Samsara

On Labor Day my dad called me to go to lunch. We settled on meeting at Interim (Mary Beth have been trying to go there for forever, but it closes between lunch and dinner and we always end up missing it due to the weirdness of hours and when we come). Well, it was closed for the holiday. My dad mentioned the Italian place across the street. Luchessi's is good so I agreed and it was closed too. I mentioned Casablanca around the corner. It wasn't closed so we had a fine meal there. The week that ensued has been hectic with grades and all. We were asked to wait until after the holiday and drop/add before we put in grades. Grades were due for the first progress report on Thursday. Before that, I guess the system was overloaded and would not load half the time. So getting all the grades in was pretty frustrating. The EMC had its first meeting on Thursday. The crowd was enormous! I didn't do anything to promote other than put in an announcement the day of and day before. I had 32 kids sign the list. That far exceeds even the amount we had at the very beginning of last year. I'm sure there will be some attrition, but hopefully a fair amount will stick. Yesterday (was it only yesterday?), I left work immediately and came home and Mary Beth and I hit the road! We made the drive up to St. Louis and met Nikole and Andy at this Nepalese restaurant called Everest. It was an awesome surprise when they decided to meet us in St. Louis. I sent out a word about it not really expecting anyone to bite, much less someone from another city. So it was great to see them and do some catching up. Never had that type of food before, but it's a bit of a cross between Indian and Korean (mostly Indian). We had to wait a while to get seated and finished just in time to make it to the movie theater. I can't tell you how excited I've been (obviously, if I planned to drive several hours to see a movie in another city). Samsara was good. Definitely what would have been expected. It didn't beat Baraka or anything, bits of it felt a little like a rehash, and it was more overtly "preachy" (not necessarily in a bad way, but the space Baraka gives its images is definitely a feat); still, it was a great movie and there were parts that stuck out just as much as and rivaled anything in Baraka. After it we were tired and made it back to the hotel I'd booked for super cheap online. Well, the hotel itself was fine and less of a craphole than could have been expected, but the price we paid was dealing with checking in. The woman working there didn't really have much of an idea of what was going on on any level. She couldn't find our reservation and was saying things that didn't make any sense. She started to tell me I should call Kayak or rebook it on the internet. Uh, no, I booked it and paid for it. I did call Kayak (really, something she should have done), but then when they called her it was straightened out, but the whole thing took up like 20 to 30 minutes. We get to our room after midnight and a little bit later she calls to ask how the room was. We weren't asleep yet, but it was super late and pretty ridiculous. We were called again, probably by someone else, in the morning while we were asleep. Didn't answer. Anyway, met Nikole and Andy for breakfast at this cafe whose name had something to do with mud. It was pretty good and I had St. Louis's own Fritz's rootbeer. It was awesome. We walked around that area of town (Cherokee Antique Row). It happened to be around the corner from where Jacques and I played that show over a year ago. It's a quaint little neighborhood. On the way back home we stopped and had lunch at Culver's (sweet!) Then got back in town and went grocery shopping. Oh, before that, I sat on the couch to watch tv and spend a little make-up time on the couch with the cats. Well, Horace's favoritest thing in the world is sitting on the couch with us. As soon as I sat down he freaked out and went charging from the other room to come to the couch. I mean, he was in a frenzy. His arms were flailing and his head was shaking and I've never seen him run like that. He's very much in love and happy I'm back home.