Jen's dinner

I slept in today. I slept in and woke up, too hot and sleep-satiated under all of my blankets, woke up without the tinkle of my alarm going off near my ear, woke up mostly content. I also woke up a little bit congested for the first time since being sick, so I guess this is sort of like the aftershock.

My cough doesn’t hurt anymore, but rattles some congestion deep in my esophagus and sounds like it has some depth. I’m not tired yet today, because I had my fill of sleep.

I drove in to the office today. I drove because I didn’t feel like walking and because it is Saturday and the parking lots are open. The weather is cool and dry – cool being a relative term, as plenty of people would rightly call 28F cold and plenty more would call it warm – but relatively-speaking, as one always must be when talking about the weather, it’s a sort of pleasant cool compared to the more aggressive cold of last night.

Can I just say that for some reason I love when I’m the only person in the office? I just do. It feels liberating.

Last night we celebrated Jen, and today she is on her way to Pittsburgh and her new job. We ate at the Cask Republic. As the name suggests, it is a bar, and as the name suggests, it deals primarily in beer. The beer menu was quite expansive.

The Olympics opening ceremony was playing on a big screen at the end of our mostly private room, and the 24 of us were sitting in two lines down the long expanse of cobbled-together two-person tables. While we were ordering our food, Steve called down several of the tables to me. “Shannon!” he called, “I think you should order the fish and chips!” Michal, who was sitting between him and her beau Santiago, nodded conspiratorially.

“Are you ordering the fish and chips?”

“Yeah, it’s Friday!”

This apparent non-sequitur is a Catholic no-meat-on-Fridays thing, which Steve and the rest of the current or ex-Catholics in the room kindly explained to me in my confusion.

Steve and I have apparently developed a rapport over fish and chips, and I am delighted by this. Steve came out with us when we went to an Irish pub on my birthday for fish and chips and trivia. Unfortunately, we did very poorly at trivia (who knew there were so many muppets? who even knew muppets could be obscure?), and Steve was unimpressed with the fish and chips, which he had also ordered.

“The breading’s too much,” he had complained, “And it gets soggy on the inside instead of staying crisp.” I couldn’t defend the meal (and didn’t need to – I didn’t make it); he was right. Usually his beef is with the chips, which are apparently somewhere between French fries and steak fries. Or possibly bigger than steak fries. He says if I ever come to England, he’ll show me proper fish and chips. Anyway, I didn’t order the fish and chips.

I drank water with my dinner, but Kate and I split two appetizers, one of chicken wings (I think they were supposed to be soy-ginger glazed) and one of pesto macaroni and cheese. When they came out, the plate of chicken wings was piled high – I think we had 12 for $10, which while not exactly a bang for your buck is a far, far better deal than you would otherwise find on chicken wings, which are inexplicably expensive across the board. They didn’t taste much like soy or ginger, but they were crispy and hot and came out with jalapeno slices and a wedge of lime, which I squeezed over mine after verifying that Kate didn’t want it. And they ended up being very tasty. The pesto mac was green and mild and delicious.

We also ordered duck confit salads, mostly because we were both drawn to the apple slices contained therein, and also because I have a thing for goat cheese. The salads came out with everyone else’s entrees, and were warm and piled high with arugula. They also had small grape and probably too much pungent red onion.

I looked down the table at Steve and his fish and chips, which looked oddly dark, and called, “hey Steve, how’s your fish and chips?”

Without missing a beat, he called back, “It’s the worst fish and chips I’ve ever had in my entire life.” Now, to my knowledge, Steve says this every time he has fish and chips in New Haven, so apparently Connecticut keeps besting itself, but this time I was convinced, because he continued by holding up a breaded piece of fish that, well… “look at it! It looks like a poo!”

And it did. I think Ben took a picture of it so there’s a good chance that the picture will never see the light of facebook, but a picture exists to commemorate the moment when I laughed myself into a coughing fit secondary only to the moment when Kate dropped a chicken wing, made a strangled noise deep in her throat, and it bounced off my fortuitously napkin-covered leg to be found moments later having made a home for itself in her purse.

Eventually we even managed to serve the chocolate cake, having badgered Lauren into asking the waitress for plates and forks because they’d diligently cleared all of our dishes. I cut the cake into 24 pieces and sent them down the table on plates with forks. All in all, it was a nice affair, and nicer still when we didn’t have any trouble settling the bill. (I was still glad to have brought cash).

Jen gave everyone hugs as we were leaving, and she informed me that I am now going to have to bear the mantle of the sole lab member in charge of baking duties. I suppose that’s all right. It was a good dinner.

Then I waited in the cold for 20 minutes for a shuttle to take me to the other side of New Haven.

It was a good day, and that is partly why I did not write yesterday. But look: you have 500 extra words to dull the pain. That’s an entire extra entry. That’s 3000 words this week! Hooray!

PS: the cupcakes also went over well.  I do feel like Denise might have gotten shafted a bit on her birthday, but Jen did get a job and you can't count on that happening every year like clockwork...