Craftacular Shogun

I hate to get the post off to a boring start (not to mention the blog as a whole—this does not really bode well for future readership), but my weekend was pretty uneventful. My folks were in town on Sunday so I did a little Christmas shopping with them. I hadn’t been at the Gateway mall since they finished remodeling it, and I was really surprised how much it’s changed. I was sort of expecting the stores where the food court used to be, but the massive new food court area really got me. What was that area before? Just a parking lot? I also wonder if the carousel is going to be a permanent addition. I’m not sure if it’s cool or extremely tacky, but I’m leaning towards tacky. Here’s an exhaustive list of all the places I have seen a carousel before:

1. Amusement parks
2. County fairs
3. A mall

Am I the only one who thinks it seems a little random? There were quite a few kids on it, so maybe they have the market pegged after all. But then again, that could be due to the holiday season shopper density.

Later I convinced my parents that we should go to Shogun. I had never been there before, and of course that meant they hadn’t either. It was pretty fun, as anyone who’s been to a teppanyaki-style restaurant can attest, and the food was good, albeit pricey. But the interesting thing of the evening for me was the conversation with the two guys next to us.

These guys worked on a TV crew shooting segments for some craft show on the Home & Garden network. We started out politely asking a bit about the different crafts they’d seen and stuff like that, but it eventually became apparent that since they were just part of a production company hired out to act as the crew, they didn’t actually give a rat’s ass about crafts at all. After that it was pretty funny to hear their workplace tales about the wide range of crafty folks they’d encountered. HGTV has some very conservative policies. You cannot say “toilet paper,” and plants do not die; they whither. Apparently they were once shooting a close-up of a woman making whatever craft she did, and suddenly noticed that the lines on her wrist where she had previously cut herself were visible in the shot. They panned off of that pretty quickly.

Unfortunately, these gentlemen obviously didn’t have anywhere else to be, for the conversation went on far longer than it should have. The Shogun staff was trying to clean up around us when we finally managed our way from the table. And that was my weekend.