Bloomington stores

Changes of note, for residents who haven't noticed or ex-residents who still care:

Today's lead is HuHot, replacing Cheeseburgers in Paradise in the NW corner of Eastland Plaza, aka "the Borders mall". HuHot is a mongolian grill, all you can eat, $8 for weekday lunch, maybe $12 for dinner, some price for weekend lunch ($9?). It seems good. Meat slices are mostly frozen even at 15;15. The distinctive element is 12 sauces in addition to the standard garlic chili sesame oils. My first bowl was bland, "spicy" sausage, pork, water chestnuts, garlic broth, sesame oil, sherry. Second bowl was very tasty: same sausage, beef, tomatoes, onions, some peanut sauce (their #1 sauce, allegedly), garlic oil. Third bowl was also good, and all veggie: tofu, baby corn, tomato, onion, water chestnuts, lettuce, some 4-chilis sauce, garlic oil. (There's also 3 types of noodles, plus table rice or tortillas.) Either their sauces are good or I like anything with tomatoes onions and garlic cooked together.

Where Borders was has been snapped up by one of those migratory seasonal stores, a Halloween one naturally. Huge, as Borders was. Lease sign still up of course, since no doubt it'll be gone by the end of November.

Jumping back, Friday I had one of the basil rices at Siam House; good. Leaving, I found that Casablanca the Moroccan restaurant had turned into My Thai, Bton's third Thai restaurant unless something has happened to Esan Thai. Kirkwood has a funky sandwich shop, where the menus are brown paper bags you check options on, turn in, and presumably receive your sub back in. Dunkin Donuts (next to Noodles next to Von Lee) has been replaced by *another* sandwich shop, Potbelly,with a very old-timey decor. Word is that the Dagwood's on 10th near Eigenmann has close.

There's a Darn Good Soup fast restaurant on the west side of the square, replacing Bloomington Sandwich Company, which I'm told moved next to Buskirk-Chumley. Ch and I went there Monday, and it was good; we both had pork and tomatillo soup. Bread is good though small, coming in 25 cent chunks.

My eyes kept falling off the Runcible Spoon menu Sunday, despite the rather large sans serif font. No one else has observed its unreadability. No, I'm not going blind, I can read everything else, I just got a sense of "DO NOT READ" from that menu.

Other Bton notes

The B-line trail has been extended. In the north, not far, from 9th and Rogers to 9th and Adams, or so said the map pillar; I stopped at the old endpoint. But I went south all the way down to Country Club Road. It then connects to the Rail Trail, but I wasn't going to take a borrowed road bike onto gravel. All the crossings have signs saying "STOP TRAFFIC DOES NOT STOP", but the cars see signs saying "YIELD FOR PEDS AND BIKES". Amy says Bton has been trying out Yield signs on 10th (Psychology), and I saw one on Jordan (dorms/Education?), but also says the drivers don't seem to have caught on yet. Note the callback to Thursday and the lack of such signs on 3rd.

Thurs: SFDG dinner
Friday: Gamers' Guild, which I mostly spent chatting with anima or Amy and selecting wedding music.
Saturday: wedding, which for here we'll note my going to Oliver Winery for the first time. The wine-involving salami was okay. The Seattles Chocolates Mint Dark Chocolate Truffle bar was quite good. I did not have any wine there. Post-reception I went to anime club, and saw episodes 9-10 of various series. House of Five Leaves, good. Last Exile, fun. Wolf's Rain: interesting. Giant Killing: time to go home.
Sunday: chatted with oniugnip, met Amy, read Action Philosophers
Monday: borrowed bike, met Ch, B-line, finally went to greenhouse with Amy, biked all the way over to Knightridge for music-sharing at tooth_and_claw's, got told to read K. J. Parker, watched Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares, biked back.
Today: slept in, HuHot, Logicomix.

Monday evening showed a few things. One was Spectrums, a series of collections of contemporary fantastic art. I liked what I saw. Second was how fast my cat allergy can kick in. Staying at Lindsey's hasn't been too bad, with an isolated room and little contact. tooth has 4 cats and carpet and within five minutes of sitting on the carpet my nose was streaming. Moving to the smooth couch, or a high metal chair, helped a bit. Within an hour of going back to anima's and saganhawk's afterwards I was back to normal.

Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares purports to be about a chef who visits terrible restaurants and fixes them, with a lot of insults along the way. I don't know how real vs. scripted it purports to be; I'm skeptical of what smells like a reality show for food, and also that some of those places wouldn't have killed someone if they were as bad as he claims. Still, it was entertaining, and someone opening a seafood dining restaurant despite not eating seafood is sadly plausible, especially if he talks about "dining experience" and has pseudo-Pollock art on the walls. Ironically, or perhaps suspiciously, he was saved by being turned into a fish and chips shop specializing in fresh... pollock.

I don't comment much or regularly on seeing and hanging out with people, because I'm me, but that's been great, too.

Wedding notes

And finally, notes about the main event!

* Beck Chapel seems rather Irish. Or at least there's a lot of very simple triskelions in it.

* I usually think wedding dresses look somewhere between blah and absurd. lyceum looked beautiful. I think I can identify why. Most dresses are pure white, have bare arms, and look completely impractical, with giant inhibiting gowns, giant trains, or both and more. Lyceum had covered arms, looked like a lady able to go direct the defense of the castle when treacherously attacked on her wedding day, and as a mention of tea-staining a hand-me-down hairpiece directed my attention to, was in ivory or off-white rather than bleach-white, which I'm guessing goes better with actual skin tones. I don't know why the arms matters, but it seems a factor. Her own words were that she'd always wanted to frolic at her own wedding, and so she had a dress that permitted it; one might worry about the fabric, but it didn't seem physically inhibiting.

I note the standard dress often wards off the bride's lower body from physical contact. Perhaps that's considered a feature, but lyceum's dress looked more fun for both bride and groom.

* Ceremony was rather religious for a couple of agnostics. But minister was groom-dad, and Christian-agnostics aren't as sensitive as atheists.

* Ceremony also spent quite some time on a parable of a farmer who paid a denarius to workers, no matter when they started working. In context, I think the intended meaning was about being generous and accepting gifts and not standing on fairness or perceived rights, to make a marriage work. But I kept hearing it as "accept what you're given, rich people have the right to do whatever they want"; that segment could have been dropped straight into a rant against striking workers. It's not just my overpoliticized brain; someone else turned out to have had the same reaction.

* The new Mr. Lyceum told the guy ahead of me in the reception line that "it" was probably going to all be a blur, whether wedding or line or both. For my turn, well:
"I could pinch you. You'd probably remember that."
"I probably would. That could help."
*takes that as permission, pinches the groom*
"Ow! I'll definitely remember that."

Personally, I give only even odds of his having spontaneous recall of it, though I'd expect recollection given prompt.

* Later we threw birdseed at the newlyweds. Lack of decolletage meant no risque targeting of the bride; instead the groom ended up with a hair full of seed. "Groom the groom!" I called, as he tried to shake it all out later.

* We picnicked at Oliver Winery, before the reception. A frisbee had been given its own bridal veil. It was still decently aerodynamic, at least until the fringe started coming part way off, and we managed not to send it into the lake.

* My table ended up with various ciders -- apple, blueberry, and pomegranate -- and only a bit of Kava sparkling wine. I preferred the ciders. We also got in a game of telephone-pictionary. Lyceum missed a great chance to inflict it on the entire wedding party; those 8-person tables would have been ideal.

* I got to notify the couple that their car had been 'vandalized' with "just married" decorations. I honestly thought I was just commenting on what I'd seen on a walk, but turned out they didn't know yet.

* I guess it was too long a day for most people; dancing to decent music got aborted by people sneaking away and lyceum not wanting to lose help for cleanup, so minimal dancing with the newlyweds, except with each other.

* Cake. Was there even a solid wedding cake? I never saw it if so. There were cupcakes. The bit I had was good though I was pretty full by then.

And that's all she wrote. Huh, my one other post with the 'weddings' tag got 19 comments.