Cause for Celebration

I'm sorry, no Flickr Fiction yet this week. Possibly tomorrow. In the meantime, click the picture for my latest desktop publishing endeavor. I've spent much of today working on the program for the play, which opens this coming Friday--plugging in cast bios, ads, and the like, and messing with the fonts. I feel like that's what takes up a lot of the time for me...that and figuring out how to do really easy things that, for some reason, I don't know how to do. On the other hand, in working on this poster I learned something very useful--how to apply a spot color and then merge it into the existing RGB color channels. (The background image on the poster came from a fairly small black-and-white image of an antique postcard. I colorized it, which was somewhat time-consuming, but the results are pretty cool.)

Besides sitting at the computer, today was a pretty relaxing day. I actually had a strong Bay Area Moment in the middle of the day. This was because 1) it was cold and rainy, and 2) we tried a relatively new Chinese restaurant in Modesto which actually serves dim sum. The dim sum was awesome, too. At least, it was Bay Area quality, which is amazing for this area. When we walked in at about 12:30 the place was full of Asian customers; always a good sign.

Rob and I agreed it was probably the most Asian people we'd seen in any given place in Modesto at the same time. The reason for this is probably that the rest of the Chinese restaurants here are pretty inauthentic, serving Americanized Chinese food. That's not to say the food isn't tasty, but it sure isn't authentic. (Although I have to say, China Gate does a killer General's Chicken.)

So, Monday night I'm going to a reading at Barnes & Noble in Oakland. I discovered, purely by accident, that someone I was friends with at Cal as an undergrad is currently on a book tour. I was reading my Cody's Books e-mail newsletter a few weeks ago, looking at the upcoming readings, and I saw a name I recognized and thought, geez, I used to know an Annie Choi. So I did some Googling and sure enough, it was the same person. Annie was a friend from Stebbins Hall, but I only lived there a semester before I got burned out on the whole roommate thing (I'd been in the dorms for two years before that) and got my own apartment. We lost touch after graduation, but she was a good friend during a particularly tough time, and is just a really cool person in general, so I was excited to get back in touch with her. Very serendipitous!