Dinner went splendidly. …

Dinner went splendidly. Mirna made an amazing carrot soup and a quite good roast chicken with Japanese rice stuffing, both out of Ming Tsai's Blue Ginger cookbook. Nummy. We ate and drank wine and chatted over dinner (Annie brought a flourless chocolate cake, so I was relieved of the necessity of dessert-making). Afterwards, we played Encore, a game where you divide into two teams and then take turns trying to come up with eight words of a song using the word on the card (i.e., if the word is "hand", you might sing, "you put your right hand in, you take your right hand out" -- there are also categories, so if the category is "minerals", you might sing, "Good bye, Ruby Tuesday, who could hang a name on you girl?"). You take turns doing this until a team gets stuck. Lots of fun, and Mirna kicked butt. I do okay, knowing an amazing number of musicals and folk songs, but I was a little tired, so had a tendency to just blank. Had a good time, anyway, though, and Kevin actually played -- sort of. He wouldn't sing, but he sat on the side, and gave helpful notes to whatever team he was supposedly on, sometimes just referencing a piece, sometimes reciting lyrics. I think he had a good time, which was nice; I'm trying to get him used to my family. They take some getting used to, especially if you're on the quiet side, like Kev. :-)

This morning I'm reading some exam stuff, as I wait for Mirna to wake up. We'll head north around 10-ish, I think. I wanted to share this quote with y'all, from the introduction to Salman Rushdie's essay collection, Imaginary Homelands:

"In 1981 I had just published my second novel, and was enjoying the unique pleasure of having written, for the first time, a book that people liked. Before Midnight's Children, I had had one novel rejected, abandoned two others, and published one, Grimus, which, to put it mildly, bombed. Now, after ten years of blunders, incompetence and commercials for cream cakes, hair colourants and the Daily Mirror, I could begin to live by my pen. It felt good."

It's that ten years that heartens me. :-) Not that I have a Midnight's Children-level book just sitting around, waiting to be published. But still, it's heartening.

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