And Baklava for dessert!

Well, now that How I Met Your Mother, The Office, and Grey's Anatomy have all finale-d for the season, I'm not sure what to do with myself these days.

Kidding!

Work has been picking up, and although I'm a little unclear on my experimental parameter details, I'm trying hard. Hopefully I can figure out what I need to know next week and get moving on my tests. After some more tests on my steel sample, I'll be done with that, and can move on to copper. This probably doesn't mean much to y'all, but it'll be nice to work with another metal. Well, maybe it will. It'll be nice to do something new, but doing something new always comes with a learning curve. So we'll see how I handle it.

The past few days have been pretty awesome. Friday I don't really remember everything I did when I got home from work, but I do remember tuna-mac-and-cheese for dinner, and Kahlua drinks with brownies while watching Little Miss Sunshine. (Take a moment and just bask in all the awesomeness contained in that previous sentence. Mmm. Okay, now you're good to go.) I laughed almost as hard this time as I did the first time I watched that movie. It's great, and if you haven't seen it, you should.

Saturday we geared up for Matt coming to visit. He was flying in at night so we had the day to do other stuff like grocery shopping (Mike) and shoe shopping (me). Mike was much more successful. I didn't end up buying any tennis shoes, heels, or belts, but I did buy bubblegum and some of those Noxzema acne-fighting pads. Those things smell horrible but GEEZ they make your face tingle. I hope whatever they put in those things is safe because that smell sticks around A WHILE. But they're neat so far. Whether they'll become a habit? We see. We see.

I'd asked Mike to take me out to dinner on a date like we used to do back when we put some effort into the relationship (self-ZING), and he surprised me with a marvelous dinner on Saturday at an Ethiopian restaurant. We'd never eaten Ethiopian food before, and I'll admit, I was a little worried at first. I'd heard it was good stuff, but that's just what you hear sometimes, you know? There's always somebody who likes the type of food you're worried about. But anyway, we went there and it was wonderful. The food was great, the service was great, the place looked really neat, and we had a good time.

One thing about Ethiopian food that you might not know is that you eat it with your hands and with injera as your only utensil. Injera is thin, rolled bread:


You take a roll, tear off a piece, and kind of pick up what you want to eat using a sort of pig-in-a-blanket type of technique. The bread is sour and weird tasting, but it goes well with the spices they use in the food. Our food was served on a big round pan on top of, you guessed it, a huge piece of injera:


This isn't the best shot of the plate, but it's the least blurry, and I think the glass next to the plate gives a decent size comparison. The plate was about 18-20" in diameter. There was "house salad" dividing our two meals on the plate. Mine was beef and mushrooms with other tasty veggies in a spicy jalapeno pepper sauce, and Mike's was lamb with veggies in an even spicier sauce. You can see a piece of pepper in the picture above. Also, see that bottle of reddish sauce? That stuff will kick you in the face. It's some type of chili-like sauce with extra salt and more than its share of WHOOPASS. Good on food, not straight out of the bottle.

They also had an Ethiopian stout beer that Mike ordered, and I tried some, and it was good. And I don't drink/like beer, so you can mark my words that it was DAMN TASTY. I had a glass of their Ethiopian honey wine, which was also very delicious. It had the most complex flavor of wine that I'd ever had, I believe. I'm no wine connoisseur but here's how I'd describe how it tastes, in order: sweet, bite-y, mild, and then really, really smooth. Kind of a little bump at the beginning for the wine-bite, and then it just gets delicious as you let it sit on your tongue. Yum:

And this was all before we drove to SFO later that night to pick up Matt! I'll be back tomorrow or Tuesday with more stories and pictures. Goodnight!