Olga's Birthday
It’s a shame I had to work yesterday. My boss is taking a long weekend in New York to visit a friend and see a museum exhibit. It’s the sort of thing I thought I would get to do with my sister - she went to museums with Olga yesterday while I was working. On the other hand, I got to help shop for clothes, high-end face cream, and a violin(!) I even got to try my hand with the bow. (It wasn’t pretty.)
When I finally got home, there were phone messages: Vanessa was looking for me. It was Olga’s birthday (there was uncertainty about the actual date) there were dinner reservations for 8:00, and did I have anything I could bring as a gift - perhaps some sort of bound, printed material? “It would be a lot easier to get a hold of you if you had a cell phone.” Apparently she couldn’t call me at work, which is what everybody else seems to do. Also couldn’t email. I spent the day sitting at a desk with a phone and a computer, so I can only imagine how hard it must have been to reach me.
The gift request would definitely have come in handy when I was at the bookstore borrowing the DVD of “An Inconvenient Truth” so Vanessa could watch it. As it was, I had just enough time to change my shirt, shave, and get going again.
We joined Olga, her parents and her boyfriend for dinner at The Little Fountain. It’s a small place and Olga used to work there, so the staff was an extension of the family. I sat through another delicious meal and conversation largely in Russian. Vanessa is now trained as an interpreter, and I suggested that she could practice by telling me what the others were talking about. I think I can now say “I don’t know” in Russian. A few words are becoming familiar, but I don’t know if I could pronounce them properly. Once in a while I would hear a word borrowed from English and get the gist of the conversation - or at least a good guess about the topic.
With the extra hour from Daylight Savings, I stopped in at Asylum. It was not particularly busy. There was a good stretch of bass-heavy rock music to keep my foot tapping. One extra hour was not nearly enough.
Posted by Evan Bittner Sun, 04 Nov 2007 15:38:00 GMT
