Yesterday

What a nice afternoon we had yesterday! We did end up seeing Prince Caspian, which was pretty good. IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN THE MOVIE, YOU MAY WANT TO SKIP THE REST OF THIS PARAGRAPH. I had the same feeling with this one that I did with the first: the screenwriters read the book a long time ago, and kinda remembered how it went, and just made up the bits they weren't sure of. There was a lot more fighting in the movie than in the book, which could have been left out if they had just used more of the original story. Also, I think Caspian was supposed to have been about 12 in the book, and he looks almost twice that age in the movie. Still, I liked one of the bits they added with the White Witch, and the actor playing the General was very good.

Afterwards, when Ralph checked his cell phone (which as a Good Citizen he had turned off during the movie) he had a message from the co-worker we were meeting with; they were running a bit late & would be at Outback around 5:30 instead of 5:00. This gave us time to look at the last few minutes of the Green Car Show that was going on at the Pike (which is where the movie theater is and just across the street from where we had dinner). Some of the cars were pretty neat. The coolest-looking of the concept vehicles, IMHO, was the Dodge Zeo. We didn't have our camera, but here's a link to picture (it's even the same color as the one we saw):
http://www.dodge.com/en/autoshow/concept_vehicles/zeo/



Dinner was wonderful. We arrived first, and had some cold, cold lemonade which was marvelous on such a hot day. After a while, when the others still had not arrived, we ordered a Bloomin' Onion. The co-worker and her husband arrived at about 5:45, with his daughter & granddaughter in tow (Joyce, Ray, Monique, and Star). We had to move to a bigger table. Dinner was yummy: prime rib with a crab cake, au grautin potatoes & green beans, followed up with a cinnamon oblivion. In the course of conversation, we were talking about bookstores and Joyce asked me what kind of books I buy. I said, "Lighthearted mysteries, lots of knitting books. . ." and she burst out, "Oh, do you knit? Can you make socks?" so of course I pulled the Brown Socks That Will Never Be Finished out of my bag & showed them. Her mother taught her to knit and she wants to learn how to do socks.



Still not able to get a good picture of the new fish. I'll keep trying though. I did get a fairly decent shot of the bat-faced plant. Even with the focus on manual it was hard to get a picture where the flower was in focus rather than the leaves.