Been busy with moving. I'm still tired from all the packing, carrying the boxes up and down the stairs, and most of all, deciding what to throw away and what to take along. It's amazing how much stuff we accumulate as we live our lives. Most of them aren't that essential--not that I believe in a life that's made up of only the bare necessity--but it is so hard to throw them away. Though between Patrick and me I'm the Acting Minister of Toss-It-Out, it does give me some pang of guilt to hear the "thud" of something still functioning hitting the stinking bottom of the dumpster. I've known, all along, that the lesson is not to buy stuff that I don't absolutely love and/or absolutely need, but they still seem to find ways to infiltrate my life. Grrr....

So, we used the weekend to pack and move most of the non-furniture, non-essentials to the new apartment, where the current tenant let us fill up one of her unused rooms with our u-haul boxes. I'd been planning to hold on to my kitchen stuff till the last moment in the current apartment, but early on Sunday I was hit by an urge to be done with them, and ended up packing and moving most of them. My kitchen looks very white now--no more colorful condiment bottles and sundry sacks on the shelf, no take-out menus on the fridge door, no cooking utensils on the windowsill. All the walls, shelves and countertops are exposed, and white. It's so white that it feels like a hospital room, indeed.

Till we unpack the kitchen stuff in the new apartment, we'll survive on take-out food and coffee (I'm keeping the coffee maker till the last minute in this apartment; it's our life line). For lunch, I drove out to Hong Kong Buffet, a Chinese place on Lincoln Ave., figuring that it'd be a hassle-free meal. I filled up the styloform conatiner with noodles; stir-fried veggies and meats; and a peach-shaped steamed bun (my favorite); and paid a mere $3.76 for its weight. I came home delighted.

What I soon discovered should have been obvious: there was no cultery to eat the food with. I'd packed all the chopsticks, forks and knives. Even the plastic ones we'd saved from other take-outs had been packed away. Loathing my own thoroughness, I looked around the empty kitchen and the similarly (but slightly less) empty computer room. Nothing. Just when I started to consider the pros and cons of eating the General Tso's Chicken with my bare hands (or the alternative was to use the Dunkin Donuts' straw), I remembered last night's dinner. I recalled, specifically, a plastic fork. Carelessly thrown onto a bag of just-out-of-the-fryer French fries, the fork had warped in the middle, forming a rugged half circle. A warped fork is better than a straw or bare hands, when it comes to eating utensils, so I dug into the grease-spattered brown bag from last night (which was, shamefully yet conveniently, still sitting on the table). Sure enough, the fork was still there, and my lunch and my dignity as a civilized eater were both saved.

So, the lesson is, if you can't learn the first one about not buying stuff you won't need, to say "yes" to the crutial question at the take-out counter: "Do you need a fork?"

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Hong Kong Buffet
6249 N. McKormick Rd., Chicago, IL
773.649.0888
The food was good, a standard Chinese-buffet fare. Although some Yelpers absolutely hate this place to the marrow ("yucky" "msg" "filthy" "greasy" "peking duck resembles roadkill" "no wonder they make you pay before you enter the restaurant" etc.), I didn't find it any more horrific than any other Chinese buffet. Maybe my standard for Chinese buffet is lower than it should be, but hey, when I'm paying under $4 for a full box of meats and veggies, I'm not gonna complain.