Me and Harlan's favorite neighborhood joint is a sushi place a few blocks down the road from us. It's kind of random that we chose it as there's nothing particularly exciting or great about it, we just kind of started going there and going there and soon enough it became a weekly thing, something that for a long time we did every Sunday. The place has a lot of those crazy sushi rolls, including one which is baked in a toaster and comes out in aluminum foil, and we really got into the rolls. Plus, it's kind of cute in a fake-Japanese kind of way.

Anyways, we've been going there pretty much since we've moved to the Outer Richmond and they really know us now, particularly one of the waitresses, whom I guessing is the daughter of the owner. She knows us well enough that she knows most of what we want before we order and knows exactly how we like it done (we want the sushi rolls to come out all at the same time and we like forks for the baked sushi as it's too hard to grab when it's heated up). A couple of times, we were seated away from her assigned tables and she took our order anyways because she thought it would be easier that way.

The problem we're having is that for the past few months, she's been bringing us free ice cream when we're done despite the fact we've never ordered ice cream there nor do we really want the ice cream. Not that we don't like ice cream (who doesn't, especially green tea ice cream with chocolate syrup), it's just that we don't really want it. But how do we tell her that we don't want it? How does one politely go about asking for free food not to be sent our way, especially when the person giving you the food isn't very good at English? We've also realized that she's probably feeling the same way, that now that she's given us ice cream a few times, she's stuck in giving us the ice cream all the time because how could she suddenly not give it to us without thinking that she'll piss us off to the point we won't be back.

And so, every week, we eat our ice cream.

This brings up a place that we used to eat in Noe Valley. The food was pretty good and the place was really cute but the husband and wife who owned the place (the husband cooked, the wife was the waitress) we're really, really friendly. Too friendly. Often, we just wanted to have a nice, mellow dinner but we're suddenly dragged into 10-15 minute conversations with the husband and wife despite the fact the last thing we wanted to do was talk to anybody. Even worse, the husband would often come down to talk to us while we were eating. The two of them were really, really sweet and often did special things for us, but we stopped going there because we didn't like having to deal with constantly being forced into conversations. And, yes, we're awful people for being like that. And, yes, we feel totally guilty that the place closed down and we partially blame ourselves.

Still, one benefit of being well known at the sushi place is that the people who work there speak so little English that we'll never have to deal with them trying to talk to us while we're eating.