Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

"Chinese food and a movie" isn't actually my family's tradition; we celebrated Hanukkah and my grandfather's birthday (combined party), and Christmas was just another day off from work and school. But redqueen invited us to her annual dim sum gathering for "Jews, Pagans, and the unaffiliated," and I liked the idea of seeing her again, and of having dim sum, so we went.

I half-expected that we would go, eat some dumplings, and come away again, because the failure mode of dim sum outings, in my experience, is that noise and table shape can make conversation difficult. However, China Pearl has good acoustics, and decent food: there was nothing astonishing, but they had clams with black bean sauce, and a nice version of shrimp fried in taro, and perfectly cromulent har gow and shu mai and sticky rice, and we sat and ate and talked for two and a half hours.

There were enough of us to occupy three tables; while I stayed put, some people moved around so they could talk to more people. I hadn't seen redqueen in sixteen years, and we hadn't seen Mary Anne Wolf or Martin Doehring in rather longer than that. Those are connections of mine and cattitude's from college; the other people at our table, who I hadn't met before, included Mary Anne's partner Arthur and someone redqueen knows from Morris dancing.

(I was surprised that one of the first things redqueen said was that I had lost a lot of weight; I shrugged and said "it happens" and we went on to talk about more interesting things.)