Hmmm, struggling to come up with a way to make work today sound interesting to those who aren't interested in the exact details of how you decide whether or not to leave words open or hyphenate them, where exactly a hyphen, en or em dash goes, or any of the other things I spent five and a half hours looking for today. Weekender goes to print tomorrow, so I think I looked at pretty much the entire thing, at least once, today and then also proofed a couple of BAB articles, along with doing a little bit of writing and quickly preparing for an interview tomorrow. Contrary to how it might sound (looking at commas and all that), it was still an enjoyable day--there is something very satisfying about crossing off all of the corrections with a bright pink highliter!

We broke from tradition today and headed the opposite direction from Suji's to go to a place called, I think, Eggs Benedict, which is a really, really cute cafe down by Nissin (the expat grocery store we buy our Canadian bacon at). Since it was a totally gorgeous day (23C and sunny), we sat outside on the sunken courtyard they have outside. The whole cafe felt very much like it was straight out of Estevan or Oak Bay village back home, and the food was quite nice--salads, curries, Eggs Benedict (of course), taco rice, which is what I got, baked goods, coffees, etc.

After work, which was about 7:15 by the time I left, I headed up to Orbitune to meet Peter. While I was waiting for him, for about an hour, I finished my Bill Bryson book, which was fantastic. One of the reviews on it says something about him making writing look flawless, which is true--he has such an easy, dryly humorous way of writing which makes you think he is just sitting there chatting with you, but you know that if you tried to write like that, it would just sound like you were trying to write like you were just chatting sarcastically.

His book paints a great portrait of America in 200 pages, from the point of view of an American who spent 20 years in Britain and then came back to 'rediscover' his homeland. With self deprecating love but no holds barred, he points out some of the flaws and oddities of American culture. Among other gems, I found out that the average American eats 19 pounds of pretzels a year (and Peter and I thought our four pound Costco purchase in January was excessive!). Also, there is one lawsuit for every 2.5 people in America, and NYC spends something like 200million dollars paying for 'slip and fall' settlements ever year. There is also something like 300 lawyers for every 100 000 people in America (and more there than the rest of the world combined). To put in some kind of perspective, Japan has 11 per 100 000.

Once Peter was ready to go, at about 10, we went out to get gyudon (meat over rice, basically), which is like comfort food in a bowl. Its super cheap, super filling, and super loved by lower level salary men, who can put a bowl away in about 2.2 minutes (that's only exaggerated by about 30 seconds). Its like ramen, a super hot, large bowl of which can be consumed by a 'ri man in about 2 minutes through a well practised combi of slurping and as Kieron puts it, "putting your whole head in the bowl to become one with the ramen". The slurping and head-bowl techniques cool the ramen down and keep splashing to a minimum, respectively.

We were ordering at the vending machine, as you do, but I didn't really know what I wanted, so I just randomly pushed buttons, and ended up with salad, miso, gyudon (with pork, not beef, which is how its traditionally served up), and pecularly, a raw egg. In the shell. I'm really not sure what one is supposed to do with that. Actually, that's not quite true--you are supposed to crack it into the provided dish, mix it up, and pour it over your rice which is supposed to cook it with the ambient heat. I just palmed my egg (and Peter's), and took it as a type of doggy bag. I like my eggs properly cooked, thanks :).

Off to watch some gymnastics now (I love TiVo, have I mentioned?)

D.

(who, btw, doesn't want to hear anything about the grammatical mistakes which are sure to be in here, just in case anyone was getting some ideas!)