Monday

Sunday we bid Ellie a fond adieu after an extra-large Vietnamese lunch at Four Sisters.* I had caramelized tofu and straw mushrooms in a clay pot, which was so good I ate every last dripping morsel even though I wasn't at all hungry. It was forty-eight and raining nastily when Ellie got on the road, but she made it home alive--even with one hand taking pictures. Sunshine and I headed over to Arlington for a book sale. We'd been to this sale before back in 2004. It was something we'd been planning to try to hit again this year. It's a very good sale: taking up most of one level in the Arlington Central Library* parking facility, this sale is very well-organized and -stocked. Of course, since it's in a parking lot it's also unheated. While the upper forties is not too bad when I'm walking around, it can get chilly when I'm perusing the used world politics section of the parking deck. We did find a box-full of interesting books, and we carefully hurried them out to the car in the rain. That's right: the sale is in the parking area, but I parked on the street. Today was a low key day, by the way. Sunshine organized a happy hour gathering among her Vietnam-bound coworkers, so I met everyone at the very same Roslyn pool dive as the last time. I got to meet the man who will be Sunshine's boss for two years, and that was really cool. I also got to eat more of the lounge's good pretzels. After two happy hours, we came back to Falls Church and ate at the Lost Dog Café,* a little deli-style eatery with good custom pizzas (mine was rosemary-feta-pine nut) and about sixty different world beers. [Cavin]