And now for something waaaay less deep!

You guys, I got served decapitated shrimp heads with dinner tonight. INCLUDING FEELERS!

We went to Taka Sushi to have some inexpensive seafood (surprisingly good, just happens to be in a crappy little strip mall and doesn't cost much), and I ordered some ebi, among other things. What turned up was not ebi. This is ebi:

Note the lack of creepy-ass shrimp skulls.

What turned up looked like something they rejected from Alien as being too shudder-inducing:

WHY IS THAT THERE? IT HAS EYEBALLS.

I regarded it in horror and revulsion. I poked it a couple times. It didn't move. Regardless, I was having none of it. Historically, when gross stuff unexpectedly shows up I give it to my father, who has an iron stomach and is disgusted by very little in the way of foodstuffs (remember the lard soup with the random corncob in it?). However, he was not present, so Patrick stepped up admirably. I am one of those people who feels the need to not offend the chef by refusing to eat something, even if it's an abomination against nature and it's going to haunt your nightmares for at least a week, so Patrick saved me a lot of creepy shrimp face napkin-stuffing. Yes, I absolutely would have rammed that freakish thing in my napkin and snuck it off to the bathroom so I didn't look like I was rejecting their wonderful delicacy. No, I do not know what is wrong with me. Probably several things. The relatively normal-looking shrimpy part was good. Raw, but good. I considered that to be quite enough damn horizon-broadening for one night, thank you very much.

Even looking at a picture of that gives me the wiggins. Creepy... I draw the line at eating something's face. Particularly while its dead eyeballs are STARING AT ME. Maybe it's just as well I don't hunt like the rest of my family. I'm obviously kind of a weenie. Patrick's stomach just grumbled really loudly. I told him it was the shrimp faces in there screaming to get out. He disagreed, but I'm pretty sure I'm right.

On an up note (get it? I'm so funny) that has nothing to do with that, Patrick got called this afternoon to play the Holiday Pops concerts with the Seattle Symphony! This was really last minute as apparently some scheduling thing went all wonky and their principal trombonist didn't show up for the rehearsal (which was today, performances are the 8th through the 11th), so Patrick got called. Since he obviously didn't have his trombone with him as he'd been at work and a trombone is not exactly a briefcase, they gave him this piece of crap one that's for kids to play with from their Soundbridge learning thingy. Someone asked him if he mugged a high schooler to get that hunk of garbage, which I found hilarious. He says he was sure that thing had never been played with the Seattle Symphony before, but now it has been. I'm sure it's very proud. At any rate, he's glad to be home and have his own again. I don't blame him. Monkey is not glad. Every time she even sees him pull out the horn she runs like he's going to kill her with it. Why does she hate it so much? We do not know. It's a mystery, Charlie Brown.

Oh, and he gets a comp ticket for Friday night, so I get to go hear him for free! Apparently there is a singalong. I love singalongs. Even if the songs are all kind of stupid, like Jingle Bells and Rudolph The Red-nosed Reindeer. I think they do that because no one can get the pitch changes right on stuff like Greensleeves or For Unto Us A Child Is Born unless they're actually in music, and I can't imagine them wanting to listen to a bunch of semi-intoxicated old folks warbling their tone-deaf way through something like that. Although if I were drunk enough it might be awesome...

I wish I had eggnog.