Saturday

Street Stud:* I was dealt the next three cards of my poker hand while heading down the road for dinner at Bún Việt on Thursday. Sunshine attended a gallery opening that night. The house got all its own cards too: I actually found eight cards scattered along a single block. Added to my Ace clubs and Ace spades were the Jack hearts, Ten spades, and Ten diamonds. The City was dealt Queen clubs, Six spades, Five clubs, Seven spades, and the Wild Joker. My two pairs, Aces over Tens, to Ho Chi Minh City's pair of Queens, player takes the pot. Two hands in, I've picked twenty whole playing cards up off the street without a single duplicate yet. Tonight's dinner was particularly fine, and damn well should have been after what we paid for it. We like a little Italian restaurant called Luna L'Autunna, but it's one of the most expensive places around: our dinner with drinks and dessert cost over forty dollars, probably twice what similar would run at Thursday's restaurant. But the tiramisu tonight was some of the finest I've ever eaten. It was the type served in a wide goblet with a spoon. This was liberally dusted with unsweetened chocolate, and the whole effect limited the queasy sugary shock of the thing without in any way diluting the concentrated richness. There's something to be said for Luna's mojitos, too, though that's a quality probably intrinsic to any restaurant in any city where I can buy sugarcane on all the best street corners. After dinner, we went back to the housework: this weekend's the big push, hopefully by Monday we'll have very little left to unpack and put away. We can already see the floors in the bedrooms again, and that's what I call progress. [Cavin]