might inhibit conversation, but it turned out that it wasn't that bad and we sat in the back. Afterwards, we headed over to Barnes and Noble. Given how crowded the one at Southpoint one was the previous weekend, I was surprised to see that there weren't many people at the Brier Creek one. That was good for us. I had a decaf cafe mocha with skim. Shocking.

I had been planning to make macaroons or brownies for the Duke University Library Staff Association (DULSA) Christmas party, but I got back much too late. I had to take purchased stollen instead. The party was fun. AJ helped me get through to the Gothic Reading Room, which I'd never seen before. There was catered barbecue and chicken and people brought desserts. It was all very good. There were karaoke Christmas carols and everything was very festive. No, I didn't sing.

One night when I got home, either Wednesday or Thursday, there were flowers from CL and JL waiting for me at my front door. It was 27F out, so the alstrloemarias were frozen and according to my answering machine message it had been outside for 2 hours, but it perked up amazingly well. It's a very pretty arrangement and I've enjoyed it all week.

Thursday morning I had to get up to test the Blackboard system at 6am. Old courses were moved to a different file system during the middle of the night so I needed to verify that everything was all right. It was. Around lunchtime NP and I tried out Cafe Zen at the American Tobacco Campus. While my dragon roll wasn't nearly as good as a Kurama wizard roll, it was still very good and had lots of avacado. They passed my mackerel test quite well. The service was horribly slow, but that might have been because they were short staffed so close to Christmas. NP told me all about his recent trip to South Africa, which was very interesting and entertaining.