On Friday, per usual when it's an option, I slept in a bit later than everyone else. There was an omelet made with left-over squash/rice dish and toast and a debate about how to conquer a day with abyssmally gray weather. Then I found out THE STATION AGENT was on at the Kentucky Theater. Everyone else graciously agreed to go see it, because everyone loves Peter Dinklage.

I highly recommend the movie. It's sweet and funny and has only a few missteps, but you can hardly hold those against it. Lovely movie. Charmingly cast, beautifully shot. And it makes good use of quiet moments of acting, without overplaying them.

After that, even though it was Buy Nothing Day, we went shopping at the book and CD stores. We got some magazines -- The Diarist's Journal, The Sun (on a rec from Michael Bishop in our Night Shade forum), and Orion -- and we swapped out old copies of Say and LCRW Sqecial had left for new ones. CD store was full of new used goodies (bless those college kids for buying CDs, burning them, and selling them back so quickly). We got the "Tour de France Soundtracks" by Kraftwerk, "Countrysides" by Cracker, "A Beautiful EP" by Clem Snide, "Reality" by David Bowie, "Just Because I'm a Woman: Songs of Dolly Parton" by various, "The Party Never Ends (Songs You Know From The Times You Can't Remember)" by Robert Earl Keen, and "Tough Love" by Hamell on Trial. You can figure out which ones are Christopher's, which are mine and which are both. Richard also gave us The Rosebuds' "Make Out" and Trailer Bride's "Hope is a Thing With Feathers." Wow, that's a lot of new music. But a pretty inexpensive haul too, which is always pleasant.

Then we had a little more whiskey, or maybe that was earlier, and went to Tomo, the excellent sushi place.

Here's a picture of Barb and Richard looking cute together at the restaurant.



Sadly, we neglected to take any pictures of the delicious and beautiful sushi. However, the sushi chef at Tomo is also trained as a French pastry chef so they always have the dessert equivalents of non sequiturs only yummy. We got the three they had that night, two puff pastry thingies with strawberries and a special creme the chef makes, apple pie with the same creme, and a wonderfully light flan with green tea ice cream.



Then, we decided we would rather go bowl and sing karaoke than hear a band. This would be a fateful decision, but we made it and called a cab.

The bar didn't have anything I would drink, but the others gamely Corona'd up and we got our shoes and bowled to give the bar time to hop.

Our girl shoes were lovely, scuffy and identical. Can you tell who is who?



Christopher ultimately won, I'm told, though I didn't realize it until he told me. Everyone's a winner when we bowl, because we are all pretty bad. Our sorta winner:



Richard, who is secretly a really good bowler:



Barb, who isn't, but does it with grace:



And me, the blurry one:



Richard and Christopher, putting competition aside...



And those are all the pictures, because I wasn't familiar with how to work my Dark Karaoke Bar Camera Settings, and we wanted to get out alive and really the story of the karaoke bar we fled in the snow on foot should only be told aloud as people might get offended if they can't experience certain parts with the proper inflections.

We were glad of the infamy after we left, well, after we made it safely to another bar, with much better stock, and much less scary inhabitants. Our cab driver on the way home was in the middle of The Dark Tower series.

So, anyway, those are all the pictures I have. And all the time I have to tipper tapper about it all.

It was a lovely holiday, and one that made me thankful for many, many things.

earworm: "Nick Drake Tape," Clem Snide (The Beautiful EP)

random rec: "The Experts Speak," ed. Cerf and Navasky

namecheck: Mike "Hava Nagila" Dude