the road arriveth

moments ago, i read the NYT review of The Road and cursed myself for preordering, because i assumed that meant it would be *shipped* today, as opposed to arriving today... then lo and behold, the UPS man arrived to prove me wrong. unfortunately, i desperately need to go to sleep within the hour, and when i get up, i have a slew of work to do, stuff that needs to be done by lunch tomorrow (for once, no, i wasn't procrastinating-- i just found out about it an hour ago). so i can't start reading it til tomorrow night, anyway. kinda wishing it hadn't arrived after all. now it will torture me with its presence... i WILL NOT open it until i have slept and the work is at least halfway done. at least i'll try not to. had a lovely trip to norfolk saturday night for the new annual tradition with "old" friends from high school and earlier. we decided to revisit a regular haunt from back in the day: la galleria. i took a date there about ten years ago, but otherwise, we did the math and realized it had been 16 years. which was... shocking. the food was as good as i remembered, though the service was a tad slow. the nostalgic calamari wasn't the best, but i have a new love for fried zucchini. they obliged my annoying wine allergy so i could quench my craving for salmon, though i purposely didn't eat much of it so as to save room for the two desserts i ordered (tiramisu and the napoleon). can't believe i forgot my camera! the whole group remains healthy and happy, and we made plans to reconvene at the greek festival next year. i was surprised to see that downtown norfolk has gotten even friskier. almost surreal, given the ghost town that it was back when we used to frequent la gal. didn't get to see anyone but the dinner party, alas... i'll be back soon. not sure how i didn't know about this before, but an email from my old roomie alerted me about OpenCourseWare. brilliant! the perfect drug for us wannabe lifer students who can't afford tuition every damn semester. MIT looks to have the best variety of offerings, in english anyway.