Dancing and eating and books

[ailbhe]

It was Rob's birthday on the tenth, and we went dancing. The day started with Rob's work POP server routing all customer mail to /dev/null, and then I gave him his present (a map of his parents' home area, dating from before his parents' house was built). The rest of the day was pretty uneventful, until we left for dancing at about 7:30.

I had missed three lessons, and was too ill to dance the whole hour, but I managed half an hour. Rob had missed two lessons, but he went last week on his own and was mor ein practice than I. We're the only couple left from the group we started with - a very few people have moved up to the Intermediate Class, but most have dropped out. We started with a social foxtrot, which neither Rob nor I could do properly - by the time we'd got into the rhythm of it, it was time to remember how to turn, and we couldn't remember how to do that. Then we did the ordinary foxtrot, which was more or less a disaster. Eventually, Rob and I did a lovely waltz which I enjoyed enormously, and then Rob did the cha-cha with the teacher, because I was sitting off at the side. They finished off with a "barn dance". It was much like one of the dances danced by the Swedes around the Christmas tree - forwards and backwards, change partners and polka. Repeat. It was to the tune of Cotton-Eye Joe, or whatever that is called, and seemed hilarious, if a bit loud.

Rob has been doing all the cooking (see my most recent entry on how sick I feel) and is getting very good at it. Pasta bolognese and lasagne-alike and almost-cottage-pie for dinners, and this morning I had two toasted sandwiches for breakfast - one egg and one banana. I eat like a horse.

At the weekend, we went to Keegan's second-hand bookshop, where we found yet another Anne McCaffrey. Also, across the road from it is a place that does milkshakes made of milk and icecream and fruit, which is a rare and wonderful beast. I had a banana milkshake, on the assumption that the banana and milk were food and the ice-cream was a justifiable treat. Then we went to Bella Pasta and had lunch-dinner.

We've been updating the library database. I have stickers for the spines of books which have been catalogued, and so we have some idea of what has and hasn't been entered. Also, Rob has changed it to a postgres db instead of mysql. For some reason, we are both very happy to spend hours looking up ISBNs, first publication dates, and author biography details. We've done the first half of the spec fic already.