Tibetan tea on a flower tray

I had a belated birthday dinner this evening, at the Wild Yak, the Tibetan place in Smith St, which was rather fun. (My birthday dinners are always belated ones, as nothing's ever open on the 7th of January.) Since there were some 14 people or so in attendance, we had the banquet option, in which lots of small plates of stuff were brought out, from which people took serves. There weren't enough people to go around for the food, it seems, or perhaps their portions are rather generous; in any case, the food was very nice. Tibetan salted butter tea, however, tastes exactly the way it sounds, which is to say rather salty and oily. If you're bracing for the cold Himalayan winter, it's probably a good thing; otherwise it's not really my proverbial cup of. Much good conversation was had by all.

I got a good crop of presents too; from cyflea, I got a DVD about Wesley Willis ("The Daddy of Rock'N'Roll"); strangehours got me a book titled Creative Exposure Control, about achieving artistic effects in photography (which is mostly film-oriented, though a lot of it is applicable to digital photography as well; I'm probably going to get a lot out of it). Sabrina gave me a small, thick, square book titled the Great Beer Guide, by an Englishman named Michael Jackson. Andy gave me Architecture In Helsinki's Kindling EP. Annie gave me two carnivorous plants; a venus flytrap and an European wasp eater. Monika (who couldn't make it, but whom I met earlier today) gave me a box set of six European beers. And b0rken gave me a "Thought Screen Cap", a baseball cap lined with something looking like duct-taped mylar, claimed to block alien mind control.