Saturday night there was a going-away party for one of Sara's lab mates, who has taken a job elsewhere (though she's still living in Ann Arbor).
Our host made Dosas, Idlis, Sambar, and lots of other great stuff. People brought some good appetizers and desserts, too. I left full.
Then Sunday Sara happened to get a dinner invitation from a neighbor while doing her laundry. Score! Even more good food.
When I was a kid a party would mean food, games, and toys. These days it means food and talking. I'm not sure if I'm quite up for it. Maybe I should start bringing lego with me to parties. ("Oh don't mind Bruce", Sara would say. "Let him go play while us grown-ups talk....")
I've got lots of good reading these days. I picked up Richard Dawkins "The Ancestor's Tale" recently; I've had this copy lying around for a while--Sara's parents gave it to me last christmas--but just haven't really sat down with it till now. The book is a huge reversed-time human-centric survey of evolutionary history; it first covers early humans, then chimapanzees, then the next group of primates to join (gorillas), etc., all the way back to bacteria, with a chapter for each point where a group of still-living ancestors broke off from human ancestors. The various organisms mainly serve as examples for more general discussions of evolution. It's very interesting.
I also discovered recently that the media union's collection includes some french-language comic books. Probably not too exciting to anyone else, but to me it's like turning a corner and suddenly finding that your home town of decades has some marvellous thing that you'd never till now been aware of. So I brought home a few last week.
The one I've completed so far is volume 3 of Fabrice Neaud's journal. It was hard going: the vocabulary and grammar are difficult for me, and it's also angry, depressing, and times a little tedious. But interesting; maybe I should give it another try. I skimmed large parts rather than trying to look up lots of unknown words or puzzle out difficult sentences.