The good news: Thanks both to time and to the meds plumtreeblossom brought over, I’m doing much better. If you ignore the cough, I’m pretty much well. I went out of the house today. There’s this bright yellow thing in the sky that makes you warm. It was a little weird.

But the bad news is very bad. My housemates have this (darxus started feeling bad last night; cathijosephine realized she was sick early this evening). And so does my poor honeywuzzle. She seemed fine this morning, but by this evening (after I dropped her off in Davis) she was really sick.

I hope all of them get better very quickly, and I feel really really guilty. :-(

Lovely weekend. (Isn’t that how all my posts start?)

On Friday, I met plumtreeblossom after work in Central Square (with some difficulty, since I was incorrect about where the CVS we were supposed to meet was), and we went to Shalimar of India, where I had exceptionally good lamb korma. Then we went to joyeous’ birthday party, where we had a delightful time chatting with folks, watching Treehouse of Horror and (if I’m remembering correctly) little snippets of Return of the Living Dead in honour of it being Friday the 13th, petting her housemate’s very soft bunny rabbit, and generally having a lovely time. Thanks to audioboy for giving us a ride back to Mare’s place.

On Saturday, we met a friend to go to the Flea, where we had a productive day of shopping. Then we got a ride to my house in Quincy, where we had a game of Munchkin (plumtreeblossom’s first) with cathijosephine and darxus and watched a little bit of Spun, a creepy-funny movie about speed freaks that they were watching when we came in. I like the fact that we spent our Valentine’s Day with three other people, and that didn’t detract from it being a sweet, romantic date

On Sunday, after breakfast at a little hole-in-the-wall diner near my house, we went to the Museum of Science, where in addition to wandering around the permanent exhibits a bit we saw the frog exhibit and watched an IMAX movie on the Spirit and Opportunity Mars rovers. Then after a brief stop at the Cambridgeside Galleria so we could both drool over gadgets I took her home. We both have tomorrow (Presidents’ Day) off, so we’ll have a day to rest and recover from all the fun. And we do have an awful lot of fun.

On Friday I met plumtreeblossom after work (see her weekend write-up here) and we took the train to Quincy Center together. We had dinner at Outback Steakhouse. I don’t like their corporate politics, but I love their food and sometimes I just need a hunk of cow. As it turned out, I’m very glad we did, because I ordered an Australian beer I wasn’t familiar with — Cooper’s Brewery Sparkling Ale — and it was so good I ordered a second, and then went looking for it at the liquor store later in the week. (If you are wise enough to follow my example, be cautioned that it’s fermented in the bottle, so there’s some sediment in the bottom; you want to pour it into a glass.)

After a yummy dinner, we went to my house and watched Reefer Madness: The Movie Musical, which was very funny, and a little bit of the original 1930s exploitation/propaganda movie, which was a bonus on the DVD.

( Another few meals, another movie, some geekery, and some games with darxus and cathijosephine. )

At some point in the weekend, plumtreeblossom took a whole bunch of pictures of grim warrior beowabbit, including the one that I eventually munged into my new userpic, and I also took some pictures of her cats, who were sleeping together on her bed looking especially cute.

The one bad thing about the weekend is that towards the end of the workweek I’d been having little twinges in my hip, and they got considerably worse over the weekend. I’m going to need to drive to the T tomorrow (where parking is $7); there’s no way I can do the normally 15-minutes walk to the T station with the ice that’s on the sidewalks. I’m not sure if this is a return of my sciatica or if I did something to my hip slipping on the ice. But if a hurt hip is the price for all the joy and fun I had this weekend, it was worth it.

Another lovely weekend with my sweetie. Saturday afternoon I got ingredients for crockpot chicken and dumplings (incidentally having to get out and sprinkle kitty litter under my wheels three times to get out of the driveway!) and got that started. Picked up plumtreeblossom in the evening and we came back to Quincy for dinner. After dinner, we had a couple drinks and (as is often the case) ended up link-surfing on Wikipedia, and finally landed on this site of colour photographs of Tsarist Russia by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii. I forget how we ended up on the topic, but something reminded me of that exhibit and those photos — oh, I remember now! We’d been listening to recordings from old phonograph cylinders on Wikipedia, and plumtreeblossom mentioned how weird it felt to be listening to recordings from the 19th century and how it made that era seem less distant, and that reminded me of how it felt to see colour photographs from before the Russian Revolution, so I googled to find the Prokudin-Gorskii exhibit again.

This morning (after shovelling out the car with cathijosephine’s help), I drove cathijosephine and m_c_t to the T station so they could go to the airport for m_c_t’s flight back to the Wrong Left Coast. It was lovely having him here, and I’ll miss him.

When I got back my darling was making me bacon and eggs and we had a lovely breakfast before running out to the store so she could do a shopping run. (It’s handy to do that when I can drive her, so she can get heavy stuff and not have to carry it from the grocery store to the T to her house. And it’s fun to shop together.) I had only been planning on getting a couple things myself, but I failed to exercise any self-restraint and now I have yummy things in the fridge.

Then I drove her home, and came back to Quincy (stopping to get a few things for the house, notably sand, which yesterday’s experience demonstrated I need). I picked up some Chinese food on the way and ate it with cathijosephine and darxus.

I have a large number of things I needed to get done this weekend that I didn’t do, but I don’t particularly care. Life is full, and life is good.

EDIT: I forgot to mention; she gave me a couple more pieces of purple clothing, adding to the sweater she gave me a few weeks ago. ( And she took a picture of me in my new purple hoodie. )

Awesome girlfriend! Well, you know plumtreeblossom, right? I don’t need to tell you how awesome she is. But I will mention that last night she gave me a gorgeous light PURPLE V-neck sweater. And it’s purple! And it looks great on me! Not only that, it’s purple!

(She also gave me a beautiful purple dress shirt, but unfortunately it’s size L in Twinks’, and I am not a twink. “There’s a big difference between gay boys and bi boys, and it’s about 80 pounds.” So it has to get exchanged before you can see how gorgeous I look in it. The sweater was also size L and fit perfectly.)

And she cooked me breakfast! She makes the best breakfast! She puts extra love in it. And bacon.

So when I trudged home from work, I knew I was going to have to dump my stuff and go out and shovel the walk and the driveway for forty minutes or an hour. Only when I got home, I discovered that cathijosephine out shovelling the driveway, having already cleared off the sidewalk. I grabbed a shovel and helped, but it was the difference between getting a nice little workout to warm you up and then going in and relaxing versus being wet and miserable and tired and overheated, and she had already done at least half of it when I got there. I have an awesome housemate.

Also happy to have darxus here tonight; it’s been nice chatting with him.

Weather, traffic, and my car’s engine permitting, I will get to see plumtreeblossom briefly tomorrow morning on her way to visit her family.

Life is really pretty good.

Among other wonderful things I did this weekend, I marched with plumtreeblossom in the Obama-supporters contingent in the Pride parade. I took lots of pictures. And a generous person marching with us took a couple of me and plumtreeblossom:


I’m eventually going to upload a whole bunch of them to Flickr, but for now, here’s a representative sample.

After the Pride march, we hung out with the delightful surrealestate at the festival and wandered around and collected swag and ate festival food. We also sat at the Poly Boston table for a while.

Other wonderful things I did this weekend were go to the annual Beginning of Summer party where we didn’t stay very long (we were tired from Pride) but I got to see lots of wonderful people and I took some pictures of firespinners which you all should pester me to post, have yummy breakfast at the Burren with plumtreeblossom, and help darxus and cathijosephine pack for the move to darxus’ new place.

I would be much more eloquent about all this if I weren’t so tired. But it was all wonderful.

Huge thanks to sunspiral and roozle (and a bunch of volunteers) for a wonderful party, to David W. and the other people who organized the Obama contingent to march (they were very well organized!), to plumtreeblossom for a wonderful weekend and especially for letting me know there was an Obama contingent to march with, and to alan7388 for doing a fabulous job putting together the Poly Boston table at the festival. And to darxus for pizza, and to cathijosephine for deciding it should be pineapple-and-bacon. And to surrealestate just for being surrealestate.

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.

I love my house. It has a deck. Nice people come and eat on the deck with me. Some of them cook for me, and some of them bring me food. I love my friends, too, and my sweet chef plumtreeblossom.

Got to see the fireworks tonight, although in the rain and wind we weren’t sure we were going to last that long for a while. plumtreeblossom, cathijosephine, darxus and I set off for the fireworks over the Charles tonight (after a yummy dinner at Kagawa in Quincy), but due partly to mobility constraints and partly to scheduling constraints plumtreeblossom and I couldn’t stay with cathijosephine and darxus, so we ended up watching the fireworks from the Longfellow Bridge, from which we couldn’t hear the concert, but had a great view of the fireworks.

Had a fabulous, fabulous time last night at sunspiral and roozle’s amazing party.

darxus was there with cathijosephine’s DSLR camera (and cathijosephine), and he got some great pictures. They start here, and the first bunch are of firespinning (and firejuggling). He camera-geeks about how he took them in this entry. After the firespinning, there are some great indoor pictures (after plumtreeblossom and I had left), including a few lovely pictures of cathijosephine. And fans of cathijosephine, of buxom_bey, of gorgeous women kissing in general, or of fire will be interested in this shot.

[EDIT: Oops; I had linked to somebody else’s pictures too, but they’re in a locked post. Sorry!]

(I took some video of the firespinning; my little digicam does better at that than at still shots in low-light conditions for some reason. I haven’t looked to see whether any of it turned out yet.)

I also call your attention to this gorgeous sunset picture.

In other photo-related news, I got plumtreeblossom a camera yesterday, and from a purely selfish perspective it was a really wise investment on my part. This post of hers made me extremely happy. Awwww...

I'm in northeastern Connecticut camping with cathijosephine and darxus. I was very late getting out of Boston, due to a combination of factors including my own poor planning, and was stressed about that, but it wasn't insanely late by the time I got here (with our food and tents -- darxus and cathijosephine came down on darxus' bike), and we got the tents set up without too much trouble.

Oh, the sky was gorgeous! I really should have brought my big telescope. The stars were intense.

This morning Zeph made yummy breakfast of bacon and scrambled eggs and scrambled pancakes with berries. It's gorgeously sunny. We saw a couple raptors of some sort circling this morning. darxus has been getting lots of good pictures. Life is good.

I has a flavor. It a bacon flavor.