Monday

Another thing we picked up while shopping Sunday was book cases. We got two more stackable three-foot fold-out shelving units, matching the four we already had. The color is "java". These have shelved all our floor books. They've also provided room for all the books we'd gratuitously tucked into our bedside tables, pretending we'd get around to reading them all real soon. I still have the paperbacks triple-stacked on their sides, but we are now the proud owners of some Extra Space: today I was able to square everything away with one whole unit spare; three shelves free to expand into. I am pretty sure I said something along the lines of "that should hold us till we move again" back in February when we last bought shelves, and I’m chagrined to see how that's worked out. We have more months before packing out than we've had since that declaration, so it's possible that we'll end up having to get even more shelves soon. Keep your fingers crossed that the Vietnamese apartment we move into will be the size of a city library. This evening we went out for dinner at Italian Café, a place Sunshine spotted between here and the zombie multiplex on Lee's Highway. It's really my favorite type of Italian restaurant: a little dark brown dive with nicotine-stained booths, tucked into an uneven sixties-era strip mall. It's very reminiscent of Jersey, à la the opening credit sequence of the Sopranos. The food is predictably marvelous. Certainly they make all the very same things I'm used to in strip-mall Italian places: the usual array of noodles in the usual Italian flag of colored sauces. But they do it all very well, and we've been to eat here three times in the last two weeks or so. [Cavin]