Friday seemed like it had a lot going on. Lots of talking, very little reading on the bus. Work had normal stuff, a completely intractable problem that made absolutely no sense, and the news that if we get new hardware, it’ll be delayed for months and months. This is not that surprising, actually.

Then there was supposed to be a dinner at Benihana, for Patty’s birthday. This was originally scheduled at 7pm. However, she mailed everybody right after I left work and said, “They said they could only give us a reservation at 6:30pm.” It was a good thing that I checked mail right after I got home. I barely had time to run errands before getting on the road and getting there at 6:30.

But anyway, everyone was there, except for Sarah, who was late because of a scrapbooking meeting. The place was really busy, but we killed some time in the bar waiting for a table to be available. Anyway, we all finally got seated, right in full view of another table full of people who had apparently taken all their fashion cues from TV shows like “Jersey Shore”. (We were mostly casually and conservatively dressed, except for Nathan, who had worn a suit jacket because he had thought Benihana’s was a very classy place, and Kelli, whose clothes apparently still smelled like dryer sheets according to everyone else.) There was some muttering about how déclassé the people at the other table looked.

But anyway, we had a bunch of teppanyaki food, and John gave Patty a card (in Spanish) that had been translated (badly) by Dr. Dave, which was much funnier than it really should’ve been. Zach said that he wanted a “volumizing beard insert”. The waitress took a picture of Patty and the rest of us, and John deliberately did some sort of weird contortion that looked pretty silly in the picture. The food was OK but kind of expensive.

It was almost 9pm when we were finished with everything, and everyone else had plans to go back to Patty’s place and have cake. I was way too tired to do that. Where does everyone else find the energy? Maybe it’s because they don’t have to get up at 5:45am. . . .