Welcome to Churro Waffle, home of the churro waffle

lisekatevans had a terrible trip back home on Friday from a work visit, so I invited her over for Shabbat dinner. Then it turned out that she wouldn't be able to come over until even later than she originally thought, so I had leftover curry and she ate elsewhere, but she came over, drank a bunch of water, and we sat down and watched Five Centimeters Per Second. It's one of my favorite movies ever--the first time I watched it, I wrote about it here--and since lisekatevans loved Your Name and Five Centimeters Per Second is also by Shinkai Makoto, I figured she'd like it. And I was right!

I'm glad, because when the anime club I was in watched it, everyone except schoolpsychnerd and I hated it, so I was a little apprehensive. I told her about Garden of Words, too, which neither of us have seen, so that's probably on the list sometime in the future.

After a longer-than-expected hiatus, mutantur managed to get us back together to play Call of Cthulhu. goodbyeomelas had to quit due to the time it was taking, since it was a four-hour session along with an hour-and-a-half commute each way, but the remaining three of us won back to Inqanok, reported the news to the council there, spent a year in the town studying the "Book of Keys and Gates," and then when we finally took a ship out we were captured by pirates. I managed to incapacitate or kill several pirates while unarmed and get the scene I wanted, where I surrendered after fighting my way up to the deck and finding a dozen pirates up there and the crew overwhelmed. Not bad for a Call of Cthulhu character, even if the game is taking place in the Dreamlands.

This morning, at meowtima's invitation, goodbyeomelas, tropicanaomega, her husband, and I all went to a recently-opened restaurant called Churro Waffle, which is pretty much as the name describes. It took us forty-five minutes to get a table, after repeatedly being told it was a ten-minute wait--I didn't believe there since there were maybe twenty people outside when we got there, but that's what they said--so when we finally sat down, they brought out a churro waffle on the house as an apology for the wait time. We all dug in, and after tasting it, most of us ordered churro waffles. And can you blame us?

( Behold! )

We also came up with a great idea, based on me mishearing something that tropicanaomega's husband said. He mentioned a "hostel book club," talking about books kept in hostel libraries when he was traveling, and I heard it as "hostile book club," a book club where people bring books they hate and force others to read them. Maybe we should try to get this to work. I can think of a few books I'd love to bring to a hostile book group. Caitlín R. Kiernan's Threshold, S.M. Boyce's Lichgates... If I really want to rant, Charles Murray's Coming Apart. tropicanaomega's husband mentoioned running it like a TED Talk + white elephant gift exchange, where each person brings a book and gets five minutes to explain how terrible their book is and why everyone should hate it. Then people pick orders out of a hat and pick their books. Reading Unicorn, my online book group, hasn't met in a while, so something like that would be nice.

As a way of keeping track of my moods, I downloaded an app called iMoodJournal. It's pretty standard--rate moods 1 to 10, write a short description of how you feel, including hashtags for later analysis--but the thing I thought was funny was that the pre-populated list of emotions was pulled from LiveJournal. It even had ones on there like #indescribable and #quixotic, which I'm not sure I'll ever use. I'm not sure anyone would ever use them. But I guess it's an easy list to draw from.

I had to add back "worried," though. I can't imagine why they would remove that and not quixotic, but here we are.