when we got to china pearl we got a seat without waiting, one of the perks of coming to weekend dim sum early in the morning (10am) instead of around noontime. i love going up to the counter and saying "liang wei" (translation: "two people") in chinese. it shows all the other people there that i'm for real, that i speak the true language of dim sum (that's not quite true, since dim sum is cantonese and i speak mandarin, but our dialects are both chinese though) i got to use my china pearl discount card, stamped 10 times to get a $10 discount on today's dim sum.
 is that tripe i see? |
 laurie eating |
 china pearl dim sum discount card |
 about to use the card |
afterwards, we went to the garage to pick up the car. surprise! blackout! and because we parked there for over 1.5 hours, we were forced to pay the 24 hour rate, which is $17. yikes. but short of crashing through the broken barrier arm bandito style, we paid the extortion parking fee and left the darkened garage. laurie gave me a ride to the office and went back home to bake a pumpkin pie for some sort of autumnal pot luck party.
so for most of the rest of the day, i spent it at work, me upstairs, john miller downstairs. occasionally i'd take breaks, riding my kickscooter around the empty office, or going up to the big map of the u.s. and mapping out my crosscountry escape route. maybe next year. a crosscountry trip! i'd post to my website every night from the road! i'd travel route 66! from st.louis, joplin (missouri), oklahoma city (oh so pretty!), amarillo, gallup (new mexico), flagstaff (arizona, don't forget winona), kingman, barstow, san bernardino! joel also made another visit to our office. we learned where he'll be working when he moves back to boston, and trade some more gossips about former and current tsh workers.
7pm john and i called it quits and we drove to the atrium mall down by chestnut hill. it's strange, but i have never been to the atrium mall before. boy is it posh! the parking's insane, several levels of underground parking. 
made us nervous to be so far below ground. we parked at level b east, which i fondly called "the level of the beast." we were primarily there because john wanted to exchange a wedding gift from the pottery barn. afterwards, we drove back to his apartment where we got pizza and ate our dinner while watching meet the parents and me, myself & irene on dan's projection tv.
when john was about to drive me back home, we saw brian get out of a taxicab. he came by to inform us that he scratched his eye and that if things don't let up, he'll need john to drive him to the emergency room. you always want to end the evening with some sort of injury, and this was it. i think brian would look good in an eyepatch.