almost heaven

Hello there.

We're spent last weekend in the North Georgia Mountains, which is a thing that people do down in the South (see: John Denver's entire catalogue).  With the exception of going camping an hour away last year, we've never been, but no surprise, it's really very pretty.  For reasons that are boring we ended up staying at a cabin different than the one we originally intended to, so instead of a creek and a cornfield we got a river and some train tracks.  But they were very scenic train tracks.  Also: OMG TRAINS.

Anyway, there was Nature's Majesty and good weather and s'mores, and not to put too fine a point on it but inside the cabin was a TV that got both The Cartoon Network and Spike TV, which should, in my opinion, be renamed "The Star Wars Network" since that's basically the only thing it plays in the evening.  Not that anyone here is complaining.  (I'm outnumbered, obviously.)

Oh, the weird chemical salt crystals that we got to throw into the fire to make it all rainbow and mystical worked very well, by the way--the kids were impressed.  We just had to make sure that we were done with any fire-based cooking before we threw them in, because I'm pretty sure that eating foods cooked over copper salts and whatnot is probably not the healthiest thing in the world.  Then again, neither are s'mores, so whatever.

And whatever, I know that looking at other people's vacation-y photos is mostly boring so I'll spare you the entire set, but OK, just a few more.

Here Cal found a bird feather and was like, "Look Mom!  Like Harry Potter!"  And I was like, "Oh, that's nice, what a pretty fea--AUGH! DROP IT!  WASH HANDS!  WASH HANDS!" when I noticed the rest of the bird carcass, mostly picked clean but still with very readily identifiable calcific anatomy scattered clustered in a heap, about three feet away.  Nature's Bounty indeed.

(No, I didn't take a picture of the bird carcass.)

I read a bit about tubing on the river before we headed down, and I kept wondering how exactly it is that you get back to the starting point after you're done with your tubery.  I mean, isn't it far to walk back?  And isn't it unweildy to have to carry your tube overland all the way?  My more outdoorsy sources tell me that most people either plan a ride or have two cars, one for the starting point and one as a pickup vehicle downstream.  Which seemed...complicated.  Also, more planning than we were willing to put into the endeavor.  Our solution, therefore, was to just tie a rope to our tubes and drag the kids around in the waist-deep water like we were walking the dog.  A little labor intensive, but it worked fine, and we were able to recover 100% of our children at the end of the day.  Even the spare child.

(WHICH ONE IS THE SPARE?  I'll never tell you.)

(It's Cal.)

Anyway: the Blue Ridge Mountains!  You are very nice, and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter!  If it also looks like this little getaway fulfilled my major criteria of taking vacations in places where seemingly no other people are, your perceptions are largely correct.  I mean, I'm not exactly sure where all the people all were--it was a holiday weekend, after all, and it's not exactly some remote secret getaway spot (it seems, in fact, like the default weekend getaway spot for a lot of people because it's so close by--kind of like the Hamptons is for New York except more rustic and with 99% of the snobbery and exclusivity excised) but with the exception of hearing our neighbors once in the evening and seeing a few kayakers hurtling by, we hardly saw any other people the whole time we were there.  Which, to be clear, was fine with me.  Interacting with humans is very taxing, you know.

(And no, as usual, we didn't actually catch any fish.  That said, it didn't seem to detract from the experience at all, so who cares.  Live on, little fish.)

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I'm posting pictures anyway, so here, this thing:

32 weeks

33 weeks

I would describe pregnancy at this point as inconvenience and discomfort tempered by impatience anticipation.  People keep asking me how long I'm going to keep working and I tell them all that I'm going to keep showing up to work all the way up until this baby deplanes, because really, it's the fastest and most interesting way I know to pass a seemingly interminable span of time.  Getting through the third trimester at times is like the graph of y = 1/x.  As x approaches zero, time approaches infinity.

So what, like, four to six more weeks, right?

Tick tock.

feel free to tell me if this is counts as my psychotic break

One of the few things I've learned about having a girl baby (and granted she hasn't arrived yet, but preparatory efforts are underway, after all) is that girls clothes are more expensive than boys clothes.  With the exception of color most newborn clothes are basically the same (schlumpy variations on windsocks with arms, essentially) but when you start getting into real clothes, you see that girls clothing costs more because girls clothing is fancy.  Seriously, the variations and accessories are endless.  Little dresses and skirts and pinafores and hair bows and ruffle butt diaper covers and little baby legwarmers and oh internet, tell me what else that I never knew existed but now apparently need.

Lots of commercially available girls' baby clothing doesn't really appeal to me--either the print is unsavory or the pattern is too frilly or it falls into the category that I have dubbed "baby slut"--but there's lots of cute stuff out there too.  Cute stuff which, unfortunately, tends to cost a lot of money.  With the exception of winter jackets and this one grey cotton blazer I got for Cal as a two month-old that make him look like mini Kim Jong-Il for the two seconds that he actually fit into it (classic rookie move--never buy a blazer for a two month-old unless you just have money to burn) I don't think I spent more than $10 on any single item of kids clothing for the first year of either Cal or Mack's life.  For Thing 3, though, we could spend that amount on any one piece of clothing easily.  Hell, we could easily spend five times that amount for one clothing item, and that would be par for the course when it comes to girls' clothes.  

I've become especially enamored of these reversible pinafores that I've seen on Etsy, because--well, look at them.  First of all, they are adorable.  Secondly, you can wear them over anything--short sleeves and leggings, long sleeve and pants, bareback in the summer.  Thirdly, you can get a lot of wear out of them, because an outgrown dress can just as easily be worn as a shirt.  Fourth: DID YOU HEAR THE PART WHERE I SAID REVERSIBLE?  Spill your pureed peas down one side and you still have a whole other side to work with.  

The downside, of course, is the price.  Prices vary by vendor, but look, I'm not going to spend $50 on any vestment for a baby, unless it plays calliope music and turns baby poops into rainbows.  The dresses are cute as all get out, but the expense is just impractical.

Or, I thought to myself, you could just sew your own damn dress, it's not like Etsy is some kind of magical baby dress generating machine.

For those of you who know me in real life (hello, real-life friends), I think you would agree that "makes her own baby clothes" is probably not a real accurate description of my, uh, life schema.  I am not one for the domestic pursuits.  I can sew in a central line and I can sew up a simple laceration, but that's about it.  I don't know how to use a sewing machine, for one.  I don't tend to craft--strike two.  But I am fairly stubborn, and after a while, I started to think, you went to med school, for chrissake, surely you can sew some stupid little baby dress.  What are you, chicken? (That's how I berate myself, by the way.  Like Biff to Marty McFly.  Now make like a tree and get out of here.)  

So I did some research online and read some tutorials and thought, huh, this doesn't look too hard.  I found my sewing machine (this is the one I have, which seems to strike a nice balance between being pretty affordable yet advanced enough to be reasonably idiot-proof) and actually read the instructions.  (Those are the words printed on the paper that comes in the box.  Yes, I too have learned something today!)  And then I went to a discount fabric store--one of those that's fun to browse, but it certainly has more than its share of giant bolts of football team logo polyester fleece, that kind of place--thinking I wouldn't find anything appealing, and actually walking out with some nice cotton prints.  So I decided that I was just going to go for it, and started and finished my first sewing project last night--my first sewing machine project ever, mind you--and came up with this:

I would put a step by step here, but I don't see any point in reinventing the wheel, I basically followed this tutorial exactly.  The only minor modifications I made were that I squared off the straps instead of rounding the ends, and used snaps instead of a large button so it could be truly reversible.

You can see from the pic some imperfections in the stitching (like I said--it was my first sewing machine venture EVER), but I was actually surprised to find that the whole thing was...pretty easy.  My first attempt took me about three hours--for someone with experience, it would probably take less than half of that time.  I was surprised at how easy it was, actually--so easy, in fact, that I went ahead and made another one.  This one turned out a little better, what with the practice under my belt and the choice to use two more similar weight fabrics (the blue checkered fabric on the first one was much more lightweight, almost gauzy, and had the tendency to pull and pucker).

So...that happened.  And now I'm like Zoolander looking into a puddle wondering, "WHO AM I?"  I thought the minivan was game changer enough, but just who is this person who is sewing her own baby clothes?  Is this normal or a sign of my spiral into madness?  

Also...what else should I sew now?

MEGABED and other true stories

We're not a bunch of co-sleeping hippies, I swear (well, maybe a little) but with the exception of Cooper, who snores too loudly, we all slept in the same bed last night.  Let me explain.

OK, so first thing: I don't think I've shared this with you yet, but we...have a MEGABED.  More accurately it is two queen-sized mattresses pushed up next to each other--I would show you a picture but it looks fairly terrible (remember that we, two adult professionals in our mid-thirties have never actually owned a bedframe, let alone a boxspring or any of the fancy bedding accoutrement, unless you count that one weird memory foam pillow Joe has that he swears helps his neck) and anyway, I have more pride than to reveal how terrible our bedroom looks.  But just envision two queen mattresses on the floor, next to each other.  Hell, even pretend the beds are made, it's the world of imagination: NO LIMITS!  So that's a really wide bed.

Our intention was not to make a MEGABED, of course--one of those queen sized mattresses used to live in our guest room, back when we rented a house and had a guest room.  Then we moved to this house, which is a three bedroom, and given that we no longer had the extra space (sorry, guests--sofabeds are groovy!) we stuck the queen mattress in Mack's room and let him have the biggest toddler bed ever.  Eventually, this morphed into a twin-sized Lightning McQueen bed in the hopes that it might actually get him to, you know, stay in his own bed at night (Mack has an unfortunate habit of climbing into our bed at 2:00am--he does it then because he knows when you're WEAK) and while this bribery through themed furniture has kind of worked we still needed a place to put the old queen mattress.  Not having any other options, we just put it in our room.  At first we stacked both mattresses on top of each other, but this option ended up being too squashy, so we just laid them side by side, exposed it to some gamma rays, and that's how MEGABED was born.  (This is called an "origin story."  Technical writer stuff, you understand.)  It's indecently large but it's also like having your own bouncy castle so who's to say if we're trashy with our floor mattresses and no furniture?  YOU?  (Maybe you.)

So Cal was sick yesterday. Really, he's overdue, since he hasn't been sick once this whole school year, but as timing goes this illness is particularly bad, given that the last day of school is literally tomorrow.  (The South!)  Also, it was a gastrointestinal illness, while benign enough, tend to be somewhat more dramatic and, shall we say, exuberant than your garden variety colds. So after it was clear that he was still feeling poorly by evening and would likely be missing school today, we told Cal that, if he liked, he could sleep with me and Joe in "the big bed" overnight. Partially so we could keep an eye on him, you know, but also partially (disclosure: mostly) because I trust that my own reaction time is faster than that of a six year-old boy. We have off-white berber carpeting in all the bedrooms, you see.

Mack, not to be outdone, also insisted on sleeping in the big bed with everyone. He also, for the record, wanted to have a fever and be throwing up and taking medicine, because while he was perfectly healthy and felt fine, he sensed some inequity in the compared situations, and where there is inequity, SURELY THERE IS INJUSTICE. I let him have some Gatorade, but I drew the line at giving him medicine, even placebo medicine (an M&M or the like--Cal likes those grape Tylenol Meltaways) because I don't want Mack to get the idea that medicine is something you can just take because you want to. One of the first Pediatric patients I ever had to pronounce dead was the victim of a Tylenol overdose (granted, it was a teenager attempting suicide--attempting and ultimately succeeding, I guess), and although it's like WOAH, DEBBIE DOWNER, my point is--don't fuck around with medications, kid.

 Anyway, we'd argued about why he couldn't take medicine if he wasn't sick for, like, an hour earlier that evening (note: you will never win an argument with a three year-old, no matter how measured and rational your points are, because they are all insane) so when he asked to sleep in the big bed I was like FINE, WHATEVER, JUST STOP TALKING ALREADY. Mack isn't the easiest person to sleep with, as he tends to rotate between "The Roundhouse Kick" and "H is for Hell" with a sprinkle of "Jazz Hands" thrown in to keep things spicy--but if he was willing to keep the peace I was willing to meet him halfway. Therein is the largesse afforded by MEGABED.

Anyway, I won't say it was the best night of sleep that I ever got, but at least there was sleeping, and no one threw up on anyone else, which I count as an unexpected bonus.

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Also to be filed under "Hippies, comma, we are not" is that I cut Mack's hair yesterday.  I've been cutting his hair for a while (I don't think we've even tried to take him to a professional barber yet, given how poor Cal's experience was at this age, both in terms of cooperation and the resultant quality of the haircut) but I think it turned out OK.  Mack's hair is a little wavier than Cal's so it tends to be more forgiving--both in terms of it getting a little too long and in terms of covering up any small errors in the trimming process--but we live in Atlanta and it tends to get hot here, so I like to keep it short, to avoid the matted hanks of plastered fur look.  We can't all be Tim Riggins, son.

Anyway, as I was giving Mack his haircut, I considered if I should take pictures and do a tutorial on boy's home haircuts, but then I realized how very ridiculous that idea was, because really--I don't know what the hell I'm doing.  So my only advice to you is: just go for it, there's only so bad you can screw it  up, and just like all bleeding stops eventually, all hair eventually grows out.  That and make sure you have something good on TV, because that's how you trick them into staying still.

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Finally, gratuitous photos of our backyard.  Unexpected how all this greenery is starting to grow on me.  I pretend like it's about us asserting our dominion over nature or some such thing, but really, I just think it's pretty.

Hope you had a good weekend too.

not nesting, just feathering

So I finally figured out what to do with our fireplace mantle.

I've been trying to sort out what to put on our mantle since all the Christmas stuff came down, a decision complicated by the fact that the original print we ordered for the wall actually ended up being too large to fit in the space above the fireplace.  (To be fair, I did measure the space, it just turns out that the measurements provided didn't actually include the measurements of the matting and the frame.  Lessons learned.  But never fear, the Rothko print is now hanging above the couch.)

Anyway, this is obviously not a design blog and I don't know nothin' about birthin' no decoration babies, but what we ended up choosing for our mantle seemed like a nice kind of post for Mother's Day so here you go.  Also I don't have anything else to write about.

This mason jar of sticks I made inspired by AB Chao, who was in turn inspired by this other blog.  (This is known as "proper attribution.")  It was good because we already had a jar, the sticks were free (thanks, backyard!) and the embroidery floss was cheap--it was a good excuse to buy a whole buttload for other projects, actually.  This particular endeavor was easy enough that Cal and I could do some of it together, which is where the Mother's Day part of it comes in.  We actually wrapped most of those twigs this morning (I don't know what your day looks like where you live, but ours is a Very Rainy Sunday) and they were ready for prime time before lunch.  And look how pretty.

The T-Rex wood sculpture is, I think, one of Mack's birthday presents.  The thing of it is that it's actually not a very good gift for a 3 year-old (it came flat packed in literally more than a hundred pieces that had to be assembled painstakingly--think lots of wood grooves and slots fitting together) and it absolutely would not hold up to any kind of rough play, which...well, you've seen kids play with dinosaurs, right? Anyway.  Not the best toy.  But ornamentally, it is fun.  So T-Rex lives on our mantle now.

This is the part that Joe made fun of me for getting (it's one of the few purely decorative items I've ever bought, unless you count pillows for the couch), and he keeps calling them "decorative balls."  Whatever.  I BOUGHT DECORATIVE BALLS.  I like them.  Shut up.  (They're from Target.  I can't find a link, but I'm sure you can find them in the decorative ball aisle.)

This poster I got from the Echo Park Time Travel Mart.  I have a few prints of Amy Martin's stuff and I  really like her work--the colors in this print also match the color scheme of our living room.  Also, it's about fire, which is HILARIOUS to me because we're hanging it over our fireplace.  (I'm easily amused.)  The frame I got from Target, I "matted" it myself by just buying a piece of white posterboard and taping the poster on there before cramming it into the frame.  Whatever, it looks fine.  TAKE THAT, PROFESSIONAL FRAMERS.

(I should also note that the poster is only $20 and part of the proceeds I believe goes to benefit 826LA, which is a non-profit writing and tutoring center for kids in Los Angeles.  You know, in case you need another excuse.)

And now, finally, a pictoral round-up.  Literally.  See, because..."round-up."  ROUND.  I slay me.  Me and only me, I guess.

29 weeks:

30 weeks:

31 weeks:

And...that's it.  How was your Mother's Day?  Mine's not over yet but it's raining and I'm about to go take a nap so I'm going to go out on a limb and say that it was a pretty good one.

checkmate, mister trampoline

So...this happened.

Cal joined the chess club this semester.  It's just one of the after-school extracurricular activities at school--they have sports ones and academic ones and even an "etiquette" class (which struck me as charmingly Southern, something like training for a cotillion, but which after some time I am also seriously considering because STOP MUMBLING AND LOOK PEOPLE IN THE EYE WHEN YOU SHAKE THEIR HANDS, SON).  Cal's done the karate class and the science class, but nothing, nothing has been like him taking this chess class.  He is obsessed.  He loves chess.  All he wants to do is play chess.  All he wants to do is talk about chess, which is fairly boring to say the least.  He sees cars parallel parked on the street with a space in between and he compares it various chess board setups.  So: basically me and Tetris in the 6th grade.

Yesterday the chess club held its trophy ceremony for the end of semester, and before you get too excited, just know that every kid gets a trophy.  It's a feel-good thing, like that "King of the Hill" where Bobby wants to play soccer and when it's a tie game the coach shouts, EVERYBODY'S A WINNER!  So yes, everybody's a winner.  But the kids are fairly quick to notice that the size of your trophy is dictated by the number of points you've accrued over the season and the number of games you've won, and while I wasn't expecting too much (Cal just learned to play chess a few months ago, and he's just a first-grader--chess club has kids from kindergarden through fifth grade so obviously the older kids and the veteran players are generally going to be better) he actually did respectably.  And Lo, we were proud.  But more importantly, Cal was proud.  He was very, very proud.

While at the trophy ceremony, I tried to be subtle about the fact that I was eyeing all the second graders in the class, mentally assessing how large they were and how readily they could beat up my own kid--and somewhat relieved to note that these kids, at least the boys in chess club--which, GRANTED, may be a skewed subset--were not that much bigger than Cal.  In fact, I don't think I could have readily distinguished the rising third graders from the rising second graders, which made me feel better.  It made me feel better because...

...we actually decided, in concert with the administrators at the school and the guidance of Cal's first grade teacher, to go ahead and let him skip a grade.  (Remember, we talked about this a few months ago, though we hadn't quite made up our minds at that time what precisely we were going to do.)  In many ways it was a difficult decision, but in other ways it was also an easy decision because his teacher felt so strongly that it was the right move for him, and the administration was inclined to agree.  Joe and I went to a series of meetings and talked about it, and after reading some of the evaluations and testing results, and making sure that this would be the best decision with adequate administrative support and oversight, we decided that we should go ahead and just let him do it.

So, he'll be in the third grade next year.  I don't think it's actually a very big deal--either way, he'd be in a new classroom with a new teacher, and the school is so big and they shuffle the students each year so that he'd be in a group of mostly new classmates anyway--so the grade number posted outside the classroom door actually doesn't matter all that much.  We'll have to do a little catching up over the summer, mostly on the concrete curriculum items that they cover in second grade--U.S. History or Geography or Weather Patterns or whatever they hell they learn about in the second grade--but I don't think that should be too hard.  And luckily it seems that I'm going to be on maternity leave this summer so I think I can probably help with a lot of that.

I also realize that there's probably going to be a range of reactions to me talking about this, running the gamut from, "Well, good for Cal!" to "Oh SHUT UP bragging about your stupid kid" to, "This was a very poor choice, he's going to be socially maladjusted for the rest of his sad, anemic, chess-playing life," but...look.  We just viewed this as a parenting decision like any other.  It's not a prize, it's not an indictment, it was just a decision we had to make, and in the end, after a lot of consideration, we made the decision that we thought would be best.  And that's all we can really ever do, right?  If it was a good or bad decision, we'll find out eventually, though I doubt, like with most things, that it will ever be as black and white as that.  But we think it's the best choice right now.  Anyway, I mentioned it on the blog before, so I just wanted to give you some follow up, now at the end of the school year, on how it all shook out.

We didn't want to mention to Cal that we were considering the grade advancement until it was fairly set, but we eventually told him this Friday, not quite sure how he'd react.  We emphasized that even if he was going into second grade, he'd have a new teacher anyway and a new classroom anyway and he would likely be with all new kids anyway, and you can still have playdates with your old friends so...it wasn't a real big deal to be going to the third grade instead.

"Oh."  He shrugged.  "OK.  Whatever, that sounds good."

I think we're going to be fine.

treat yo self

"Are you Korean?" one of the nurses in the endoscopy unit asked me yesterday.

"Nope, Chinese," I told her, and waited for the second part, which, in my experience, is usually 1.) asking if I can help translate for an Asian-eque patient who can't speak English, or 2.) asking if I know a certain other Asian person, even though (SECRET INFO) we don't all actually know each other.

But actually, she said: "Oh.  Because my daughter and I went to a great Korean foot massage place this past weekend.  It was totally..."  At which point I wheeled around, grabbed her by her lapels (uh, her scrub lapels) and rasped, like Christian Bale's constipated Batman, tell me more about this massage place.

Because I have been looking for a good Asian massage place since we moved to Atlanta almost four years ago.  I just specify Asian because usually they're a lot cheaper, and are generally disinterested in talking to you, which for me is perfect.  (I don't even like chatting with the lady at the salon who cuts my hair, which I probably why I never get my hair cut until it starts getting into Yoko Ono territory.)  I used to go to this old Chinese reflexology place in New York, which was on the second floor of a brownstone above, I think, a nail salon (I know, so typical), but we don't live in New York anymore, and most of the massage places I've seen around Atlanta have been of the fancy ladies-who-lunch variety, or at the very least, ladies-who-Groupon.

Also, she said the magic words, which were: foot massage.  Because I think I've come to terms with the fact that I don't like body massages.  I just don't.  I keep thinking I should like them, because, you know, everyone likes massages, and look at me, with my bad posture and high stress job.  But I just haven't ever gotten a body massage that I liked--and don't use this opportunity to tell me about your "happy ending" massage story because I DON'T WANT TO HEAR IT.  Mostly massages are just painful.  Maybe I just don't have enough muscle to massage?  Because massages, no matter how light or soft I tell them to go, just feel like people contusing my bones for half an hour, and then I'm bruised for, like, a week after.  So body massages are not my thing.

Foot massages, though, I can get behind.  Because those are rarely painful, and my feet, I am on them a lot.  See also: pregnancy.  So I got the info, and today, since I was post-call and therefore early off from work, I went there.

It's called "Treat Your Feet," which I'm sure you can see because you are able to read.  It's located in one of these super-industrial strip malls on the Buford Highway (which Atlanta locals will know is the place to go for Ethnic Stuffs), but the inside is actually really nice, much more luxurious than I was expecting.

Anyway, after I told them what I wanted, they hustled me into this dim room with these amazing overstuffed pillowy chairs, and brought out this bucket of hot water for me to soak my feet.  And it is because I am not a vain person that I will show you what my feet look like, because hey, these are not good-looking feet right here.  I can also tell now, looking at this picture full-sized, that despite it being fairly early in the day (it was about 10:30am when I took this picture) that I already had a line from the elastic where my socks were, which, I KNOW MOM, means I should probably obtain some compression stockings at some point, only they're so tight and itchy and I hate them so whatever, I'd rather be swollen.

I didn't take any pictures of the massage part because that would be weird (also it was kind of dark), but know that there was oils and kneading and hot stones and some kind of crazy little foot hammer like in "Raise the Red Lantern," and at the end, they even did a brief face/scalp/neck/shoulder massage, which was like, bonus.  (The shoulder massage hurt a little bit, but the scalp massage was awesome--I wear a scrub hat a lot of the time, so who knows, maybe it's cutting off circulation to my scalp and that explains all my mental problems.)

Want to know the best part?  The best, best, best part is that the one hour foot massage, with the head and neck massage, only costs $30.  Actually, with this coupon (I used the "Early Bird" special because it was a better deal, but I actually I could have used either, since it is a Thursday and I am a lady, SO FAR AS YOU KNOW) only cost $26.  Twenty-six dollars, people.  So that's a hell of a good deal.  So much so that I gave them a $15 tip, because I felt kind of guilty that my enjoyment of the experience so far outweighed the cost.  Also, my dad taught me that tipping well is what you do when you're a decent person, especially if you intend to return to a place of business again.  Which I most certainly will.

(Sorry, this is all very region-specific, and exactly the kind of post that would get me despondent on another blog, because why can't anyone tell me where to get an awesome $26 hourlong massage here in Bismarck?  Or wherever you live.  But now you know where to go when you visit Atlanta, between the Aquarium and The New World of Coke.)

Since I was already on the Buford Highway, I decided to stop by one of the many ethnic eateries for lunch, and while I was tempted to go for Korean food (one of my favorite restaurants was actually right across the street), I decided to go for something which is actually even harder to find in Atlanta, which is a good bowl of Chinese noodles.  I think the place I went to was called The BBQ Corner II, which, I guess, presupposes the existence of a BBQ Corner I.  Anyway, it was not really a BBQ place, except for the fact that they did sell Chinese-style grilled pork and duck.  I had the duck noodle soup and some dim sum style desserts (basically sesame-encrusted glutinous rice balls filled with sweet red bean paste, deep fried).  It wasn't anything mind-blowing, but in a town where it's hard to find real Chinatown-style casual Chinese food, it was more than good enough. Final bill, including a soda, $10.

So.  As post-call days go, not too bad.