Quotidian: a quiet weekend, mostly

Too quiet, in some sense: cattitude was feeling knocked out by vaccines, so we didn't do much. We went for a bit of a walk in the park yesterday, but not seriously up into the hills. The trees are at that point where there's not much red left, and there's more brown and yellow than green, but not many trees are bare. There's a row of ginkgoes along Isham Street (which is hilly): at the moment, the two further down the hill are still green, and the two uphill ones are bright yellow. (Downhill is also closer to Broadway, which affects the microclimate.) A tiny maple is growing in a stone wall (along Seaman Avenue) and is showing gorgeous reds and yellows; I may have gotten a decent photo of it.

This evening, Cattitude and I went to Henry's End for a birthday dinner, slightly belated because of the above-mentioned vaccine side effects on his birthday. The duck in raspberry sauce and the Persian lime pie were both good (as expected: they've been on the menu there a long time, and I've enjoyed both before), but my shrimp bisque (a special) tasted wrong somehow. Not "wrong" as in "this is spoiled," nor even "this isn't what I ordered" (though I expect a bisque to be creamier, or at least thicker), but I didn't like it and didn't eat it. Had there been anything actually wrong, I would have called the server for help; as was, I just let it be. (If she'd come over and asked, I might have said "I just don't like it, somehow"; the busboy who eventually cleared the appetizer dishes asked only whether we were done.) Cattitude liked his salad, his veal and roast fennel, and his dessert, whose name I've forgotten: layers of crepe and some kind of filling, with a raspberry sauce. It reminded me vaguely of something from the Hungarian pastry shop near St. John the Unfinished, but I couldn't place what. [Is that bakery still there?]

Other than that, at lunchtime today I was walking up Park Avenue, and one of the usual young fund-raising types came over and asked me "Do you have a minute for gay rights?" and I told him "I have time for gay rights. I don't have money for your organization, which isn't about gay rights, it's about keeping yourselves going. Do something useful and get back to me." I walked away before he could say anything, which is probably just as well: I'm sure "supports the cause, has heard of HRC and wants nothing of it" isn't in their scripts.

Quotidian: a quiet weekend, mostly

Too quiet, in some sense: cattitude was feeling knocked out by vaccines, so we didn't do much. We went for a bit of a walk in the park yesterday, but not seriously up into the hills. The trees are at that point where there's not much red left, and there's more brown and yellow than green, but not many trees are bare. There's a row of ginkgoes along Isham Street (which is hilly): at the moment, the two further down the hill are still green, and the two uphill ones are bright yellow. (Downhill is also closer to Broadway, which affects the microclimate.) A tiny maple is growing in a stone wall (along Seaman Avenue) and is showing gorgeous reds and yellows; I may have gotten a decent photo of it.

This evening, Cattitude and I went to Henry's End for a birthday dinner, slightly belated because of the above-mentioned vaccine side effects on his birthday. The duck in raspberry sauce and the Persian lime pie were both good (as expected: they've been on the menu there a long time, and I've enjoyed both before), but my shrimp bisque (a special) tasted wrong somehow. Not "wrong" as in "this is spoiled," nor even "this isn't what I ordered" (though I expect a bisque to be creamier, or at least thicker), but I didn't like it and didn't eat it. Had there been anything actually wrong, I would have called the server for help; as was, I just let it be. (If she'd come over and asked, I might have said "I just don't like it, somehow"; the busboy who eventually cleared the appetizer dishes asked only whether we were done.) Cattitude liked his salad, his veal and roast fennel, and his dessert, whose name I've forgotten: layers of crepe and some kind of filling, with a raspberry sauce. It reminded me vaguely of something from the Hungarian pastry shop near St. John the Unfinished, but I couldn't place what. [Is that bakery still there?]

Other than that, at lunchtime today I was walking up Park Avenue, and one of the usual young fund-raising types came over and asked me "Do you have a minute for gay rights?" and I told him "I have time for gay rights. I don't have money for your organization, which isn't about gay rights, it's about keeping yourselves going. Do something useful and get back to me." I walked away before he could say anything, which is probably just as well: I'm sure "supports the cause, has heard of HRC and wants nothing of it" isn't in their scripts.

(no subject)

Someone convince me that it would be a bad idea to, in response to someone who posted asking an LJ community to do his homework, and then defended himself by claiming he was "teaching his sociology class" about the subject, ask him whether Professors X and Y told their students to ask random strangers on the internet to do their homework instead of going to the library. (His LJ posts include a meme with his real name, and his "interests" make it clear what college he goes to. It's a small sociology department, and there's one class he could plausibly be taking. The largest uncertainty is whether he is, in fact, doing an in-class presentation, or just realized at the last minute that he needed more for a term paper than "this is what my buddy and I think about relationships.")

If it's actually the "Intro to sociology" he claims it is, that's listed as taught by "department," meaning whoever they can fob it off on, but it's unlikely they'd be getting into this; there's a more relevant 200-level course. But the department is small enough that it's quite likely that one of the two names given as teaching that course is involved.