I just got back from a fabulous little trip to New York with plumtreeblossom to find large quantities of presents from silverlibre and ka9sqb in Illinois and bcat1 and spacechicken in North Carolina on my doorstep. And an awful lot of them are the edible kind!

An one very special thing was in the box from Illinois: a photo album of baby pictures of me, depicting a typical day in my life as a baby. Yes, there will be scans.

But not tonight. Tonight bed. I am happily exhausted and need to go curl up with a kitty cat.

Happy birthday to the most wonderful mother anybody could wish for! I am so, so glad I was lucky enough to be born to somebody so amazing. I hope your birthday is fabulous and you have lots and lots of fun. Love and joy to you and ka9sqb.

Happy birthday to my wonderful sister bcat1! I’m lucky to have such a fabulous sister, and President Obama is lucky to have such illustrious company on his birthday.

Happy birthday to my wonderful stepfather ka9sqb. He’s not the only thing I have my mother to thank for bringing into my life, but he sure is an important one!

So I had jotted down all the things I did with silverlibre and ka9sqb while they were here on a piece of paper. Paper was a thin flat substance made from trees or other plant matter which could be marked with pigment to store writing. Unfortunately, it was easily lost, and the writing was easy to damage, for instance, if the paper were accidentally washed, and you couldn’t grep for things written on it, so it depended on elaborate, complex, and difficult filing schemes like “not putting important stuff in the middle of piles of useless stuff” or “keeping things in approximate chronological order, or some other sort of predictable order”, which is why nobody ever uses it any more. Or at least why I shouldn’t.

Anyway, I can’t really do an accurate day-by-day list of what we did, but here are some of the highlights:

• Meals including Firefly’s, Mother Anna’s (where plumtreeblossom and I have wanted to take them ever since we first went there, well before they planned to visit), my mother’s delicious beef roast, Namaskar, and many other excellent meals
• A duck tour of Boston with plumtreeblossom, which she had done before but none of the rest of us had. It was a lot of fun.
• A Boston Harbour cruise aboard a tall ship! This was really delightful, and my stepfather ka9sqb had a long chat with one of the crew, so we ended up learning quite a lot and getting some nifty stories. (He’s an incredible people person. My sister bcat1, his stepdaughter, comes by it honest. :-)
• A free outdoor concert at the Hatch Shell with plumtreeblossom, her housemate vanguardcdk, and cathijosephine (with beef roast as picnic dinner).
• Lots of sitting out on the back deck.
• EDIT: Oh, and I just remembered: the August Moon festival in Chinatown with plumtreeblossom. (She and I also went to Quincy’s August Moon festival today, albeit without my parents.)

Um, and many other things. Which I desperately want to write about but can’t quite remember right now. This is why you should never trust paper. (Anybody want to remind me of stuff I’ve missed?) You can trust my parents, though. They’re awesome!

Had a really fabulous rest of my visit with ka9sqb and silverlibre! They rock. And I’m so glad plumtreeblossom got to meet them, and they got to spend so much time with her and cathijosephine. I have lots and lots more to tell about that visit; y’all should nudge me if I don’t get to it soon. Also, pictures! Had a few other things I wanted to mention, but I can’t brain today; I have the dumb. Oh, except I will mention that my driver’s side window no longer rolls up. It rolled down fine. I hope it doesn’t rain in the next few days.

Breakfast with my parents silverlibre and ka9sqb, as well as cathijosephine, at a nearby hole-in-the-wall diner. Then came back to the house for a bit. Then my parents and I went off and explored the commercial district near Quincy Center for a while, culminating in a ramble through the 18th-and-early-19th-century cemetery near the T station, before having a late lunch at a Taiwanese booth in a food court. (Actually, it’s pretty much the only occupant of the food court. There’s a sushi place and a little place you can buy beer and wine, but I never see them open.) Very good Taiwanese food, and the charming, friendly, and constantly happy-seeming woman who takes orders there alerted us to the August Moon festival on Sunday in Chinatown. (There’s also one in Quincy the following Sunday which I hope to go to, but my parents will already have left by then.)

Then I had to rush off to get the car and drive to plumtreeblossom’s to meet her after work and drive her and her cat Rowley to the vet’s. The vet visit went very well; we got seen right away and the vet was great. He was very good for the exam, and he got blood drawn and got subcutaneous fluids since he was dehydrated, and we took him home with some meds plumtreeblossom is going to be giving him. We don’t yet know what was wrong, but the vet was very helpful and seemed not to think it was terribly urgent, and more importantly, he seemed much better when we got him home! We wonder whether he just got so dehydrated that he was too lethargic to eat and drink, which kept him dehydrated, and the subcutaneous fluids helped a lot. Either that or the ordeal of the vet visit gave him a taste of what horrors might be visited on him if he didn’t start acting like his normal self. :-) Anyway, my beloved plumtreeblossom is much relieved.

Then I came home to homemade pizza (with amazing roasted garlic!) that cathijosephine had made using garlic pesto that plumtreeblossom gave me a few days ago, and which I got to share with my parents. As plumtreeblossom put it to me as I was leaving her place, I was having my belly filled with love from all directions. And darxus was here, and while I didn’t get to chat with him before he crashed, it was nice to see him briefly and know he was here.

My life is in pretty good shape, I would say.

After cathijosephine and darxus went to bed, silverlibre and ka9sqb and I stayed up chatting for a while, and I showed them the photos I posted from the Theatre@First one-acts and silverlibre showed me that video of lightning in slow motion that’s been going around the net but that I had missed, and I walked them back to their room so we could enjoy the night air together.

Now it’s way before my bedtime, but I might actually go to sleep. I ought to clean and straighten, but it’s been a rich full life day, and some extra sleep is probably a good idea, particularly since I think our plan for tomorrow involves the Aquarium and a tall-ship cruise.

EDIT: And I came home to an enticing package from sionnagh, which I probably would have waited until my birthday to open if I had any willpower. It had a lovely big very detailed atlas of Hawai‘i in it (a scientific atlas, with lots of information on weather patterns, flora and fauna, and the like, and plenty of text with the maps), a copy of Brokeback Mountain, and a lovely little miniature Japanese calligraphy set! Thank you, sionnagh!

Wow, busy weekend! Last night was closing night of Festival@First 5, including the one-act that plumtreeblossom directed and surrealestate, wellstar, missmelissa, oakenguy, and brief_life performed in. They all did an incredible job, and it was awesome, and I’m sorry it’s over.

After the performance was strike, which went smoothly, and a great cast party at hahathor’s stunning house. plumtreeblossom and I left early (around 1:30am) in part due to concerns about her cats, and collapsed into bed.

This morning we had a lovely breakfast on the patio at The Burren (in the course of which we ran into ladrescher, who was in the same one-act as hahathor), and then I came home to do some more cleaning and kitchen reorganization before my parents (silverlibre and ka9sqb) arrive tonight. Then cathijosephine came home briefly to take me to the room I rented for them near my house and show me around. (I hadn’t had a chance to go pick up the keys and take the tour, so she had ended up doing it on my behalf.)

And now I’m going to straighten up for a bit, and do dishes and laundry, and have my first shower since strike which I desperately need, and then I go meet my lovely girlfriend plumtreeblossom whom I have been dating for two years, and celebrate our two-year Sweetieversary with her at the same dim-sum place where we had our first date! Actually, specifying the start of our relationship is kind of tricky; we met through surrealestate, but didn’t really get to spend enough time together to get to know each other for quite some time. We did manage to express a certain amount of mutual interest before our first date, but for purposes of celebration, we count our first official date as the start of the relationship.

Thank you for two delightful years, sweetie! I love you.

(Sorry for any sensitive readers who may have gone into insulin shock. :-)

After our Sweetieversary dinner, we’re going to go pick up my parents at the train station and bring them back to Quincy and get them settled into their room. (It’s in a little rooming house just about two real blocks from my house. Very convenient!)

And I have tomorrow and Tuesday off from work, so I can spend the days touring Boston and Quincy with them. Yay!

Happy birthday to my wonderful sister bcat1!

I’m sure this will come as a surprise to all of you, but I just can’t keep it a secret any longer. I love plumtreeblossom. Happy Valentine’s Day, love!

I also love my friends and family — the family I was spectacularly lucky to get by birth and the family I’ve chosen over the years — and my tribe and community. So Happy Valentine’s Day to you, too!