malvasia bianca

We went to see The Gay Divorcee on Wednesday. (The Stanford Theatre is showing a bunch of Fred Astair / Ginger Rogers movies over the next couple of months.) I’d forgotten that old movies are in a 4:3 aspect ratio, or something close to that – not nearly as horizontal as modern movies. A couple of nice songs and some nice dancing, but I was hoping for more. And the Continental sequence really was over the top – not as bad as, say, a dream sequence from a Gene Kelly movie, but still…

We’re going table-shopping this weekend – now that there are three of us and we have friends with kids, our little round table just isn’t quite up to the chore. We looked at various options today, and found four reasonable options, but all had their flaws – not having a leaf, being more expensive than we wanted, needing a bit more care than is ideal, or in a style that didn’t thrill one of us. I’m sure we’ll buy one of them, but I’m still not sure which. I am glad that we finally got around to going to my namesake store, Carlton Arts and Design in downtown Mountain View – I’ve walked past it dozens of times without going in, not being very interested in the stuff in front (large porcelain vases), but there’s some pretty neat stuff in there. Miranda loved all the chests with their little drawers, there was a very simple vase that I liked a lot, if I were a sake drinker at home I would certainly buy one of their sake sets, and there were some quite nice tables. On the expensive side, but they were better constructed than the others we were considering, so we may well end up getting one of them.