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.

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.