Beowabbit

Yesterday's plusses and minusses

beowabbit@livejournal.com — Tue, 06 May 2008 15:32:05 GMT

Yesterday in list form:
+: cathijosephine locked herself out of the house. This is a plus because she came over to get the spare key I have, woke me up early, and took me out to IHOP for breakfast to thank me, which means I got to see her unexpectedly, I got a free eggs-and-bacon-and-pancakes brunch, and I got to work on time.
+: Met devoken for dinner. Was great to catch up with her. I got to tell her all about plumtreeblossom’s and my New York trip.
+: In conjunction with the preceding, I discovered how easy it is to walk from work to Coolidge Corner. This will be useful.
±: Because I got in to work at an unexpectedly reasonable time, and devoken works till 9, I had a very long day at work. That would have made me happy if I’d been more focussed for it.
-: I have a cold. Over the course of yesterday it became clear that it's a real cold rather than just allergies or dry air. This morning it included a bad sore throat, but that got better when I was up and around. Oh, well. Maybe I caught it on the bus.

More New York

beowabbit@livejournal.com — Tue, 06 May 2008 12:38:42 GMT

On Saturday, plumtreeblossom and I went to the American Museum of Natural History, one of my favourite places. sexykneesocks, who happened to be in town as well, met us there, and it was great catching up with her. I took lots of photos, which I will try to get posted at some point.

plumtreeblossom and I tried to go next door to the Rose Space Center, but we got there close enough to closing that we couldn't see a show, so we went back to the AMNH for another half hour or so.

After that, we met nex0s and midnightstation for dinner nearby, and had a fabulous time. I'd seen nex0s in Boston a few months ago, but I hadn't seen midnightstation in far too long.

On Sunday, we got together at Fred's, a dog-themed restaurant I've posted about before, for brunch with beetiger, eisa, and fairyleathrdady, who surprised us by paying for brunch. Lovely seeing all of them, and I'm so glad beetiger drove in to meet us.

Then we made our way back to Chinatown to take the Fung Wah back to Boston and had a lovely snuggly trip back with lots of nice conversation.

Y'all should also go read plumtreeblossom's post about the weekend here, since I'm posting this in a hurry and I'm certainly missing stuff.

Congratulations, Dreaming

beowabbit@livejournal.com — Sun, 04 May 2008 02:10:03 GMT

Congratulations to (non-LJ-endowed) Dreaming, who got his nursing degree today! He sure has worked hard for it.

(And thanks to surrealestate for calling my attention to this delightful occasion.)

Yay NYC!

beowabbit@livejournal.com — Sat, 03 May 2008 02:55:53 GMT

plumtreeblossom and I are here in New York. Our hotel (which we got on Priceline) is excellent. We're staying at Gild Hall (NB spelling) in the Financial District. The room is just really pleasant and comfy, and the staff are friendly and relaxed and very helpful. It was a really good deal.

Our bus ride down was nice (despite me running very late and almost making us miss the bus). The bus wasn't full, and it was didn't smell bad, and it got us here in very good time, so it was a pretty good Fung Wah experience.

(I basically skimmed LJ on the bus because my net connectivity wasn't very good, by the way, so feel free to call my attention to anything you particularly want me to see.)

We had a very good dinner (actually it was breakfast for me since I hadn't managed to get food before getting to the station in Boston, and the bus didn't stop on the way) at a Sichuan place right next to the bus drop-off. I had particularly good General Tso's and dun dun noodles, and our fried pork dumplings were quite possibly the best I've had; I usually like them steamed but I'm glad plumtreeblossom wanted them fried.

Then we made our way to the hotel, which took a bit of wandering around because Google Maps had a confused idea of the street numbers, and checked in and unloaded. On our way from the subway to the hotel we had discovered that there's a small branch of the Strand in the neighbourhood, so we spent a couple hours there. (I picked up a book on the history of the English language, I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang, on which the nearly eponymous movie is based, and a book about the prehistoric origins of language, as well as a few post cards. We both got Strand messenger bags to carry our haul away in.

Then we stopped in at an Irish pub around the corner from the hotel. We were a bit underdressed; I wasn't even wearing a tie. The place was very nice, with very traditional décor, and the bartender was friendly, but things shut down very early. At 9 when we got there, there were three or four other clumps of people; by 10 when we left there was only one, and the staff was cleaning tables and putting stuff away. At 10pm on a Friday night. We felt like we were back in Boston! I guess the place caters to the after-work crowd.

(After close to twenty years in Boston, it feels weird to be someplace where people are cheering the Yankees.)

Anyway, delightful trip so far!

Wow!

beowabbit@livejournal.com — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 03:37:12 GMT

Wow! I just saw Eddie Izzard! With my two favourite people in the world! And he was right there and everything, just thirty-two million billion yards away on the stage, and if I squinted I could see his facial expressions! And it was awesome and wonderful!

I also just opened a kitchen cabinet door and had a shot glass fall out into the sink and hit a mug there and smash into lots of little pieces, but if a flying splinter had nicked my jugular and I were lying on my kitchen floor slowly bleeding to death, I’d still be happy, because I just saw Eddie Izzard.

(Eddie, baby, if you don’t remember where to send the check, my address is linked from my userinfo.)

Another lovely weekend, with a side of bees and jam

beowabbit@livejournal.com — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 14:41:07 GMT

Another lovely weekend with plumtreeblossom. On Saturday we went to a sheepshearing festival¹ in Waltham with teratomarty and trouble4hire (big thanks to them for posting about it!) and had a lovely time. It was great hanging out with them, and great doing country-fair things within easy reach of Boston. (I drove, but the festival venue is bus-accessible.) While there, we bumped into mrpet and, lady_anemone. Anyway, after the festival, which was huge amounts of fun, the six of us wandered Moody Street and then had yummy tapas for dinner before plumtreeblossom and I went back to my house, where we watched the first two-thirds of Lust, Caution.

On Sunday, we went to a Poly Boston dim sum organized by a wonderful person whose LJ name, if he has one, I don't know. We had a wonderful, wonderful time. Thanks so much to the organizer!

Last night was the monthly Poly Boston dinner at Bertucci's (the first one in a while plumtreeblossom's been able to make it to, because of theater commitments), and tonight plumtreeblossom, cathijosephine, and I get to go see Eddie Izzard perform! Life is incredibly full and fun.

And this coming weekend plumtreeblossom and I are finally making a trip to New York City.

Whee!

¹ Sadly, the venue has already taken down the web page about it. If you are luckier than usual, I will eventually get around to posting some pictures, though. Because, you know, you all appreciated the Topsfield Fair pictures and the pictures of our trip to DC to meet bcat1 and spacechicken so much.²
² That I haven’t posted yet. Those pictures.

aq.org update

beowabbit@livejournal.com — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 04:48:42 GMT

Update on my server upgrade at http://community.livejournal.com/aq_net/14404.html. Short version: mail is mostly back up, the www.aq.org web site itself is back up but not yet other sites hosted on the machine, and I’m going to collapse for a few hours.

Urgent for aq.org users

beowabbit@livejournal.com — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 00:23:18 GMT

URGENT: If you have an aq.org email address and read your mail on aq.org via a POP or IMAP client (e.g., Thunderbird, Outlook Express, Mozilla Mail, as opposed to connecting to aq.org via SSH and running a command-line mail program, please call me immediately if you can. I’m in the middle of the server upgrade and it's going to cause some problems with your saved mail, and I'd like to talk to you about it before I throw the switch.

If you can’t, you’re probably going to need my help to get at your saved mail folders. (Your inbox should show up OK, but unfortunately read messages are probably going to be reset and show up as unread again.)

I believe the only people who read their mail this way are hrafn and sionnagh, but I’m not completely sure. This definitely doesn’t affect you if you just forward your aq.org email someplace else, and read it on GMail or someplace like that.

aq.org downtime Sunday afternoon/evening

beowabbit@livejournal.com — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 00:44:23 GMT

Howdy. I will be upgrading aq.org and moving it to new hardware Sunday afternoon and evening. This means that delivery to email addresses hosted there (including mine) and web sites hosted there will be down for that period.

This does NOT affect polyboston.org or mailing lists on lists.aq.org, since those are on a separate machine.

Happy birthday mizarchivist!

beowabbit@livejournal.com — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 12:33:24 GMT

Happy birthday mizarchivist! I hope you have a fabulous birthday!

aq.org email flaky

beowabbit@livejournal.com — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 22:08:16 GMT

aq.org is the current target of a huge storm of backscatter spam (i.e., bounces of spam allegedly, but not actually, sent from aq.org), which is bringing the email system to its knees. I've already had to reboot the machine once and do a lot of work diagnosing things. Unfortunately, I’m going to be away from a keyboard for a few hours, and it's possible that the machine (or email on the machine) may go down in the interim.

I’ll do my best to take care of things when I get back home. It’s possible, I’m afraid, that the quickest route to getting it up and running reliably long-term may be to reinstall it on new hardware, so I may be up all night tonight. :-/ Hope not.

[EDIT: After the reboot and a lot of manual unclogging of the tubes, aq.org seems to be doing OK. I still need to prioritize upgrading it.]

I am a happy ’wabbit!

beowabbit@livejournal.com — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 21:16:49 GMT

So a few months ago I read Stiff: The Curious History of Human Cadavers, by the smart, funny, and irreverent Mary Roach. I loved it.

Today, on my way home from dropping plumtreeblossom off at her house, I overheard on NPR that Mary Roach had a new book out about the science of sex. It’s called Bonk.

You can bet I placed an order as soon as I got home.

What plumtreeblossom and I do on our dates

beowabbit@livejournal.com — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 21:05:56 GMT

So on Saturday plumtreeblossom and I went to Worcester for a Barack Obama rally [warning: bacground audio]. The campaign was encouraging local groups to have simultaneous rallies nationwide on that day, and plumtreeblossom found this one. (Boston didn’t have any when she first looked, although there were signs that one might get organized last-minute.) And of course she asked me if I wanted to go, and of course I said yes.

Because I was driving, we got there very late (and had to resort to old, 20th-century technology by stopping and buying a map), but we got there. It was fairly small but lots of fun and totally worthwhile. And there was a bagpiper! That was quite a surprise. We had a great time meeting people and talking and listening to the speakers and the programming, and we came back with Obama swag.

I ended up taking a bunch of pictures (and plumtreeblossom took a couple of me), and they’re up on my Flickr set of the event.

My weekend

beowabbit@livejournal.com — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 03:20:59 GMT

Well, I had a bad cold towards the end of last week, and I took Friday off from work (and slept for most of it, which was glorious). But I was better by Saturday (sleeping late Saturday as well), and Saturday night I went to see plumtreeblossom and many other wonderful people at the closing night of Much Ado About Nothing at Theatre@First. The performance was great (as opening night had been), and a lovely bonus was bumping into minerva42 and getting to catch up a bit. (See my earlier post for more about the performance.)

Afterwards, I helped strike, which was lots of fun but took longer than I had expected (given the extremely minimal set) because Theatre@First needed to clear everything out of the prop closet so the church could do some remodelling. I enjoy doing stuff like that where I can just look around and find some mindless task that somebody else will have to do if I don’t do it. I think I wouldn’t enjoy it nearly as much if I were one of the people trying to keep track of all the tasks, mindless and difficult, and making sure they all get done efficiently in the proper order by the proper people.

And after strike, I joined plumtreeblossom at the wonderful cast party at heliopsis’ house. It was a great party with yummy food and munchies and delightful people. Did I mention it was at heliopsis’ house? It was at heliopsis’ house. This is of note because ① heliopsis is a total sweetheart and ② a gracious and welcoming host who ③ throws a kickass party and his house is gorgeous and just perfectly laid out for that sort of party. (I understand that surrealestate sold it to him. Way to go, surrealestate! You need to sell houses to more people whose parties I go to!) He’s also ④ a spectacular cook, by the way.

At some point during the party, heliopsis put on the Kenneth Branagh version of Much Ado (which I had watched with plumtreeblossom a few weeks ago) and we all sat around and watched and compared performances. We had to stay through plumtreeblossom’s lines, of course, but she and I were pretty tired by this point, and by the time we said our goodbyes and made our way to her place (just a few blocks away) and got ready for bed it was something like 3:00am. Whee!

We slept late (for plumtreeblossom, not really for me), and Sunday morning we hustled out of the house and got on the road to try to find the Gideon Freudmann concert in Vermont. Now, I had spaced on the fact that we were doing that until Saturday afternoon (I blame several days of a cold), and had scrambled to find and print out directions when I was leaving for the show Saturday night, and, long story short, I was not clear on the directions, I did not have my GPS with me, and I knew we were cutting it close on the timing even if everything went perfectly. Only everything didn’t go perfectly; the Google Maps directions I had printed out had some turns (or forks) onto streets which did not have street signs, and in at least one case probably looked more like a long driveway than a street (unless I really wasn’t in even approximately the right place to start with). So anyway, there was much driving back and forth trying to figure out where our turn was, and after about 40min of this I decided even if we got back on track the concert would be mostly over by the time we got there, so we turned around and looked for food.

We drove around for a while in White River Junction looking in vain for something that was both more upscale than a slice of pizza and open at 7pm on a Sunday, but plumtreeblossom found a Chinese buffet just as we were getting back on the highway, and we had a very satisfying meal there.

Only after the meal I got on the wrong highway. And I didn’t notice I was on 91 instead of [EDIT: 89] until we were almost to Northampton, which added at least an hour, maybe an hour and a half to our return trip. plumtreeblossom was very sweet about it, but remember that we’d been up till 3:00am the previous night — she was very tired and wanted to be home in bed. I felt bad about that. But most of the drive was delightful and sunny and I got to spend almost the entire day with my hand on her knee, so as far as I am concerned it was a win.

Cellist/songwriter Gideon Freudmann

beowabbit@livejournal.com — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 03:52:03 GMT

Next Sunday plumtreeblossom and I are making a long road-trip up to Lincoln, Vermont, to hear a concert by Gideon Freudmann (warning: unobtrusive background music), a whimsical electric cellist that minerva42 and underwatercolor introduced me to on a visit a while back. (Big thanks to them for that!) He also has a bunch of concerts in Connecticut on this visit out east (and some private concerts in schools in the Boston area, even) and one in Western Mass, but this was the only one I’m sure I can make it to, and it’s a great excuse for a drive.

I mention this in case any of my more northerly friends might want to go (it’s almost a four-hour drive from Boston) or in case I can hook any of you on Gideon Freudmann’s music. (Alas, I can’t give anybody a ride; the drive is going to be date-time.)

Here’s his calendar of upcoming gigs.

Shakespeare and lots of plumtreeblossom

beowabbit@livejournal.com — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 03:30:35 GMT

On Wednesday there was another in the nifty new series of monthly davis_square gatherings that anomie666 has been organizing. I got to see surrealestate, which is always delightful, and meet some nice new people, but plumtreeblossom couldn’t make it due to rehearsal. But I did get to see her afterwards, so we had a nice little mini-date in the middle of the week.

I think it was Thursday that cathijosephine and I went out for Mexican food and margaritas in Quincy, and we had a great time and got to do some catching up.

Friday I (and cathijosephine) went to see plumtreeblossom and lots and lots of our other friends in Theatre@First’s performance of Much Ado About Nothing. It was great! I later heard somebody who’s been watching Theatre@First’s performances since they started say that this was their best performance, and I can believe it. It was done more-or-less in the round, with no stage (so the actors or at or just below the level of the audience), and with a very very minimal set and costuming. When plumtreeblossom described it to me before I saw it I confess I was a bit dubious, but wow, it really worked. All the performances were fine, most of them were good, and some of them were really good. The play flowed well, the comedic timing was good, the blocking was great (and funny), the lines were clear and delivered in a way that made the Elizabethan language very easy to follow, and I just had a great time, and so did the rest of the audience. I’m looking forward to going back on [EDIT:] closing night on Saturday, and if you get a chance (those of you who are local) and you like Shakespeare’s comedies, you should try to see one of their remaining performances.

After the show I had another lovely date with my favourite character actor. (plumtreeblossom played one of the watchmen, in drag, and did a great job! She didn’t have many lines, but she had some pretty awesome body language. I also have to mention that I had a hard time believing the person playing one of the bad guys was actually dietrich, and I kept looking at the program and trying to figure out what other character that could be!) We had a great time and stayed up far, far too late.

Sunday morning we went out for yummy brunch at Johnny D’s with a bunch of the cast and crew — yummy but slow; they were very crowded — and had a delightful time. I walked back to the church where plumtreeblossom had her call for the Sunday matinée, and as a delightful bonus bumped into docorion and mud_puppy, whom I hadn’t seen in far too long.

I had a not as productive as planned but still pretty good Sunday evening (got some laundry done, at least).

Today after work I went over to see cathijosephine and bring her some snacks, because she wasn’t feeling well. Got to overhear half of a phone call with the delightful and dearly missed ragingamazon, and got lots of kitty snuggles with Chickenfinger, who has turned into the sweetest little mellow kitty. (Poor dear used to live with two huge and playful dogs, and it’s taken her a while to recover.)

And now I’m at home and I get to go to sleep. Yay!

Posted using TxtLJ

beowabbit@livejournal.com — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 17:07:29 GMT

Yay! Pretty violinists playing pretty music on the T platform while adorable toddlers listen raptly. A nice coda to a lovely date with my sweetie-love.

Happy birthday, chienne_folle!

beowabbit@livejournal.com — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 14:19:29 GMT

Happy birthday to chienne_folle! You’re a wonderful friend, a delightful and interesting conversationalist, and an all-round marvellous person, and I hope you’re having an excellent birthday.

Wikihistory

beowabbit@livejournal.com — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 21:06:13 GMT

Thanks to larksdream for pointing me at Wikihistory, a very very short story by Desmond Warzel.

Productive day

beowabbit@livejournal.com — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 01:29:25 GMT

I’ve had a spectacularly productive day, involving fixing my porch swing (which the store assembled wrong), nailing back up my rain gutter, getting a lot of progress made on cleaning my office¹, cleaning some windows, going shopping for house stuff, getting some piles of mail under control, and doing a little bit of tidying and throwing out junk in the basement.

You’d almost think civilized people lived here.

¹ My office is not clean by any means, but it’s not oppressive to be in any more. That’s kind of impressive, since it was oppressive to be in before I dumped a sizable fraction of the mess I cleared out of the kitchen and the living room in it on Thursday.

Participating in “strike”

beowabbit@livejournal.com — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 21:42:15 GMT

I’d been on the fence about whether to participate in the LiveJournal content strike, but after reading this post about it by sunspiral, I will be participating. Since I don’t post every day anyway, you wouldn’t know unless I told you, so I’m telling you.

I’m unhappy with a lot of changes at LiveJournal (slowly snowballing through each successive sale of the company), but since the value of LiveJournal is the community it creates and provides it’s very hard to up stakes and go someplace else — that would only work if everybody I cared about upped stakes and went to the same someplace else. But at least I can be part of a little blip in the usage stats, which will help the company (and its competitors) figure out what proportion of the user base (and the content provider base) is content and what proportion is not, and if they are good businesspeople that will drive their decisions about policy. Many of the changes are clearly made because SUP hope they will make more money this way. They may well be right, but I’m not convinced, and maybe the “strike” will give them more accurate data to help make that determination.

(Apologies to all of you who don’t follow the minutiae of LJ politics. Feel free to ask questions, which I will answer after midnight GMT tomorrow, 8pm EST.)

Yay

beowabbit@livejournal.com — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 03:35:08 GMT

Having a lovely date with plumtreeblossom, who’s out having a smoke. First I fixed her intarwebs, then we had yummy Mexican food in Quincy, and we just finished watching French Twist (and incidentally consuming a somewhat surprising quantity of alcohol — I just bought that bottle!). Life is good.

And tomorrow’s yummy brunch at Doyle’s! Life continues to be good!

Dil Se

beowabbit@livejournal.com — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 03:18:12 GMT

So I just watched Dil Se (warning: spoilers in link) with darxus and cathijosephine. It has to be the weirdest and most disturbing Bollywood movie I’ve seen so far. I liked the latter part, when all the brutality was the focus of the film and no longer just background for a typical fluffy Bollywood romance, better than the former part.

Basically, it was half Bollywood musical and half Shakespearean tragedy. I’m glad I saw it, but I wouldn’t exactly say I enjoyed it.

The company (two humans and a cute cute kitty!) and food (kind of a cross between pancakes with a side of ham and an omelette) were excellent, though.

Wonderful weekend

beowabbit@livejournal.com — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 00:15:23 GMT

Friday night and yesterday morning, I did more disassembling in my old bedroom. Slowly, slowly making progress. (I’m moved upstairs, but lots of my stuff is still downstairs.)

Yesterday evening, I picked up plumtreeblossom from the T and we both went grocery shopping. She loves coming out to the huge suburban grocery stores. We each got a huge heaping cartful. (Oh, also yesterday morning I had cleared out the fridge so there’d be any place to put any of this.) Then, after dropping our shopping loads at my house, we went out to the Finnish steam baths a few blocks away and had a lovely blast of heat in the middle of the winter. After that, we went to the Firefly’s Barbeque (gratuitous Flash/audio warning!) in Quincy for dinner, which is becoming one of our favourite dinner venues.

(I tried one of their hot sauces. plumtreeblossom asked me how it was, and I said it was tasty, but pretty mild. She had a teensy taste to see, and disagreed amusingly. To me, it seemed milder than Tabasco, although more flavourful; to her, it seemed stronger than Tabasco.)

Then we came back here, and plumtreeblossom got to stay in my new bedroom for the first time.

This morning, we loaded up the car with plumtreeblossom’s groceries, and went out to the little hole-in-the-wall diner we like to go to for a yummy breakfast. plumtreeblossom needed leaf bags, and we went a bit out of our way to a Lowe’s. (I was debating going to the Home Depot nearby, but ① I don’t like their politics or their labour practices, and ② I had this notion that there might be some stuff at the Lowe’s I wanted, too.) This turned out to be an incredible impulse-purchase success; the Lowe’s had porch swings (with canopies) on sale. They had four different kinds out, one which unfolds into a bed, and a very small one. I bought the one that unfolds into a bed for my deck, so I’m going to have comfy seating (and, when the weather gets a lot warmer, maybe occasionally sleeping) out there! It’s getting delivered in a week. plumtreeblossom had somebody measure the little two-person one so she could check whether it would fit on her balcony. When I dropped her off this afternoon we measured the balcony, and it will, so she’s getting it, and she’ll have a nice covered place to sit out there and have her morning coffee and cigarette. What delightful discoveries!

Oh, and we did find leaf bags. :-)

On the way out of the Lowe’s, I had some weird visual stuff going on in one of my eyes that it later turns out was probably connected with my first ever migraine. It looked like a curved streak in the field of vision of my left eye had kaleidoscope-like flashing lights overlaid over it. The headache, which started to develop around the time the visual weirdness shut off (it started and stopped very very suddenly) was pretty mild and didn’t really bother me, although I did (about an hour later) end up taking some ibuprofen for it. If that’s what my migraines are going to be like; I won’t so much mind having them, but hopefully this was a one-off thing.

After I dropped plumtreeblossom off and came back home, I had the pleasant surprise of a phone call from cathijosephine’s father. He had called basically to say hi and see how I was doing and offer his sympathy over last month’s unpleasantness. That was nice!

So so far, it’s been a fabulous weekend. The rest of tonight is going to be about more house reorganizing (and maybe even cleaning and laundry).

Photographic evidence of happy feet.

beowabbit@livejournal.com — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 14:23:25 GMT

By request. Let me know if you want this lj-cut; I figured it was small enough that wasn’t necessary.