China Buffet in my Dining Room

Dude.

I made a ginormous amount of Chinese food tonight. Beef fried rice, Mongolian Beef, and Sweet Sour Chicken w/mushroom white rice. I'm obsessed. We ate Chinese on Friday night, too, at the China Buffet in Goshen. And I could totally eat more, right now. If someone laid down a platter of General Tso's Chicken in front of me, or some Pepper Steak, I would devour it and ask what else they had. It was so nice to have our whole family around the table again, with no rehearsals and no interruptions.

Speaking of no interruptions, I was right about the dogs. They've been reading my blog. Because, for the third night in a row, they stayed in our room all night and didn't go outside. However, Nikita did ask to go around 3:30. She wasn't as demanding as usual, like when she says "HEY! MOMMY! I GOTTA GO! RIGHT NOW! WAKE UP!" This was more like a, "...mom?......you 'wake?" And when I said, "Lay down," she was like, "Oh. Okay. I was just checking," and laid down and went back to sleep. This could open up a whole new world of sleeping opportunity for me. Part of why I never feel well rested is because I'm a terrible sleeper to begin with, but if I wake up in the middle of the night, that's it. Even if I *do* get back to sleep, it's never fully, and when I wake up it seems like I never went to sleep at all. As if I just blinked and got back up. Maddening.

I cannot stress to you enough how much I am LOVING this audio book, "A Scanner Darkly". I should just wear headphones to work all day and listen to it on a discman. The futuristic drug Substance D splits your personality, and so this guy, the main character, is a drug addict -- but he's also an undercover cop! He's narcing on himself, and he has no idea. It's so well written, and I'm just going to take one more moment to drool over Paul Giamatti's reading of it... ok... wait... ok, now I'm done. Wait... ok, now.

Let me tell you about another obsession of mine: sorting things. Coins, crayons, embroidery floss. I swear that my ideal job would be working in a mail room somewhere. It's an organizational thing. But today, when I stopped by the theatre for a meeting with Steve and John, John Shoup made my heart soar. He had a tub of screws dumped onto the stage that needed to be sorted. My eyes landed on them from the back of the theatre when I walked in, and I inquired about them immediately. When John told me that they needed to be sorted and that, in fact, there were three tubs that needed to be sorted... it was hard for me to contain my joy. So much so that I think he thought I was faking the excitement. I am now going to be allowed to take the tubs home with me so I can sort while watching tv (thereby quelling my anxiety about watching tv instead of doing something productive). John's even going to buy me individual plastic tubs for the screws so I have something to sort into, and everything will be happy and shiny and in its place AND THERE WAS MUCH REJOICING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (....yay.)

Now I shall take my leave of you, as you are no doubt put off by what excites me and are going to have to take some alone time to decide whether or not you really want to follow the blog of a 30+-year-old woman who so thoroughly enjoys menial labor that it makes its way into her leisure time.

Please don't leave me :(

SJS