Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

We celebrated cattitude's birthday with excellent sushi and homemade birthday cake. The sushi was from Cafe Sushi (which delivers through DoorDash) and hence a bit of a splurge. I got one of the nigiri assortments, which was as good as I'd expected, and a negihama roll (yellowtail and scallion). Cattitude had chirashi, and adrian_turtle had seaweed salad and a couple of rolls, and we ordered more maki to share. In practice, we shared all the maki, except that I didn't eat any of the spicy salmon roll. I did eat two pieces of the special tuna roll, which had quite a bit of wasabi, and maybe a bit of hot pepper.

There was slightly more sushi than we had room for, not and leave room for even small portions of chocolate cake, but only slightly. The food was excellent, as was the company. I was pleased that Adrian and Cattitude both wanted seconds of the chocolate cake. I don't expect to finish the cake while it's still fresh, and will probably make half as much next time (it calls for two eggs, so that's an easy recipe to halve.)

cattitude and I just had sushi for the first time in 16 months, having decided that (at least this week) in this part of Massachusetts, I was willing to eat indoors.

It wasn't astounding sushi, but it was sushi, and reasonably good, and hey, raw fish! nori! And then we went to the farmers market, so I have raspberries and peaches and lettuce and cherry tomatoes, and bread and local honey. (Genki-ya, in Davis Square.)

Now I am home, and glad to be in an air conditioned room. (Weather Underground says the air quality here is "155: unhealthy," but the weather app on my iPhone says "70: moderate." I wore a mask indoors and part of the time I was outdoors, and the air seemed OK.)

Tomorrow will be a day to stay close to home and not over-exert myself, because I am trying to be cautious after being sick for several weeks, including a relapse or two.

I'm just back from sushi dinner with roadnotes, baldanders, and cattitude. The fish was good, despite the restaurant being out of some things; some of that was minor, leaving us with mackerel instead of Spanish mackerel and me with sea eel instead of freshwater eel. (I'd made the choice between those two pretty arbitrarily; I like them equally well and in the same way.) We talked about all sorts of stuff, food and health and t-shirt collections and relationships and random silliness. Baldanders is doing well, I think: some aphasia, but he communicated pretty well, if with some gaps, and seemed to understand all of the conversation. I tried a roll called, I think, Josephina: something like that, random enough that I'd guess that's the person who came up with it. Tuna, cucumber, green apple, and tempura crunch, inside-out. (The menu said "eel sauce"; it came without, but I don't think eel sauce would have improve it.) I liked it, and happily finished it (except the bits I gave my friends to try), and am glad I ordered it, but probably won't order it again: though that's partly that there are more interesting fish available, and it's a large roll, so reduces total variety if nobody else wants to split one. Green apple does go pretty well with tuna and sushi rice.

Also, I have Cattitude's birthday present; the second and third packages arrived today, despite a post office tracking page that told me they had attempted delivery on Saturday, and I should go to the post office with the delivery slip and photo ID to pick it up. I had no delivery slip; I tried to find it, determined by phone that, yes, tracking number plus photo ID would do, and was all set to head out after work when the office manager, who I'd asked about where such a slip might be, told me my package was here.