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!

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!

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!

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.

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).

plumtreeblossom and I are at an Arby's outside of Richmond that we put a fair amount of effort into finding. This is a big deal.

(Sorry no Rabbit Hole Day post this year; I don’t have enough brain cells to be creative right now. You get the following by virtue of the fact that most of it was written yesterday on the T.)

So last long weekend was Arisia, and I haven’t stopped having fun since. On Tuesday, I ended up at dinner at the Cambridge location of Addis Red Sea with cathijosephine, ragingamazon, and a bunch of other people in what was sort of an impromptu farewell dinner for ragingamazon. I had never tried their new location, and I hadn’t had Ethiopian food since Meskerem in DC with plumtreeblossom, bcat1, and spacechicken. It was the yum, and the company was lots of fun.

On Wednesday, plumtreeblossom and I went to a gathering at The Burren for members of the davis_square community. The bar gave us free food, and they certainly recouped their investment; there were about 30 or 35 of us there. There were lots of Theatre@First people there, among them the wonderful surrealestate (f/k/a pheromone) and joyeous, but there were also a lot of people we hadn’t met in person, and a lot of people we (especially I) didn’t know at all. It was a great time.

( A few more days, cut for length. )

As I was telling jadia over dinner yesterday, as a child I was an introvert, more or less out of necessity since I was sick a lot (and therefore out of school a lot, and often unable to run and play with other kids). Clearly I am no longer an introvert, but it’s only been in the past few years that my mental image of myself has caught up to reality. I used to think, “Hah, hah! I’ve got everybody fooled; they think I’m an extrovert, just because I get energized by spending lots and lots of time with other people!” and it was only fairly recently that I realized that everybody who thought I was an extrovert was actually right. (I am, though, an extrovert who needs a lot of quiet alone time.) Anyway, if I had lingering doubts, this past week should lay them to rest.

I’m too tired to do justice to the lovely time I’ve been having the past few days, but here’s the capsule version:

On Wednesday, the 26th, drove to Rochester. (Lots of happy fun stuff happened before my trip, too, but I’m hopelessly behind so I’m just going to start fresh.) Gorgeous driving weather. Arrived in time for dinner at plumtreeblossom’s mother’s house (where her brother and niece also live). Had a great time with them. Had an especially great time with Jack, their obsessive-compulsive border collie. I feel guilty encouraging them, but I love excessively enthusiastic jump-all-over-you-and-lick-you dogs.

plumtreeblossom’s mother had generously gotten us a hotel room, so we went there and had a lovely time. It must have been the free wireless that made it so delightful. Yeah, that was it.

On Thursday, I woke up with the birthday girl, and her family came to meet us at a diner for brunch. (Mykonos Café; the food was wonderful.) Then we went back to her mother’s place and had lovely hanging-out time, and then got on the road.

On the way, she returned a happy-birthday phone call from a couple old friends, P. and E., who now live in Southampton (in Western Mass), and we got an impromptu invitation to dinner, which we accepted. They are really delightful people, and their dog is a delightful dog (as affectionate as Jack, but much more calm and disciplined).

We got to plumtreeblossom’s house very late, but I didn’t fall asleep on the road, and neither of us had to work in the morning.

Today (Friday), we had a leisurely morning, had brunch at a diner near her (I loves me some diners), and then ran a couple of errands together — fixing the internet on her phone (which took the folks at the Verizon store all of 15 seconds once we got seen, and now plumtreeblossom knows the magic Just Please Make It Work Again Dammit code) and getting me an eye exam and ordering me some glasses that plumtreeblossom described as “hot”, all emphasized just like that. plumtreeblossom speaks in well-formatted, standards-compliant semantic HTML. (The eye exam was mainly for contacts, but I need a new pair of glasses, too.)

And I had crockpot Kalua pig waiting for me when I got home. And it just occurred to me that I probably also have a lot of mail waiting for me. Should go bring it in, I suppose, but I think instead I’m going to collapse into bed, collapse directly into bed, do not pass GO, do not collect $200. I am debating whether to take my shoes off. Maybe I’ll compromise and take one shoe off.

The good: plumtreeblossom and I got to go see The Golden Compass last night. I found it really really compressed compared to the rather thoughtfully-paced book it’s based on, but I loved it. Lyra’s Oxford was much as I had imagined it, and Iorik and Lee were plucked right out of my head. The world was a bit more steampunky than in the book, but I didn’t mind that. The acting was good. I’m so glad I saw it. And I’m very glad that plumtreeblossom enjoyed it, too, not having read the book. (She’s excited to read the series now.) And, barring production problems, there are two more movies to look forward to!

We had an unplanned intermission when there was a fire alarm and the building was evacuated, but when we started to see people streaming back into the building as we were walking towards the T we decided to go back in and see what was up, and since it had only been 10min or so since the alarm, they resumed all the movies. We saw some smoke or steam coming from a nearby building; I presume that’s what the alarm was about, but I’m not sure. The Religious Right is up in arms about this movie — as well they should be; the books are delightfully subversive —, so plumtreeblossom’s first thought was a bomb threat.

More recent good stuff include dinner with plumtreeblossom at The Cheesecake Factory near my work on Wednesday, pasta and interesting liqueurs with cathijosephine on Thursday, and brunch at Johnny D’s this morning (with live jazz guitar).

The bad: I have a bad cold. I had hoped it would just be a mild day-or-so, but I feel really crummy today. I am probably going to go to bed soon. (I really hope plumtreeblossom doesn’t come down with this, but that seems pretty implausible.) On the other hand, I have the weekend to rest. On the other other hand, I had planned on doing a lot of work on the house this weekend, and instead I’m mostly going to be resting and trying to get better.

Net balance is quite good, though.

I’ve had a wonderfully social last few days.

On Wednesday a bunch of us hung out with surrealestate to celebrate her birthday. It was a delightful gathering in honour of a delightful person! plumtreeblossom and I had a great time.

plumtreeblossom and I went back to her place afterwards, so I got to wake up next to my sweetie and have coffee with her. On my way in to work Thursday I got Grigori Yefimovich¹ inspected.

Thursday after work I met cathijosephine, and drove with her to xmelancholia’s, where we caught up for a while, cathijosephine gave xmelancholia some excellent socks, and I got to play with big huge wonderful friendly dogs (a mastiff and a German shepherd). Yay for doggie time! And yay for seeing xmelancholia; it had been too long.

Friday docorion had arranged to get group-rate tickets to see Handel’s Messiah performed by the Handel and Haydn Society at Symphony Hall (very near where I work). My typical inability to get anywhere on time was in evidence, but in a somewhat unusual fashion: I somehow managed to get there an hour early. Anyway, I crashed docorion’s dinner nearby and at the correct time, we were all back at Symphony and plumtreeblossom and the rest of the group congregated successfully. The concert was delightful, although I felt a little odd at something so liturgical. I had never been inside Symphony Hall before, and I loved checking out the décor. I’d have loved to see what the original paint job looked like (there was very elaborate moulding and detail work, but it had all been repainted in a neutral colour). I think we all had a great time. Thanks, docorion!

Saturday plumtreeblossom and I got together with dan4th and dabunny at their place and ordered in Thai food and had a lovely time. Along the way, I learned probably three or four little facts about hockey, which at least doubles what I know about the game.

This morning (Sunday morning, although I guess technically I mean “yesterday morning” at this point), plumtreeblossom and I had a yummy and relaxed brunch at The Burren, and then I came home and resumed work on my plumbing.

My life is good!

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¹ My car.