Remember when I said we were new to this whole car-buying thing? About 12 hours ago? That was borne out today when we went to the nearby Honda dealership and saw--duh!--they were closed on Sundays. Maybe this is SOP for dealerships, but it completely surprised us. I mean, sure, a car showroom needs to close sometime, but one would think both days of a weekend would be prime car-selling time, and a weekday would be a more profitable day to close. And car salespeople are all going to Hell anyway, so what do they need the Sabbath off for? In any case, a simple call or check on the website would have clued us in.



Anyway, we went down to Facets and saw Word Wars with the Gropys. We all enjoyed it a lot, but if you've read Word Freak by Stefan Fatsis (an acknowledged inspiration for the film, and interviewee), not much new ground is covered. A Scrabble game isn't going to have the inherent suspense that the Spelling Bee brought to Spellbound. Still, it's interesting to see these personalities from the book onscreen, and the filmmakers had the good sense to use two Minutemen songs.



After that we got some crazy-good deep dish at Pequod's, a little hole in the wall nearby. I'm not typically a deep-dish guy--it mostly ends up too gooey for me--but there are 3 or so places that do it great, and this is one. The movie and dinner ended up being just what the doctor ordered. After the wedding in Ely I was a bit wistful about my old crowd and the land o' lakes, thinking wouldn't it be cool to hang out with these people more, frequent the $2-beer bars in Nordeast with 'em, etc. I snapped out of most of that when I thought, look, half of them don't live in the Twin Cities any more, and the three in the Chicago area---including one two blocks away--you rarely make the time to see anyway, you putz. The rest of that wistfulness was driven away today by the return to two things here that I love and can't get elsewhere. The past few weeks I'd been busy and had forgotten about them. Obscure Movie + Killer Food. Why would I want to leave?