nunly observations around her town

Company picnic at the lawn bowling green at Woodland Park. Despite the green's being a fifteen-minute walk from my place, and despite passing it on the bus thousands of times, I'd never been here until yesterday. What's so special about a lawn bowling green, you ask? Well, these things:

1. There were members of Seattle's lawn bowling club there to teach people how to do it. Yeah, they were older, genteel-looking white guys. I'm kind of amazed that this club still exists, and the guys in it are so game to keep it going. I admire their dedication if not their direction.
2. There were signs up telling people to wear only flat shoes on the green. I had a vision of ladies is '50s New Look and lovely heels punching holes in the green.
3. Best of all were the pennants in the clubhouse. Most of them were brought by Australian (!) lawn bowling clubs during the '60s. What a different time that must have been, when people would cross the Pacific for a lawn bowling tour, and better yet, leave specially made mementos along their route.

J of J & R fame does love a nice restaurant, so she organized an outing to Sushi Kashiba near Pike Place. We didn't get a good start; Kashiba had her reservation down for Saturday, and we almost didn't get seated. The food, however, was more than right on. I thought it was a little weird how the servers kept addressing us customers in the first person plural, and I noticed that they were all attractive women of around thirty in black, but mighty fine sake and sautéed geoduck made that easy to overlook.

Was Sushi Kashiba better than Shiro's? Wayell, I don't think I'm enough of a gormay to really distinguish them. I've sampled a larger variety of the menu at Shiro's, having been there several times, and it's all fantastic. I will say this, though: I've never known Shiro's to do something I thought was weird or incompetent, and price-wise, both of those places are an expensive habit. J raved about Kashiba's sushi, though. (R, who doesn't like sushi, was absent. That's just tragic.)

It occurs to me that Sushi Kashiba is exactly the sort of place I should take Funny Lady: she loves good sushi, and we can check out the wait staff together.

Oh: some of us were running a little early, so we got drinks at the Triple Door on a whim, where a couple of dudes were performing some bossa nova hits, complete with singing in Portuguese. J went to high school in Brazil, and her dad is from there, so she knew all the songs. The musicians finished their set as we were leaving, and the singer was surprised to hear J compliment him in Portuguese. Perfect.