I rarely carry an umbrella, because I usually dash quick enough to be able to dodge the raindrops. Totally cracks me up on a rainy day like today how the people with umbrellas still huddle under the awnings of the stores, sometimes to the point of pushing people without umbrellas (like me!) out into the rain. This happened to me in a really bad way last week when I was at the bus shelter waiting to go home. I counted 4 people with umbrellas huddled under the eaves of the shelter. I was just about to say something when their bus came and I had room to stand under the shelter again.
If I could change just *one* thing about the world, then people who need to read their email to stay in touch with what is going on, be it at home or at work, would ACTUALLY READ THEIR EMAIL! And save them if they contained important information! And there wouldn’t be any people like a former boss of mine who would automatically print out the email, read it on paper, and then thrown it in the recycle bin. What a waste, huh? Think about how many trees had to die for that cause.
I wonder if when the telephone first started to make its way into the business world, if CEOs and company presidents had to be convinced that they needed to pick up the phone when it rang for them.
Boss: “Miss Smith! I was supposed to talk with the head of the sales department department today! Why isn’t he here in my office to talk to me?”
Miss Smith: “Sir, the head of sales is out of town today visiting a client, and he was going to call you.”
Boss: “Call me? What in heaven’s name do you mean by that?”
Miss Smith: “Did you hear a bell ringing in your office a few minutes ago?”
Boss: “Yes. It came from that black device someone put on my desk a few days ago.”
Miss Smith: “That is a telephone, sir. It allows you to talk with people even when they are not in the same room as you. When it rings, you’re supposed to pick up the receiver, and that allows you to hear and speak to someone.”
Boss: “That’s incredible! But it’s so much work… I want people to show up in my office if they wish to speak with me. These phone things are just a bit too new-fangled for my tastes.”
Miss Smith: “But sir, all the executives at the other companies use these to communicate. You won’t be able to communicate with them unless you learn to use a phone.”
Boss: “Bah! Phone-shmone! If they want to talk to me, they just have to do things the old fashioned way – in person!”
We tried Kushikatsu cuisine at The Olive Stick last night, which was quite the yummy adventure. Kushikatsu is a Japanese style of cooking where the food is breaded, then deep-fried in olive oil and served on skewers. Because the breading is very fine, and they “flash-fry” it, the food isn’t as greasy as you would think.
We ordered full-course meals with cold sweet sake, which includes 6 “sticks”, a soup, a stick salad, and a rice ball. My soup was creamy ruby, which was a beet soup garnished with sour cream and dill. The stick salad consisted of a deep clear bowl with wasabi dressing in the bottom, and a variety of vegetable sticks standing up in the bowl, backed by a large lettuce leaf. This was the first time I was able to eat a salad with my hands. The rice ball came in the shape of a flower, garnished with seaweed, herbs, and a crunchy sesame sprinkle.
The sticks were fun – they came with a tray of different sauces on the side. The sticks I ordered were beef rolled with garlic and basil, cracker sandwich, shitake mushroom with minced beef, scallops with butter and soy sauce, eel rolled with seaweed, sesame sweet potato, mochi with sweet soy sauce, and brie with spicy jam. (We ordered extra sticks so we could try more flavors.) The cracker sandwich turned out to be thinly sliced beef between two saltine crackers, breaded and fried. I think my favorites were the brie stick, the mochi stick, and the shitake and beef stick.
After we had made it through our sticks, we finished the meal off with hot sake, served in little jugs with tiny thimble cups. The cold sake had been served in wooden boxes. It was really neat to try some new things.
Unfortunately, that restaurant location is closing in a couple of days, and they are opening a new one downtown not far from my office called Madame Butterfly. The current restaurant is about 5 blocks from our house, and will now be used for private parties only. The good thing is that I can have kushikatsu at lunch if I feel like doing something special.