Romanian Lettuce

Sometimes I forget that I live in a place where people know food. This past weekend we went up to South Bend/Mishawaka in order to celebrate our 6th anniversary, as well as reconnect with some friends. Anyhow, while we were at a restaurant, one of our friends asked the restaurant owner (who happened to have stopped by our table) whether one of the salads was made with Romaine or Iceberg lettuce. The owner responded saying, "Romanian lettuce? Nope. The lettuce is American." At first I thought the owner was making a joke, then I realized, he wasn't. My friend asked a couple more times about the lettuce, thinking that he was just being coy. What was funny was that you could tell that the owner had no idea why my friend cared so much about where the lettuce came from...

Our anniversary was quite nice. We washed/waxed our car and went to a small Italian restaurant in Mishawaka with some other friends. It is cliche, but time does move along so quickly. Here's us after six years of marriage...

One other funny story. I'm currently teaching an introduction to Linguistics course at IU, and yesterday one of my students said something that made me realize the age/experience distance between me and them. At one point, we were discussing the syntactic properties of the sentence "Jack and Jill ran up the bill", when I happened to mention that one of my former roommates routinely had a $150-$200 phone bill from talking to his girlfriend at another school. One of my students raised her hand and asked, "Didn't your roommate have a cell phone?" A second student immediately chimed in, "What year were you in school anyway?" It's amazing what has changed in just 8 years.