Pack Up All Your Cares and Woes, Head On Up To Tokyo

Sometime between now and Tuesday I need to find a recipe for Seafood Jambalaya and make enough to feed 40 people. Oh, and I vaguely recall volunteering to make mass quantities of gumbo and salad as well. Heh, heh.

Fortunately the book I was reading last night, which should have been a cookbook but was not, offered a new technique for dealing with worries: visualize a matchbox, slide it open, tuck your worries inside, and then slide it shut. Imagining a matchbox was a snap because I happened to snag several at the Ramen Museum just last month. Do I lead a serendipitous life or what?

With my worries safely nestled inside a JFK matchbox, I set off for the Tokyo Dome this morning with Kim, Sherri, and a fully charged cell phone which enabled us to hook up with Jane, Valerie, Hiroko, and Kasayo at the indigo exhibit where we watched an elderly gentleman swish fabric in a kettle of blue (presumably indigo) dye.

We bought bento box lunches -- mine, of course, was light on vegetables and heavy on dumplings and rice -- and then we admired the fabulous quilts and wandered through dozens of stalls where vendors were hawking fabric, notions, quilting kits, and scores of other items not remotely related to quilting.

Those vendors saw me coming. Once I solve the Jambalaya/Gumbo problem, and finish knitting the ribbed scarf Stanley started, and work my way through Ulysses, I will hand Matt the five quilt kits I lugged home from Tokyo today and see if I can bribe him into translating the directions into a language I can comprehend.

Let's hope he won't have left for college by then. Hey! That would be a perfect worry for the Che Guevara matchbox!