Weekend activities

Instead of taking a break after the reading, my mom and I cooked dinner for my friends on Saturday. My mom got the menu together, did most of the work, and I played assistant chef. Someday, I'm going to have to do this on my own. I hope my mom will at least let me call her for emergencies - "How much of this goes in that?" "How long should I bake the what's-that-thing-called?"

At dinner, I got to meet a friend of Noella's, who's visiting from Singapore. A nice girl who was in the Navy, the Central Narcotics Bureau, and is now a P.I. She was very generous and said I could write her if I needed to do research for a new story, or even an essay on the life of a private investigator. I love meeting people with unusual jobs. One of my friends in the MFA program aspires to be a postal worker. The simple happiness of having a route, getting to knowing folks and their pets, being done with work by late afternoon, going home to write. Imagine the wealth of material you could generate from daily interactions with the community. For now, he's slaving away at teaching writing. And once upon a time he was once in the Peace Corps, based in Russia.

More female fun - I finally colored my hair on Sunday night. My mom's turn to help me. I was rather impatient to see the results; I even skipped the allergy test. Well, there's no point showing pictures because my hair hasn't changed much. It's shinier, and blacker, but not much blue. The box says blue-black, but I suppose it's hard to really get that blue-black color onto my own hair since it was already very dark to begin with. It's pitch black now. I'm enjoying it, though I wish I could have a little more blue. I miss those hair extensions from 1998.