I HATE being sick!

Had a cold hit me really hard while we were in Albuquerque Saturday. As a result, not working today and haven't decided if I'm going to class tonight. Which means that I'll have to work Saturday to make up the hours I'm not putting in today.

*sigh*

Albuquerque & Mamma Mia

We headed off to Albuquerque Saturday morning, found the theatre fairly easily, and made it to our seats in plenty of time for the show, only to find someone sitting in our seats!

Well, it turns out that Russet made a minor mistake on our tickets: they were for Sunday, not Saturday.

She was beating herself up pretty bad for it; apparently when she booked them online she had to go through the web site a second time and must have made a mistake on the date selection. The problem was that she had to work Sunday night, and it wasn't practical to come back or spend the night and see the show and get back home in time. Fortunately the guy in the box office found two seats for the 8pm showing that were four seats apart, so we got seats for Saturday's 8pm showing.

It wasn't a huge deal, it gave us time to raid Trader Joe's and do some other plundering before the show, instead of cramming in everything after the show. But Russ was still majorly bummed. Oddly, one of the things that I have not done in my life is gone to hang out in a university's book store, and as it happened, it was practically next door to the theatre. Russ humored me, and in we went. She quickly found a book to look at and sat down in a Comfy Chair. Me, I wandered off to the art/drawing section, and much to my surprise, I found....

The recently released picture book of Japanese Love Hotels!

I took it back to Russ and we flipped through it, laughing at many things, bewildered at others. It had very good photography, but it had a very interesting section: reader response cards. Apparently one or more of these hotels have some interesting comment cards that have two 'people' outlines, along with boxes to fill in your measurements and to describe your genitalia. It had spaces to fill in how many times you'd been to love hotels, what your favorite position was, how you met your partner, etc. One thing that I found a little perplexing was the space for blood type, I have heard that the Japanese have a thing about blood type, though I don't know why.

It was pretty funny looking at the drawings that people customized the heads with. Frequently they were anime exaggerations that were pretty funny.

Anyway, I definitely recommend looking at this book: it's funny stuff, and it served to break Russet's mood.


With several hours to kill, we went off and plundered Trader Joe's. There's only one in Albuquerque (and one in Santa Fe), though at least a couple more are planned. This one was doing huge business, but that was apparently the norm for this store on the weekend. Our cashier said she comes back to work to shop, rather than waiting an hour to wade through the store and check out.

We also found a Chinese restaurant recommended by a co-worker called Ko Palace. It's been quite a while since I've had Chinese food that I would rate as pretty good, and this stuff was very good. The crab wontons were excellent and I loved my orange beef and chicken fried rice. Usually I have leftovers when I order this, not this time. Russet's sesame chicken was also good, but the pot stickers were a little disappointing. The dipping sauce was excellent, but the pot stickers themselves were lacking.

Then it was off to a bookstore for our final time-kill prior to the 8pm show. A fair amount of plunder and my cold manifestation swinging into full, I got myself a hot chai and that made my throat feel considerably better.


Back at the university, we were there before the four people who would be between our seats. So we're sitting and talking, eventually the four arrived and they had no problem shifting one position so that we were together.

The play itself is lots of fun. Mamma Mia! is a musical based on a story woven out of music by Abba. Some of the songs were modified to to fit the story, but nothing major was changed. The whole score was quite ably performed by seven musicians: four keyboards, two guitars, and a percussionist.

So, yes: I'm outting myself as an Abba fan. They were a huge thing when I was young: high energy music (even if it was bubblegum pop), two very cute lead singers, etc. But I don't own any Abba music CDs with the possible exception of a mini disc of four covers by Erasure, which could actually be worse.

I saw Mamma Mia! in Tempe at Gammage, excellent performance. They've made a couple of changes to the story, one of which I decidedly do not agree with, but they had three or four last minute cast substitutions, so maybe they restructured a couple of songs to accomodate that.


Anyway, lots of fun! Russet had a good time as did I. It was sort of a belated Christmas present and definitely a good one. Afterwards we hit Village Inn for a nosh before starting the 4 1/2 hour drive home, during which I slept while Russet drove and listened to her laptop read SG:A fic to her.