Are you ready, Steve? Uh-huh. Andy? Yeah! Mick? Okay. All right fellas. Let's go! It's been getting

[hazelchaz]

Dinner with Eva, Jyoti and Gilberto last night -- click on library_lynn and her friends from college to see the photos.

Eva from Germany comes to visit only rarely. Gilberto and Jyoti live in Mar Vista, that is, not very far from LAX; but we rarely see them. They all went to UC Irvine with Lynn a couple of decades ago. Eva gave Lynn the magnetic thingie with cartoon characters of mice and cheese that hangs near the ledge close to our front door; if you've come to our house, you may have seen it. I suppose we could hang notes to each other off of it, but mostly it just hangs there as a piece of art.

Eva and library_lynn had been out to the L.A. County Fair earlier in the week. They report that the L.A. County Fair doesn't have as much in the way of craft displays as the Orange County Fair does. (But we already knew that; L.A. has more commercial exhibits, and the combination of more vendors and fewer displays makes the fair in Pomona a lot less fun for me than the one in Costa Mesa.) One of the displays that they enjoyed seeing was the Table Setting Contest display. collency, I'd like to draw your attention to the write-up for the Space Cadet Academy Table Setting Contest to be held at laconiv...

We were all going to meet up Friday night, but Jyoti was assisting with a delivery and couldn't get away from the hospital in time. So we rescheduled for 6:00 pm Saturday (which with traffic delays turned into 7 o'clock), and headed out in two cars to Chevy's. Lynn likes Chevy's, because of "El Machino" [sic], their tortilla-making machine. Hot fresh tortillas don't have to be cranked out by a tortilla-making machine -- the process doesn't have to be that automated, as we've seen elsewhere, but it's a cute gimmick.

On the way to the restaurant I called ahead for a table for five; when I arrived, before the others, it was ready, right next to El Machino. I glanced at the output basket, which usually has a few packets of hot tortillas in it...nope. Empty. The machine wasn't operating tonight! *Sigh* Poor, poor, Lynn.

I don't usually go out to Mexican restaurants with a group of people; our dining-out is usually just the two of us. So I seized the opportunity to order an appetizer while waiting for the four buddies to arrive; I asked for some plain chips & cheese, i.e. not with all the trimmings their Nachos Grande comes with. I figured the four people without cheese allergies could put them away... We had a nice little dinner. When we finished up, we were talking about dessert and I suggested we move on to Claim Jumper for that -- especially so we could share a Chocolate Calzone between us.

And the dinner check came. library_lynn had warned me that Jyoti & Gilberto would try to grab it, and make a fuss about it; we'd decided ahead of time that if it didn't land near us, we wouldn't fight it, although we were the ones hosting. As it happened, the waiter put it right between me and Lynn -- perhaps he'd figured I'd already been playing the part of host -- so it was a simple matter to pin it with my elbow. We explained to Jyoti that we'd invited them, and it was our turn to host, and that to deny us the bill was to refuse the gift. But they offered to pay for dessert at Claim Jumper, and we consented to it.

On the way to C.J. I drove Eva, and Lynn went with the other two. Eva and I talked about the different practices, and asked how we figure out who's going to pay. I explained about being the host, about reciprocating hospitality, and about the simple rule of "the one who picks, pays." In fact, I've gone to lunch with a friend or two where the person who picks the place and picks up the tab also drives the car -- it makes it simple and unambiguous who's playing host. Do it often enough and alternate back and forth, and it averages out just fine. Eva explained to me that in Germany, the restaurants are set up to do split checks as a matter of course, and that when the waiter comes with the bill they'll ask if the party's paying separately; if so, the waiter will go from one to the next person collecting the money. I told her about the restaurants I've seen (usually coffee shops) where they keep careful track of which person orders what, so the bill comes pre-divided by seat. And about some of our friends who cook and invite us to dinner, and we reciprocate by either inviting them in, or inviting them out. But we agreed that we liked the host-pays-all hospitality model more.

At Claim Jumper, we took a few more photos. I'd brought my camera, of course; we have two sets of photos from Chevy's and one set from Claim Jumper. Not only because these are people we see rarely, so we should get a good number of photos, but also as insurance against some of them turning out to be duds. Eye-blink, bad focus, poor light, and so forth. We talked about getting the Chocolate Chip Calzone, and whether we should get a second dessert. I urged them NOT to get two calzones! We ordered the Calzone as soon as we got our waiter, because it takes extra time to prepare, and discussed our second option. They're all good -- but if we're looking for something to contrast to the Calzone, it made sense to get either the bread pudding, carrot cake, or lemon bar brulé. (Or brool, as Gilberto pronounced it to rhyme with rule.) We settled on the lemon... ordered it... and then everything came.

Lemon Bar Brulé: bottom half is like a shallow cheesecake, then lemon filling on top, then the carmelized top. Served with a bit of whipped cream. Chocolate Chip Calzone: a calzone roll filled with chocolate and white-choc chips, heated up, served with whipped cream and a scoop or two of vanilla ice cream, chocolate syrup on top.

Well, it's a lot of dessert. Lynn can't have the lemon bar brulé, because it's made on a cheesecake base, and besides the chocolate rule applies. (library_lynn agrees with Fuzzy Niven, that if you're going to have empty calories they should be calories of the highest quality, and for Lynn if it doesn't have chocolate in it then why even bother.) We split the Calzone five ways, and one or two of the others had a half-hearted bite of the brool, but it was left up to me to finish it off... they didn't want to take the leftover dessert home with them, even... Lynn had no trouble going through the leftover ice cream (which had a little chocolate syrup on it) from the Calzone. But if we had it to do all over again, with a group of five people who had just filled up on dinner, we would probably have just had the Calzone.

We got out about 10 o'clock, Lynn came home with me and the other three headed back to L.A.

....And I'm caught up. My slow pipe at home won't let me upload large files quickly -- the eight or nine high-resolution images took about an hour to get online. So a change that's coming real soon now is to not upload the high-res images to the website, even temporarily, except when people specifically request them; they'll be on my back-up CD's, and they'll sit on my hard drive for awhile, but they won't pass through the website. If I do that, then I can do most of my updates using my modem at home, and I won't have to depend on someone else's high speed pipe.