05.18.10
Girlfriend Craft Day
My longtime girlfriend and I have decided to make a one day a month craft day. We like to meet up at my parents’ house since their house is midway between our houses, and it also gives us a nice excuse to visit with my parents. So we meet up around 11:30AM, go out for a bite to eat, then head back to the house for a day of crafting. For May our craft day was last Sunday and we all went our for dim sum for lunch. I’ll take this moment to put in a plug for Restaurant 88 in San Gabriel. Tasty food at a very reasonable price. Here’s a shot of one of the food carts.
For anyone who isn’t familiar with what dim sum is, it’s basically a Chinese roving buffet. Women roll carts around full of various foods and stop at each table who wants any. If you like what’s in their cart, they’ll just place however many orders on your table that you request and stamp your ticket. At the end, they tally up all the stamps and that’s how they figure out your bill. The nice thing about dim sum is that the orders are small, so you can try lots of different dishes. Here’s an example of what our table looked like at one point. Keep in mind that as you polish off your container, they take it away and more comes, so it’s ever changing.
Usually they have so many dishes that it’s almost impossible to try everything. They also have desserts, but after my AA days, I don’t indulge in those anymore. For that matter, since my AA days, I had even avoided dim sum all together for “years”, and only recently started venturing out again. Here’s another closeup of more dishes.
I especially liked this one, which is veggies wrapped in nappa cabbage.
Now don’t ask me what these dishes are called. While I have eaten them many times in the past, I have no idea what each dish is called. And as a matter of fact, sometimes there is a bit of a language barrier, since these dim sum places are pretty much operated by Chinese, who speak Chinese and tend to have heavy accents. And even so, there are mistakes in translation. Here’s an example of what I mean.
You might ask for a lobster, and they’ll give you a crab, ha ha ha!
So moving right along. After we stuffed ourselves we headed back to the house for our day of crafting. We’ve been working on cross stitch patterns. Here’s an old pattern I made years ago and finally decided to try making it into a small pillow.
Here’s the finished, well, “almost finished” pillow along with the other little cross stitch patterns I’ve worked up. I’m kinda out of practice sewing and kinda winged it to put this pillow together. It’s a bit crooked, heheh, but I’m just going to use it as part of my Christmas decor at home, so no big deal. Plus I think I’m gonna put some cording around it to help dress it up a tad more.
Okay, so I still have a few more pics that I’ll post later because I’m almost finished with another shrug. . . 
and I still have the museum pictures to share from last Friday. We went to the Wende Museum in Culver City, but there is one pic I want to take to add to the post yet, so will hold off until I get that shot. I’m also still reading a couple books that have some info that I think would be interesting to share. The book, The Ayatolla Begs to Differ is turning out to be rather interesting. I’m certainly learning a lot more that I didn’t know, and I also appreciate the different perspective. I know that many cultures think differently, and understanding the culture does help to understand their behavior and decisions. This book helps in that in a funny way because the author has a nice sense of humor.
So until next time, hope all is well!
Marlakins
