my favorite italian restaurant

seppo and i met max, lynn, and colin for dinner last night at a restaurant near max & lynn’s house. it’s the second time i’ve been there, and i was impressed enough last night to declare that it’s my favorite italian place. and boy, do i love italian. i admit it’s not really traditional italian, so purists may not like it.

i had a fall vegetable soup (shared with seppo), followed by a tagliolini something or another that was… i mean, the flavor was indescribeably good. and let me say, i’ve had some damn good pasta in the past. homemade stuff, out of the kitchen of a friend’s elderly grandma from the “old country” with sauce that’s been simmering all day, that kind of good. it had some bacon and some tomato (cooked up into a very small amount of thick sauce) and maybe mushrooms, with some cheese, and a touch of stewed? jalapenos, just enough to let you know there was something different, but not enough for you to notice it was spicy in any way. i know, weird. but it was just so incredible.

seppo had a chicken dish, which was quite tasty, but nothing to daydream about. but the potatoes that came with them! i had never had such delicate, fluffy, creamy, yet crispy potatoes in my life. i mean, i know this entire post is going to sound like a huge exaggeration because of the extreme adjectives i keep using, but i really can’t describe it any other way. i had never tasted potatoes that tasted so great while tasting exactly like potatoes (and not dressed up so much that you don’t even really taste the potato, because it’s just the carrier for the other flavors). man, they reminded me of the best gnocchi i ever had. heh.

anyway, the dinner was great. the company was good, the ambience was just the right — quiet enough to chat, but loud enough that you don’t feel like you are breaking some sacred silence, the waitstaff was very professional yet friendly without being intrusive or snooty in any way, the decor is elegant yet cozy, and the lighting made everyone look gorgeous. 😀

and the cost? $25/person including a 20% tip. i was shocked both times. for the food and ambience and service, i would have expected to pay easily 2-4 times that before tip, even without alcohol. bay wolf is well-celebrated as second only to alice waters’ chez panisse in the area (french laundry is too far to consider local for me), but this small, unassuming restaurant totally blows it out of the water for me. yes, i know they are in different categories, but whoever heard of aperto?

i’ve had their chocolate souffle before, and i thought about it for two solid weeks afterwards.

eta: i’ve eaten at Oliveto’s before, which was FAR more expensive and much more highly rated, but eating there never shocked with how good things tasted. last night, when i took the first bite of my entree, i made that stupid phony-looking face that people make when tv chefs make them taste something that’s supposed to taste fantastic, except it was for real: a combo of stupefaction and delight. i may even have gasped. heh.

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NaNoWriMo Progress

nanowrimo status

2662 words! i think i am either at the end of chapter one, or the break in the middle of chapter one, depending on how i want it to go.

so far, i’ve introduced the major woman character along with her basic stats, her current circumstances, her motives, and some of her personality traits, three minor supporting characters, and the very first major plot point. yay!

bay wolf

we went to bay wolf last night for dinner. we were seated promptly, treated courteously, and had a very tasty meal. we had a duck liver flan appetizer that was extremely silky and airy, followed by pork loin for seppo and more duck for me. the duck was indeed delicious, as i had read it would be. for dessert, seppo had a persimmon pudding and i had a chocolate souffle cake and a small pot of earl grey. the consistency of the cake was amazingly similar to the duck liver flan, very airy and smooth. seppo commented that the cake was exactly like the alton brownies that i make. heh. all in all, a great meal for a very good/reasonable price, although i think i was expecting to be more awed. i think i would like to go back during a different season, maybe in the summer when the veggies and fruits are drastically different from those that are in season right now.

i spent a little time last night starting the nanowrimo onemola (one month late) last night, after midnight. i am up to 472 words. i’ll need to have three more bursts of writing today. i’ll squeeze one in during lunch.

some of seppo’s presents shipped! yay. now i will proceed to torture him for almost a month.

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update: i snuck in a 15 minute writing session, and am now up to 892 words. yay.

update #2: after lunch break, 1400 words.

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did i say 1400? i meant 1594. woo!

nanowrimo progress meters

i added a meter on the right, under my profile. it’s functional, but i’m not sure how i feel about the way it fits into the look of my website. this link is yet another way i am keeping track of my progress. let’s see how it looks.

silly novelist, charts are for twits

being a twit, i have created a spreadsheet with two charts that will mark the progress of my novel throughout the month of December. one chart tracks the total-to-date word count against the expected progress. the other chart tracks my daily word count against the daily word target.

yoinks.

i am quite excited, but i need to flesh out my characters more. seppo gave me a really good character trait for my male lead yesterday. i need more of those things that will flesh out the characters. with a solid handle on my characters and a skeleton for a plot, i am hoping to be surprised by the twists and turns that they will take me through in the coming month.

adage in action

i did not cry over it, but i spilled milk at work today. it was a spectacular display of copious amounts of liquid in motion. the graceful arc it made as it flew through the air nearly brought a tear to my eyes as i stood there, coffee cup sitting next to me, hands still shaking a milk jug that was no longer there.

ok, so i just cracked up.

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two evenings from now, i shall embark on a month-long journey into bad prose. my bad prose. a couple of things:

• most likely, i will not let anyone read anything until i am done writing, and possibly not until i am done editing.
• i will not allow myself to do any real editing as i write. the analogy is to running a marathon: just because you think you could have run a part of it faster, it doesn’t mean you should go back and run it again. just focus on what is ahead.
  
• as such, if i do let anyone read any portions, it will not be for constructive criticism, only showers of encouragement to get me through the finish line. remember, quantity, not quality! 🙂 afterwards, i will be open for plenty of constructive criticism.
• i may be a bad friend this month. please forgive me. i will make it up to you, i swear.

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my sister is coming to the US to visit our mom & brothers in atlanta on december 2nd. she’s going to stop by on the way back to korea, from january 13th to 18th. yay! i will get to see her and my two nieces again. seppo will be meeting the little one for the first time. i have to make sure mobi is not going to eat my sister’s young.

[no title]

the clinton library is opening right now, as i type. i listened to speeches by various people: average citizens who had been affected by clinton’s policies, former presidents carter and h.w. bush, prez w. bush, and hillary clinton. hearing about clinton’s effect on people made me cry in the car on the way to work. i am truly sappy in my creaking old age. the difference between clinton and bush is so vast that it is heartbreaking. carter’s speech was extremely moving in its respect and obvious affection for clinton. i have to say that the senior bush gave a really gracious speech, really giving clinton his due in a very personal way, even though i’m sure they hate each other. the little bush gave what i thought was a very bland speech with all the required platituded but nothing more. and i’m 100% positive that my views on the speeches are biased, so don’t take my word for it. 😀

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last night, i read more comments in the blogs of ex-EA employees. it makes me truly fear for seppo and his sanity. it also made me grateful for my workplace. the scheduling has been really reasonable, moreso than anywhere else i have ever worked. during crunch time, i put in maybe 1 or 2 extra hours per day for maybe two weeks, with one weekend day and one comped holiday, which was really on a volunteer basis. the rest of the time, i am completely shielded from the pressures of other departments and the manager fight hard to make sure we are protected and not overworked, as well as feel personally appreciated on a daily basis. the managers have lives and focus on their families, which is wonderful. it’s a place i’d like to stay for a while to come.

hello novel

i figure that the novel writing venture that i will embark on will not be the pursuit of the Great American Novel ™; rather, it will be the “Hello World” of novel writing for me: i will learn the technical details of novel writing, including such details as setting up dialogue, character biographies, maintaining consistency of location and position of the characters in a scene, and other such mundane details.

framing it in such terms allows me the freedom to learn these basic things and write for volume without worrying (too much) about the quality of my prose and plot. “Hello World” is not about producing shockingly insightful ways to say “Hello World”. it’s about taking a basic, mundane, uninteresting functionality and implementing it. as such, i have decided to implement a very well known, basic, formulaic plot, which would go a long way to guaranteeing that i will see this task through, as i would not have to worry about what needs to happen next in any given scene. given my reading habits, it is clear that this plot will have to be the very typical historical romance, with no frills.

last month, when i cheated and wrote a few pages for this project, i started writing about me and seppo. the story was fictionalized and the characters had different names, but i figured it would be easiest not to have to come up with characters and their voices by going with knowns. in the first scene, i accidentally injure and hospitalize seppo. heh. i think i might take that somewhere in the future, but for now, i will be working on a very cookie-cutter story which will purposely be built to lack in originality. 😀 way to set the low bar. i’m pretty excited about it though.

but i regress

i am listening to Chicago’s “I Don’t Want To Live Without Your Love”. shortly before that, i listened to New Kids On The Block’s “I’ll Be Loving You”, and Skid Row’s “18 and Life”. i could still pick out Donnie Wahlberg’s lines. bwahahah. needless to say, i just threw some bucks down for a trip down memory lane.

yeah, i know the songs are not good and have no real lasting quality. but listening to them still makes me as giddy as a twelve year old, which is when i first heard all these songs. i don’t know why i enjoyed these songs. probably because they were popular and for no other reason, as my musical tastes had not yet been developed. yet, i still enjoy them, and there is no other music (or anything else, for that matter) that can evoke such a sense of how i was at that age. when i play this music, i can remember when i couldn’t see beyond high school, when i believed in the innate goodness of people, when i drew little hearts all over my notebooks, when little curlicues were a must in my writing, when friends made each other mix tapes, when it was important to get my jeans cuffed just right, when the best thing in the world was seeing that guy at his locker between classes and when the worst thing in the world was not being allowed to stay 5 minutes longer on the phone.

heh, i have a selective memory. that certainly was not the worst thing in the world at the time.

it’s so hard to say i’m sorry

we’ve said, “sorry, everybody” and you guys responded, “apologies accepted“. awww. let’s have a group hug, world.