Lots of fun lately!

Friday after work, I met plumtreeblossom after work for fried chicken. The Popeye’s in Kenmore Square where we’d been planning on eating was insanely crowded due to a ball game, so plumtreeblossom suggested we turn it into an impromptu picnic. We walked a few blocks with our food to the Esplanade and had a lovely dinner by the Charles.

From there we walked to the Charles/MGH T stop, and on the way we saw a family of Canada geese with three cute little goslings! Pictures on Flickr (scroll down a bit).

After stopping at plumtreeblossom’s house to dump off our stuff and get cleaned up, we went to a combination birthday (yay!) and going-away (boo!) party for Theatre@First stalwart and all-round sweetheart big_jewfro. We were unfortunately too tired to stay very long but we had just a wonderful time. plumtreeblossom managed to drag me into the karaoke room, which I thought I wouldn’t enjoy, but I had a fabulous time. It was a truly delightful party. I hope the Boston area ends up getting big_jewfro and his sweetie back eventually, but wherever he settles will be a big bright spot visible from orbit.

When we got to plumtreeblossom’s house (fortunately only a few blocks from the party) we collapsed right away.

Saturday morning we had breakfast at local favourite The Burren and then went to Earthfest, an annual eco-themed music and marketing event on the Charles River Esplanade. I’d never been before, but plumtreeblossom’s been several times and said this year’s was the most crowded she’s seen. This is a free concert with an associated vast stretch of marketing tents, all with some connection ranging from direct to very tenuous with ecology. Oh, and food vendors, of course. We had a lovely time, but the crowd was very dense and it was a lot of walking and waiting. Lots and lots of cute dogs to look at! And the weather was spectacular. I’ve put a few photos on Flickr.

Saturday evening I helped eisa unload at her new apartment. Due to the large number of people and the relatively small amount of stuff it was very quick, and the traditional pizza was yummy. I’m delighted to have her (and her dogs) back in the area.

Now, I think, it’s time for bed.

PS — During the course of the weekend, plumtreeblossom and I discovered that the longest of the three escalator flights at the Porter Square T stop is exactly one hundred kisses long.

Today when I got home from work, I was too tired and low-brain-function to do anything actually useful. But repetitive stuff involving pictures was not beyond me, so I uploaded some of the photos I took when plumtreeblossom and I went to see the Big Apple Circus in April to Flickr. You can see them here.

Awesome weekend at Arisia and other places with plumtreeblossom. Much seeing of old friends I don’t get to see very often. Car mishegas — my car is currently in the shop having the muffler reattached. Loved plumtreeblossom and joyeous’ performance in this year’s Red Shift.

Completely aside from all the fun things going on in the vicinity, I find just being in a hotel relaxing and refreshing. plumtreeblossom and I are thinking of doing occasional little mini-vacations close to home, where we don’t really go anywhere special, but find a hotel in the general Eastern Massachusetts area and have a night or two in a room that somebody else cleans, with a really soft bed and a big bathtub and no piles of stuff that needs to get done nearby.

Wonderful wonderful pie breakfast chez bbbsg and chillguru.

Awesome Thanksgiving dinner at plumtreeblossom's, the first joint event we've done (although she really did all the work), and a true delight with some wonderful people (and two wonderful cats), and The Very Best Gravy plumtreeblossom and I Had Ever Had in Our Lives, courtesy of the delightful and massively talented heliopsis.

Got in phone calls with my parents, with my sister, and with sionnagh.

My life is good. I'm thankful for many things, among them relatively new love with plumtreeblossom, a close and warm circle of friends, and the fact that cathijosephine (with whom I have a strong and lasting friendship) seems to be well and truly through the worst of her tonsillectomy recovery.

Oh, I'm also thankful for getting my brain back! That's my big news of the past decade. :-)

Howdy! I plan (slightly tentatively) on having a games afternoon on Sunday, August 27. It’ll be the day after my birthday, and it will have been a long time since I’ve played Cities and Knights, or Carcassonne, or Puerto Rico, and I’d love for y’all to come and help me fix that. (I’m going to be mostly interested in playing German-style board games, but if y’all want to bring card games, other kinds of board games, retro video games, party games, or whatever, you’re welcome to. And I plan on starting this at 2:00pm and going till 9:00 or so, so we should have time for several games.)

This will be at my house in Quincy. RSVPs (via comment here or by email) are highly recommended so that (1) I can be sure that my relatively small house will accommodate everyone (although if the weather is nice, we can use the deck for those games that are less likely to blow away) and so that (2) I can get you directions.

PS — Also, Remember, Remember the 25th of August.

First, the morning from hell. For background, I got a new prescription for contacts a few months ago, which turned out to be incorrect, although the sample lenses the eye doctor had given me to try out were correct. So I had an eye appointment scheduled for today to get the prescription fixed.

I’m too tired to do a fully-fleshed-out write-up, so I’ll just tell you about my morning by copying and pasting from mail to cathijosephine. ( Here’s what I wrote. )

So, the three good things: Thanks in large measure to mud_puppy, I went to a fundraiser/rally for Deval Patrick at the Hynes Convention Center on Thursday. Introducing him was Barack Obama, who of course was a really good speaker, but who did a very good job of not stealing Patrick’s thunder. I’d heard Obama’s DNC speech and a couple other sound bites, so I knew what to expect from him, and I got it. But I’d never heard Patrick speak; at most, I’d read short quotes. And wow, he is a kick-ass speaker! Inspiring, entertaining, honest-sounding, impressive. He gives the sound bites, but he also connects them and uses them responsibly. He doesn’t just assert or imply something, he explains why it happens. His speech made me simultaneously really confident in him as a politician and really confident in him as an officeholder, and you don’t get that combination very often. (Even people who are in fact going to be good at both often do only one or the other in their speeches.) So that was amazing. And it was nice to see mud_puppy and a couple co-workers of hers, docorion, and lilbjorn and M. there.

After that, I met cathijosephine at Sarsfield’s, our local Irish pub, for a pint and a half each, which made up in caloric value for not having had dinner. :-) We had a really good time. While I’d seen her a few times recently, this was the first time we’d had a chance to just chat one-on-one since before I went to Hawai‘i, and it felt really good.

And tonight I went over to chienne_folle’s for a night of text-adventure games with her and her husband and a bunch of their friends, which was really, really fun. Makes me want to put some text adventures on my Treo to play on the subway; evidently there’s a lot out there. We played a game called Ad Verbum (if I’m remembering correctly), which was interesting in that it was largely about verbal puzzles. For instance, there’s a room in which all the descriptions use only words that start with S, and you can only use words that start with S in your commands. Atypical, I guess, but lots of fun. I left before they started the second one, because I was starting to get too tired for that kind of brainage, but I had a great time, and seeing queenofhalves there was an unexpected pleasure.

So, all in all, life is good! And soon I will have new contact lenses that don’t give me headaches and with which I can actually read computer screens!

beowabbit sleep now.

Good few days. I finished V for Vendetta (the comic), and really enjoyed it, and hope to see the movie soon.

Speaking of movies, I’ll be seeing Mrs Henderson Presents with chienne_folle on Thursday, and am looking forward to it (and to the company). (Too sleepy to make an IMDB link right now. :-)

Went to lots of wonderful social events over the weekend. Among other fun things, got to chat about jazz with chillguru and see eeblet during her whirlwind Right Coast tour. Oh, and got to learn a new board game.

Part of why I’m tired is that last night I got home a bit on the late side to discover that my new phone, a Treo 650, was waiting for me in a box on the porch. So of course I stayed up late getting it working and transferring stuff from the old phone. And today I got calendar synchronization working, so I can again carry around my schedule in my pocket.

Several years ago, when I used to carry a Palm organizer around with me, I was somewhat more organized and less likely to forget stuff I was supposed to do. But then I started carrying more and more other shiny bits of consumer electronics around with me, and stopped carrying anything that was good at calendaring. Now I have a phone that’s good at calendaring, so hopefully I’ll be better about not forgetting to write down stuff I want to do. Wish me luck. Also, wish me more days in the week and more hours in the day, because that’s the real problem with my schedule. And make sure that about three of the extra hours are stuck between 4:00am and 4:01am, so that I will actually wake up well-rested every day.

Speaking of well-rested, it’s time for me to go work on that.

[EDIT: Oh, and yummy dinner with cathijosephine at the Tibetan place by the Diesel. I hadn’t had Tibetan food in way too long!]

It was a great weekend!

I got together with minerva42, underwatercolor, and kkpixie on Friday night for Japanese food (at Kagawa, the excellent Japanese place in Quincy Center that I frequent) and a movie. We watched 12 Monkeys. I confess I didn’t pay quite as much attention to the movie as I might have, but that was OK; I’d seen it before. It was good.

Then on Saturday I went out to Northampton to see gishmi1ish. I had a great time! She showed me around the Smith campus a little bit, and in particular she took me to the greenhouses, where we discovered they were having a bulb show, so there was a lot to see. I wish I’d thought to bring my camera with me. We had dinner at Moshi Moshi, gishmi1ish’s favourite Japanese restaurant in Northampton, and had a really great time talking. I also got to see aibyou_canti, albeit briefly, and meet the menagerie at his house.

On Sunday I went to the Massachusetts Horticultural Society’s annual Spring Flower Show and had a nice time. I was tempted to buy some wildflowers for the yard, but it slipped my mind before I left. I did get some yummy herb mixes. I also took lots of pictures, and hopefully at some point soon I’ll have a chance to post some of them.

Now it’s time to do some laundry, pay some bills, maybe do some cleaning, and hopefully get to sleep early. Tomorrow evening I get to see zzbottom for dinner, yay!

Oh, PS — I think my car is on its last legs. I hope to replace it really soon, because after the trip back from Northampton, I’m not sure I trust it for another significant trip.

[Edit: Oh, I forgot to mention: I saw Transamerica with gishmi1ish. It wasn’t what I expected at all, but I loved it. I think I want to see that again.]

So last night I went to the Suicide Girls burlesque show at the Middle East that bbbsg pointed me at. Bumped into a bunch of other good folks there (although I didn’t find bbbsg until the show was over). Was fun, but I didn’t have a very good view from where I was, and the main thing that was appealing was the silly energy of the performers. The band that was on beforehand may well have been good, but it was so loud that my injured ears weren’t able to detect any music. Many thanks to pir for giving me a pair of earplugs! Was a fun night though. Oh, almost forgot! There was a woman in the audience who had really short hair (like mine a few days ago, shorter than it is now), and after the show she was near us and I asked her if I could rub her head, and she said to go for it. Yay! Head-rubbin’s!⁰ Of course, she had been up near the stage, so I had to be careful to avoid the swaths of chocolate sauce.

So, they’re really more grade-school and junior-high nightmares than high-school nightmares, but “high-school nightmares revisited” has the right associations and a better rhythm. I set foot inside the gym at work today. Scary! I’d signed up in December, before my last trip to Hawai'i, but the personal training office seemed unable to actually call me back, or schedule things when I did manage to speak to a human, and actually getting an appointment scheduled felt like a Sisyphean ordeal. But it finally happened today, and I’ve got another one on Thursday. It was kind of intimidating – I felt as out of my element as I ever have, and that includes both the lesbian hayride¹ and the house meeting at Campus Students for Christ – but it was actually kind of fun, and I’m looking forward to going back. The trainer would have been more intimidating if he didn’t look an awful lot like me – which means, of course, extremely cute.²

I didn’t make it to the Diesel tonight because I had a bunch of stuff to do. But I didn’t get much sleep last night (partly because I forgot until about 3:00am that I had the appointment today and therefore had to be at work at a more civilised hour than is my custom), and I may not get much done. Sleep is a very appealing concept.

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⁰ which remind me of belly-rubbin’s and puppy-lovin’s, some of which I shall hopefully be fortunate enough to enjoy in May.
¹ Actually, at the time, that was my element.
² Actually, it means similar facial structure and close-shaven hair and beard, but who’s keeping track? He wasn’t verbal enough, and didn’t seem happy enough to be there, to come off as cute. There’s a guy at the munches on O'ahu who looks a lot like me, and has the enthusiasm and verbal facility to be way, way cute, just like me.

I was really wiped out Friday night by the time I was done at work, so I didn't even go over and register at Arisia. (Also, between a wonderful week behind me with Kala and a wonderful week ahead of me with Dreaming, I figured I needed a quiet night at home.) ( Background for what follows )

I ended up getting to Arisia really late, around noon, but it was good to get the sleep. ( Saturday afternoon; entertaining story about picking up my phone )

By the time I got back to Arisia, there wasn't much time before a big dinner that some wonderful people had organized (dunno if the organizers want to be mentioned by name, but thanks!). Got to see lots of good people there, and while there was some stress involved in getting seated, the meal itself was lovely, and very inexpensive for the quality and quantity of food and accommodation. After that, I was really tired, so I went on home, even though there was still some programming I wanted to see.

Sunday I got to a couple of panels, managed to connect with Dreaming, and had a good time, although most of the panels I'd wanted to see were on Saturday.

I was especially happy to get to see bensong1 and A. and G., up from New York. And it was also particularly great to see [corrected LJ name] surrealestate; although I'd seen her since she got back from Kripalu, this was the first time I'd seen her while she wasn't being silent, so it was our first opportunity to do anything like catching up.

( Sunday night and Monday with Dreaming )

I've had some great conversations so far with Dreaming, and am looking forward to the week.

So, I had a lot of fun at the first Arisia I've actually been registered for, despite missing most of the programming I wanted to see. Resolutions for next year: (1) Plan attending much earlier, so I'm actually prepared. (2) Don't lose my phone. (3) Despite all the travel I'll no doubt be doing before Arisia, stay plugged into the right social circles enough to be invited to those sorts of parties. (I did get to test a truly lovely backside for doneness. Nice and tender; it was done.) (4) Get enough sleep going into Arisia (although I have absolutely no regrets about this year!). (5) Be on some panels.