~Sunday~ I was up at 8:30 and left my house at 9:30 to meet Jen and Anna at Neomonde in Morrisville to meet for two hours to come to consensus on our STC writing competition entries. Neomonde’s website said that they open at 9:00 on Sundays, but when I pulled up at about 10:02, the doors were still locked, and the hours on the door indicated that they open at 10:00 on Sundays.
Paying for my coffee and a danish, I said to the guy at the register, “Your website says that you open at 9:00 on Sundays.”
“No, we open at 10:00,” he said.
“I know. I’m here now and I see that you open at 10:00 and that’s what your door says. I’m telling you that your website says you open at 9:00, in case you want to fix that. If I’d’ve driven all the way out here at 9:00 instead of now, I’d’ve probably been upset.”
“That’ll be $4.62,” he said.
Let me put a look of surprise on my face that the page is still not updated as of 10:46PM, Monday, 11/16/09.
Jen, Anna, and I spent a little over two hours going through our four entries and comparing our assessments. We also had the assessment of our fourth judge, Anita, who was unable to join us, but had sent her scores and comments via e-mail. Our rate of time to consensus improved over the course of the two hours. The first one took us about 50 minutes to reach consensus on, the second one 30 minutes, and the third one 25 minutes. I got bored with tracking it by the fourth one, and I’m trying my best to resist creating some kind of graph of the improvement rate in an Excel spreadsheet.
The three of us had lunch after we finished, and then each hung around and used their free wi-fi for various amounts of time. I had a delicious lunch, but was a little nonplussed when the guy asked me what kind of kabob I wanted and when I asked him what the choices were said, “Chicken, beef, or ground beef.”
I immediately answered, “Ground beef,” but as he was putting the order in it occurred to me the implication of that and I wondered how ground beef was going to stay on a stick.
I got a platter, which came with the choice of two sides and I picked two different salads, one I thought I’d like better than the other, but which actually turned out just the opposite.
The top five reasons to suspect you might be turning into Gladys Kravitz:
- You lean forward on the bus to see the names (and authors, if possible) of the books people are reading
- You read peoples’ badges to see where they work and if they’re temporary employees
- You look in peoples’ recycle bins on trash day to see what they’ve been eating
- You walk around with a pen and pad all day taking notes of what people are saying and doing so you can write about them later
and the number one reason to think you might be turning into a Gladys Kravitz…
- The window blind slat at eye level in your bathroom window is bent from constantly flipping it up to see if the voices outside your window are of those two exceptionally built boys who are renting the townhouse across the parking lot from yours.
I took a nap before Mostly Social Book Club tonight, from 4:30 until 6:00. It was a deep, deep sleep and another one of those situations that when I first woke up I thought it was 6:00 Monday morning. Fortunately after just a few minutes, before I even got out of the bed, I remembered that it was still Sunday night and I needed to get on to book club.
My phone rang shortly after that and it was Suzanne confirming that tonight was indeed book club night, because she was the only one there.
“It is,” I said, “but we don’t start until 6:30.”
Mary had called before I went down for my nap to let me know she wouldn’t make it. Janet never showed up with no word from her. Suzanne, Sharon, and I discussed Anna Karenina and Sharon shared to the extent that she could only ever having completed less than 100 pages of the 817-page tome.
Truth be told, though, the discussion didn’t last more than 15 minutes of our 2.5 hours together, which is exactly why we’re called the Mostly Social Book Club and not the Mostly Discussing Books Book Club.
Sharon did announce our next book, as it’s her turn to choose, and she has actually chosen a book that she hasn’t read but Suzanne has. Not only has Suzanne read it, but she also bought each of us our own copy of the book. It’s called, “Three Cups of Tea.”
I had every intention of not going to karaoke tonight, but at 9:15 on my way back to Raleigh, I received a phone call from Joe who was at Flex asking me if I was thirsty.
“You caught me at a weak moment,” I berated him, as I pressed my turn signal to switch into the “heading downtown” lane.
Chaz was there—who although it takes him forever to stop yammering and actually sing—has a phenomenal voice, and he did his signature song, “Purple Rain.” At one point when he was really pouring out his soul through a musical phrase, I yelled, “I SEE JEE-SUSS!!!” and the place fell out.
Joe continued to be a bad influence on me (did I mention that he’s off tomorrow???) and we tried a new place to eat called Sauced Pizza on Glenwood that I knew had opened by following them on Twitter of all ways.
The food was decent, but the pizza we ordered had so much more on it than the description implied it would that we wondered if we’d gotten the right one. We were not impressed with the bartender (who also took our order) or the music, which was too loud and just not very good.
We definitely won’t be repeat customers there.