super-good!

Before I forget, a few notes about the food we went out for in London:

• Our first night there we had some really fantastic Thai food at Isarn on Upper St. in Islington. The food was excellent and the fruit drinks that they served were super-good. Also amusing were my sister-in-law’s tactics for getting our four-year-old nephew to eat the salt-and-pepper fried squid—she tells him it’s “squid-chicken.” He ate with gusto, and after a few minutes looked up and Andrea and me sagely. “Squid and chicken are the same thing,” he explained with great authority. Alyssa used this technique again on Thanksgiving, when she served Damaso a helping of turkey-chicken.

• A few nights later we had dinner at J Sheekey before seeing a play. I had a pan-fried filet of sole and was very pleased, and I didn’t do too bad of a job getting the bones out despite having had a few glasses of wine. Truly, this is an accomplishment of which I can be very proud, and one that must be awe-inspiring to anyone who might be reading this.

• Tea, particularly the tea we had at Liberty, was always wonderful. Why don’t we do this in the States?

• We had dinner at the Wapping Project, to which I won’t link because their website is fairly incomprehensible and irritatingly resizes your web browser. The food was good, but the atmosphere was really fun. Giant green generators all over the place, and a huge tree out front filled with yellow umbrellas; also, the small stand of trees surrounding a phone booth in the back room.

We’ve been in London since last Saturday, staying with Alyssa and Santi in their amazing loft. It’s been fun shopping and having afternoon tea, walking around in the drizzle and hearing a new accent or language on every corner.

My sleep schedule is totally off—I’ve been waking up at three or four, feeling completely awake for an hour, and then conking out again until noon (and would sleep longer if Andrea didn’t come wake me). Oh, how I suffer!

We’re heading off to the V&A in a little while, and then it’ll be dinner and a play.

Some pictures of food I saw on sale in Minnesota on our recent trip:

I didn’t partake.

We’ve had a new floor put in our bedrooms, which means that we had to move all the stuff from half of our house into the other half. Our fireplace nook became essentially the only habitable part of the house, and that was taken up entirely by the bed.

But it’s been worth it. Before:

and after:

I just got home from seeing Andrew Bird at the Fillmore. The show was outstanding—I could actually see him this time, unlike the last two shows of his I saw (at the Great American Music Hall and the execrable 12 Galaxies). The layers that he and Martin Dosh can get going with those samplers is really amazing, and watching him hurriedly switch from violin to guitar to glockenspiel and back again floors me every time I see it.

I am, of course, intensely jealous of that kind of talent.

Last week Andrea and I caught the Decemberists at the Warfield. It took a little coaxing to get her to go, but she really enjoyed it. They played songs from all of their albums, opening with “California One/Youth and Beauty Brigade” which is one of Andrea’s favorites. During the last song, “The Chimbley Sweep”, the band stopped playing and jumped into the crowd, only to be replaced moments later by a couple of kids from the audience. I don’t know if it was staged or not, but the crowd pretty much lost it when one of the kids grabbed Colin Meloy’s guitar and performed the rest of the song himself. He looked like a deer in the headlights before he did it, faced down by the expectant stares of the whole Warfield crowd, but he really pulled it off. If it wasn’t a setup, that kid is going to remember it for the rest of his life.