More autoshoujo!

Four more contest entries in the AutoShoujo Cover Contest! Or, if you are boring and don't want to click from the official contest entry page linked there, you can check my DA favorites gallery contest section, where I've got them in reverse chronological order.

State of the telophase

Went out for sushi at Sushi Yoko Friday night with myrialux, right before the storm, and got to drive home in pouring rain and lightning. It's very close to the new house, which is on the route back to the apartment complex, so I naturally took the opportunity to point out to myrialux as we were driving by the house that if we lived there we'd be home by now.

Sushi restaurant verdict: very good. The atmosphere seems high-end, but the diners were in casual clothing and they had no problems with letting Toby in wearing shorts and T-shirt. For starters, he and I had white tuna sashimi, and I had a quail egg*. Toby had a Seattle Sunset roll (crab meat, cream cheese, asparagus top w/ smoked salmon, avocado), which was very pretty but he said only average, and a T-Mex roll which doesn't appear to be on the online menu, but which was very good - I had a few pieces, too. I don't remember what was in it except that it was topped with white tuna and salsa. :) I had the Longhorn Roll, which is also not on the online menu but IIRC was basically a California roll (crab, avocado, cucumber) with slices of steak on top**, with some sort of basalmic vinaigrette. It was deelish. We're definitely going back. On the way out, we noticed a bunch of small boxes with names on the wall, and asked the hostess what they were. She said they were personal chopsticks for regulars, which we both thought was so pretentious that it was hilarious and we loved it. :D

Saturday, running around to the property management office to get our deposit form thingy signed, and then I had to work. Sunday, after discovering that the freezer had stayed open all night, I threw everything out*** and went to lunch with Toby, cleaned the kitchen and ran a couple of dishwasher loads, emptied out the fridge since most stuff in there was getting fuzzy anyway, did three loads of laundry, and cleaned the bathroom. And then collapsed and watched the next episode of Dexter on the DVD I've got with Toby.

I'M SURE YOU WERE ALL DYING TO KNOW THAT





* I have a total addiction to these little things. The way they're served is raw, with the top nipped off and a drop or two of sriracha sauce, propped up on a wad of wasabi. And, in the case of Sushi Yoko, a bit of some other sauce as well and a small tangle of thin green onion rings, which added a bit of texture. You eat these guys like they're a shot - sucking the whole thing down at once. Mmmmm.

** For those of you who aren't particularly adventurous in eating, I hasten to assure you that the crab (or krab) and steak are cooked in this one. I like both raw and cooked sushi.

*** Possibly not necessary, as it was packed full and there were blue ice things in there, but it made me nervous enough that it wasn't worth keeping the mostly-empty ice cream containers, leftover rice that needed to be thrown out anyway, and half-full freezer-burned vegetables. I have enough gastric issues that are triggered by anxiety that eating anything from that freezer would have made me sick even if it was perfectly healthy. And we're moving within the next few weeks anyway: less to move!

Question of the Day

Actually, I'm about to head off and lead a meeting*, but here's a question for you to provide a bit of interesting reading in the comments, ripped off of a Skepchick Afternoon Inquisition question:

Do you sleepwalk or talk in your sleep, or have you ever done so? If so, what did you do/say?

I have had no reports of my doing either of those, but a former roommate told me that she used to sleepwalk a lot, and her family was surprised to find her in the living room once, trying to open the windows in her sleep because she dreamed there was a tornado coming.**

--

* I am bringing a box of crayons to it for people to use. No lie.

** Old wives' tale that opening the windows equalizes pressure and prevents them from blowing out when there's a tornado. Windows get broken in tornadoes because the building shifts and stresses them, or because things like debris, mailboxes, cows, and other buildings get thrown through them. Your average house leaks so much air that changes in air pressure don't do a damn thing to the windows.

Book recs!

This time for wintersweet, which I'm mostly-reposting from the original post because this is the sort of book that I like to read, too. She asks, in part:

I'm going through past book recs but I have a new and challenging novel rec request for you. The problem is how to describe it, because I don't know how to put it in non-Japanese/manga/anime terms that won't sound overly schmoopy.

First, for the anime/manga fans/Japanese readers: The textual equivalent of Yokohama Shopping Project or Omohide Poroporo (Only Yesterday) or something where Oga Kazuo (the main Ghibli landscape artist) would do the backgrounds for it if were made into an animated film. 癒しの本。

For everyone: Something interesting but...I don't know, gentle? with detailed settings and scenery (landscape porn? :P). Not too tense. No pervading sense of the downfall of the human race, no suicides, no Literary Copout Tragic Endings, no "anomie as character." (So no literary equivalent of Wong Kar Wai, despite the settings.) It doesn't have to have a huge Hollywood musical-style happy ending, but at least a vague positive overtone would be good. Slice of life is fine; mainstream realism is fine. Huge bonus points for beautiful settings (or settings made beautiful by the author's attention.) I just want something I can swim around in, but with enough story to keep me reading. But, and here's the big catch, I don't want anything gooey, schmoopy, New Agey, or romance-booky. (Romance novel tropes make me tense if they don't make me stabby, which counteracts the effect I'm going for here, so even if they're good it would backfire.)

I was thinking fiction, but travel writing or memoirs might be OK, as long as the story is immersive enough and doesn't push too many buttons. I have a low tolerance for "I went to an offbeat place and there sure were a lot of offbeat people doing offbeat things! but I wasn't impressed 'cause I'm too hip" *cough*PicoIyer*cough*) or "I went to a mystical place and they thought I was really special!" or "I went to a really poor place and got off on how poor yet beautiful everyone was and learned about doing things simply and became enlightened and then took a $1000 flight back to my $2000/month yuppie flat in Marin and felt awesome about myself."

If you recommend Eat, Pray, Love, or anything along those lines, I will smack you. (That is exactly the kind of thing I don't want to read.)

So! Go over there and rec away!

Hey!

If you think you might have a use for personalized 5 x 7 or 4 x 5 greeting/birthday/whatever cards, winkflash.com has a sale that ends TUESDAY for 75% off - use the 75CARDS when you're checking out. I just made four greeting cards using photos from my Japan trip and ordered 10 copies of each to try at AnimeFest and see if they sell. :)