Speaking Of...

I'm excited, 'cuz Amy Hartman is considering coming for a visit.  She would, of course, be my first houseguest... which means I'd have to come up with a place for her to sleep pretty quickly!  Maybe I can pick up an Aerobed or something.  There's a part of me that wants to ask Doug if I can borrow his for the weekend of her visit, but I live in mortal terror that  Truckstop would decide to claw it and puncture it.  Much better that I get my own and let him destroy that if it must happen.

That picture to the right is one of my favorites of Amy.  I took it back in March of 2002, when she and Denise Pullen were in town for a reading of Denise's play Phone Noir.  Now that's someone I need to be in touch with... I haven't talked to dear Denise in an age and a half.  I wonder how she's doing?  I miss her terribly.  Last I spoke with her, she was working at Seton Hill College back in Pittsburgh, teaching in their Drama Department.

I hope she's doing okay... I really gotta get off my fat ass and catch up as soon as possible.

Well. sad to say, I've started the process of looking for a home for Truckstop.  It's just not working out at the new homestead.  He's lonely, and needs companionship, which translates into constant crying and neediness, which is exactly what's driving me around the bend.  Poor guy.  Those of you who know me well know that I'm not a cat person to begin with, and part of my reason for agreeing to keep him when Matt Unterburger went back to Alaska was that I was (foolishly!) under the impression that cats are a lot more self-sufficient than dogs.  Well, maybe most are, but this little guy isn't.  So I think it's best that I work on finding him a home where he has other feline companions.

Leave it to me to make the whole thing about me, but I feel sad about it at least partially because it feels as though I'm somehow a failure as a parent.  I just wish I knew how to make him happy (and stop the frickin' incessant yowling), but short of getting a second cat (which I am SO not doing), I don't know how to calm him down.  Besides, more than one person has suggested to me that strategy can backfire, and I could end up with two unhappy cats who hate each other.

In the long run, I think it'll be best for both of us.

So last night's dinner with Holly was great!  We went to a place in our neighborhood called Trattoria Mulino, a relatively new Italian restaurant on 5th Avenue.  We both agreed that the food was wonderful, and I was a bit more taken with the atmosphere than Holly was.  Be both ardently agreed, however, that we were over the service, in a big way.  And not in an "I'm sick of being ignored" sort of way... our server was on as like white, as they say, on rice.  She just wouldn't leave us alone.  Wouldn't let us pour our own wine.  Kept interrupting the conversation to ask if everything was okay.  Holly was really put out by it.  At first, I kinda liked the attention that was being paid to us, but even I found it cloying pretty quickly.  It didn't help that I think our server didn't have a lot of English.  She was this really cute girl who was obviously, judging from her accent, from somewhere in Eastern Europe, and her stock phrases were:

"Excuse me."

"Thank you."

"Enjoy your time."

"How is your meal?"

Just about everything she said was a combination of those four phrases.

That having been said, I'd definitely go back, despite the fact that it was probably a little pricier than either of us had really expected.  The food was worth it.  I'm just a little turned off (when I'm not expecting it) by menus that are completely a la carte.  A five dollar side of vegetables, for example, really adds up.

Suddenly I'm an expert.  Go figure.