Strange how you can have two very different experiences at two not-all-that-dissimilar chain restaurants. We had dinner at Macaroni Grill on Thursday night, and that was fine. The food was great, and although the restaurant was somewhat crowded, all we had to contend with was a loud cell-phone chatterer at a table behind us (and an annoying conversation at the table next to us about Biblical “textual deconstructionism,” whatever that means). Tonight we had dinner at nearby Bennigan’s, where an ill-behaved toddler at the table across from us whined loudly through the second half of the meal and where an indescribably boorish jerk stopped to jawbone a busboy and stood with his Neanderthal rear end not five inches from my face. Should I have made a scene? I felt like it, but where would it have gotten me? Oh, well, at least our server was the height of solicitousness.

Pickerel Lake is hardly a unique appellation. Turns out there’s at least 22 other lakes in Michigan with exactly the same name.

We drove past campus today and saw undergrads dutifully trundling their belongings out to sidewalks and cars, along with a few half-hearted, exhausted lawn parties sputtering along and a ton of “For Rent” signs all the way from the center of campus out to past Zeeb Road as we drove out to Dexter-Huron Metro Park for another beagle excursion (this one much shorter than the epic Pickerel Lake trek last weekend, because we were all kind of groggy and tired, including our friend David, who’s been visiting this week from San Francisco).

Wow. It’s kind of astonishing, actually, having been in the Academic Time-Space Continuum for (seemingly) so long and all of a sudden being dumped back unceremoniously into everyday existence. It’s hard to believe, but the end of the year is here (if you can call eight months a year). Now if I can just get this last paper written …..

Maybe we didn’t give it enough of a chance, but I was kind of underwhelmed by the Ann Arbor Book Festival today. (It fills a portion of North University for a couple of days every year around this time.) There were a sizable number of people there, but nowhere near as many as I expected, and nobody seemed thrilled to be there; there was a lot of milling, very little excitement.

Of course, if you’ve seen one book fair, you’ve seen them all, I suppose. They’re mostly booths full of T-shirts and merchandising opportunities (as opposed to books). But is there some magic that this fair has that we were not plugged into? Or is this another case of the notorious Ann Arbor über-hype at work? I don’t know.

Update: Bentley points out that this is actually the first time the Book Festival (as an outdoor, pavilion-type event) has been held. The Ann Arbor Antiquarian Book Fair (which is held in Michigan Union on Sunday) is actually the event that’s been around for 26 years. This would explain much. Thanks for the clarification.