Inaugurating the guest room

Yes, we finally had guests in our guest room!


We put the finishing touches on the room:


And on the dog. Dharma put on her fanciest collar for our guests. She also had a bath, with ti tree oil shampoo. We weren't able to take any pictures of that, because we were both wet and had our hands full. How can one little dog be so wiggly?


Our guests arrived Tuesday evening to a meal of lasagna, salad, and bread from my favorite restaurant, The Bakehouse. I finally used my grandmother's dishes. They didn't look too grim, especially with food on them:

The tiny mysterious plates made excellent little dishes for holding olive oil for dipping our bread. Much healthier than butter pats!

The next day, we took our guests to the local restaurant, The Runcible Spoon. The name comes from the poem by Edward Lear The Owl and the Pussycat. A runcible spoon is a tasting spoon, with one big spoon for stirring and on the other end, a small spoon for tasting. They were more popular before the germ theory of disease was widely accepted, I guess. This is a medieval French word. Other proposed definitions include a folding spoon, a wooden spork, a three-tined pickle fork, or a slotted ladle. But this food historian prefers the tasting spoon, since she has actually seen the term in a medieval cook book. (Sorry, Edward Lear didn't make it up, even though he does like made-up words almost as much as Lewis Carrol.)

It was a lovely day and we had breakfast outside at the Runcible Spoon. Then we shopped all over downtown, including Yarns Unlimited, Howard's Bookstore, and Caveat Emptor (a used bookstore whose name is Latin for "Let the Buyer Beware." Ominous, isn't it?) We took our yarn to the Eastside branch of the The Bakehouse and ate too much and knitted and crocheted. I worked on this hat:


Then we did what all good vacationers should do every day. We took a nap.

Since this was Naplover's birthday, we took her to the fancy food but casual dress Scholar's Inn Restaurant and Wine Bar. (We're really doing our part to support local business!) It was lovely, especially the chocolate fondue dessert. Then we watched one of my favorite movies: Raiders of the Lost Ark. You'd think the loose interpretation of history would bother me, but I love this movie. When I was little, I thought that Indiana Jones was based on my dad. Really. He was a history teacher in a big brick building, he wore a tweedy blazer with leather patches on the elbows, and all his female students were in love with him. He was fearless around spiders. He even worked on an archeological site during the summers, the Spiro Mounds in Oklahoma. So, allowing for a little artistic license, he was clearly the basis for Indiana Jones. I even think he looks a little bit like Harrison Ford. Those royalty checks should be coming in any time, now.

My Daddy, being a good sport and wearing the hat we got him on vacation. (With my mom, who is showing great suprise that the cruise line decorated their room with birthday decorations.)

Thursday, we got together with my good friend TammyJo for lunch, then did much the same sort of thing: eat, talk, nap, knit and crochet. Boy, do we know how to have fun, or what? I worked on this scarf:


We let Naplover's daughter pick where to eat dinner. She knew right where she wanted to go. She had spotted the signs from the highway: steak AND sushi. What more could you want? So, we went to Domo (which I think is just an intensifier in Japanese, meaning something like "very much"), a local Japanese restaurant, where the chefs cook dinner at your table, juggle knives, and make bad jokes. And we had steak and sushi. Yum. No raw fish for me, though. I think Indiana is just a little too far away from the ocean for the raw fish thing to be a good idea. If I were in Japan, it might be a different matter. Actually, sushi isn't really about raw fish. Click here for way more than you ever wanted to know about that subject.

More about their visit (and the awesome knitting display at the Indiana State Museum) in the next post.