the hana is a sweet little sushi place a couple miles down the pike from our house. it’s a family owned restaurant with a regular and loyal clientele. it’s not fancy or trendy which is why we like it–and of course, the food is excellent. brni and i sort of use the hana as a decompression chamber. every saturday evening we wash away the toxic load of the week with friends, saki and food from the sea.
the hana will cure what ails ya.
my in-laws have a tradition of going out to dinner to celebrate birthdays. the birthday person gets to pick the eating establishment. this sounds reasonable, but my in-laws aren’t known for their culinary wisdom and sometimes do odd things at the table.
this time, we ate at paul’s favorite chinese place in west chester. they have an impressive, laminated menu sporting creatively named dishes. the dish i picked was named after a chrysanthemum.
as i was looking at the menu, i saw movement out the corner of my eye. upon further inspection, i found a rather large roach-like bug nestled in the folds of my scarf. i quietly showed brni my little visitor then i gently shook him off my scarf and onto the floor. that’s when i decided to fill up on those crunchy things you dip in chinese mustard and wash it down with medicinal doses of wine to kill the germs. my dinner did not disappoint. it was very pretty and wholly inedible.
towards the end of the meal, brni’s father gave each one of us a pamphlet that he picked up in florida from some nursing home. we have five wishes, and they are:
1. the person i want to make care decisions for me when i can’t.
2. the kind of medical treatment i want or don’t want.
3. how comfortable i want to be.
4. how i want people to treat me.
5. what i want my loved ones to know.
after we fill it all out, we need to have it signed by two witnesses who are willing to swear that we are not crazy and they aren’t going to make a fortune when our designated loved ones pull our plugs. brni and i made a rather quick exit after that.
i feel kind of guilty about dumping the roach on the floor the way i did, because now that i think about it, he was probably just trying to hitch a ride to safety.
this explains so much.
this year i decided to spend just one afternoon at the mind-body-spirit expo instead of 3 days. i needed to replenish the exceptional lavender essential oil and since most of the speakers were the same as last year, i decided just to peruse the vendor tables and pick up whatever struck my fancy (within reason).
so i found the ugliest ring ever made. it fit. the pretty ones didn’t.
i wanted the crystal singing bowls, but could only afford the tuning forks.
found a pretty copper bracelet for my arthritis. it has peace inscribed in many different languages.
the tarot lady sold me the secret forest deck for twice what i could buy it for on amazon. it’s not out of print as she said. i love it anyway.
brni and jesse showed me that the pendulum doesn’t work if you hold it differently. that was disappointing.
i had a nice time and bought a years worth of lavender oil (well, if i’m extremely frugal with it, it’ll last a long time).
the voodoo priestess wasn’t there and the nasty woman with the tiny sharp teeth was replaced by a crew of younger, cute women and the adorable sisters selling their soaps were absent as well. but the shambhala people were there selling extremely expensive, sacred, geomancy-based jewlery which will fix our karma and bring about world peace. 
they are strangely beautiful, but at $400 a pop, i guess i’ll just hope for the best.
Croneswood Art 