My last few days have been wonderful. First I should mention something I forgot to post about last time: I got in a nice long phone call with sionnagh on her birthday (July 8, or Double Independence Day as she calls it). Aside from Hamlet, the best dog in the world (see userpic), having a problem with a cut on his paw that won’t heal, it sounds like she’s doing really well. The fact that she had a birthday party the previous night, on the 7th, and it was still very much in evidence in the background of the phone call, speaks well. :-)

I already posted about last Tuesday at Walden Pond with surrealestate, which was delightful.

I had been planning on making a brief day-trip up to BiCamp on Sunday morning, so that I wouldn’t completely miss BiCamp this year, but surrealestate offered me the use of her tent Friday night, so instead I went up Friday night and came back Saturday afternoon. I am so glad I did that, and so grateful to surrealestate for her hospitality. I got to see all sorts of wonderful people from out of town, such as onemintjulep (and I got to meet his sister, the_elle_word), K. and her sweetie A., and a couple people from New Hampshire who don’t use LiveJournal. Also got some hugs in with lilbjorn and docorion, of course.

Swimming on Saturday at the swimming hole was excellent and delightful. (Crossing the rocky, slippery riverbed twice with no shoes I could get wet was somewhat less delightful. I’m very glad that my cellphone was in one of the two pockets (of six) that didn’t get utterly, utterly soaked when I fell. But swimming was totally worth it.)

And oh, my, the stars! If I believed in a Creator I would thank it profusely for the gift of small bladders forcing me to go outside in the middle of the night. Wow.

Then I came back on Saturday to a truly spectacular evening with my gorgeous girlfriend plumtreeblossom. You will forgive me if I don’t go into too much detail. Oh, and there was also good conversation!

Then we had a yummy and relaxing breakfast at The Broken Yolk (a little diner very near plumtreeblossom’s house, and the only place in the Boston area that I’ve found that has biscuits and gravy) before she went to Theatre@First for a work day or a rehearsal (I forget which). She’s a delight and I love her. (By the way, if I can let you in on a little secret, we’re dating.)

For the rest of the day, I got a little stuff done around the house — not nearly as much as I had planned, but given that I now have clean clothes to wear, I can’t complain too much.

Then yesterday (Monday) morning, I popped some corned beef and veggies in the crockpot, and last night cathijosephine came over for that and a beer. Had a great time with her, and I felt good about cooking, because I haven’t been doing nearly as much of that as I want to lately; it had been quite a while since I had the crockpot out. And it came out very good! I mentioned that I felt silly wasting all the broth but didn’t know what to do with it, and she had the awesome idea to cook pasta in it! So that’s what I did, and I just had some for lunch, and oh, my is it yumminess! That cathijosephine is smart! Walked her home (which was nice, because it was a gorgeous night and the first exercise I’d gotten all day), so I got to stop in and cuddle Chickenfinger a bit. Then I came home and puttered around on the computer for far too long and got to bed late, but I slept in a bit (I don’t have work today) and I feel really good today. The plan for the afternoon is scheduling logistics and house cleaning and organization before Diesel.

I’m really sleepy, so I don’t have time to do justice to my lovely NYC trip to visit K. and hang out with cathijosephine and her mom, but I can’t go without posting something about it, so very briefly:

Had a lovely time catching up with K., telling her about my life since she saw me last and hearing about her travels (notably Vienna) and her music and multimedia projects. It was great! She’s doing some amazing stuff (which I’m not sure I should talk about since they’re in progress) that I look forward to hearing more about. And I got to see her delightful apartment, which looks like it works really well for her. Yay for a good work- and living-space! And she took me to a scenic lookout over the Bronx and a scenic (no, really!) lookout over New Jersey, and took me to her favourite local Indian takeout place.

Sunday I met cathijosephine and her mother (who is in New York for a conference this week) for brunch, and then we had a nice long walk from 32d Street to Chinatown — stopping in at a makeup store, a goth/fetish clothing store, and THE MOST HUGEST COSTUME STORE EVAR which was like Hallowe’en in April on our way. In Chinatown, we met K. and A., and wandered around Chinatown for a bit, stopping into a bakery for yummy baked goods and bubble tea. (Or in my case, bubble coffee.)

Then K., A., and cathijosephine’s mom bade us farewell at the bus pick-up, and cathijosephine and I rode back to Boston, getting here around 9. It was great weather, and light out for most of the trip back. The bus was run by some other bus company, filling in for Fung Wah to deal with overflow, and it took a different (and more scenic) route out of the city than I’ve ridden before. On the bus I finished Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father, and cathijosephine finished her nap, and both of those things made me happy.

(By the way, I highly recommend Dreams from My Father. It makes me wish Barack Obama would hurry up and get elected President already and get his eight years over with so he can get back to his true calling as a writer.)

[I started this on the train this morning, but discovered that neither of the web browsers on my phone was capable of posting to LiveJournal.]

K.’s been here since Saturday, and we've been having fun. We’ve watched lots of Firefly on DVD, and we watched Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers. Heinlein’s book is almost, but not quite, a parody of itself. The movie is a parody of the book, so it's even better.

Yesterday we went to Wollaston Beach, which isn’t Ko ‘Olina or Kailua Beach, but it sure is a lot closer. In fact, I think I may live closer to my nearest beach than sionnagh lives to hers.

Saturday morning I got to see sexykneesocks and some Boston-area friends of hers (and mine) for brunch. Yay! I had hoped to catch an hour or so of a beginning-of-summer party between that and meeting K., but the MBTA had other plans.

So, it’s been a good few days!

I do have a rant in me about the interminable struggle to get a prescription for contact lenses that works out of my optometrist, though. So you have something to look forward to. :-)

My New York trip was delightful; I wish I had time to do it justice. Here’s the quick overview, though:

Saturday brunch with eisa and nex0s at a nice French café called French Roast at 85th and Broadway. We sat outside so Puppy Monster could hang out with us. The waitress really liked him, and brought him a pie tin of water. The food was good, and the conversation was excellent! I had a great time catching them up and getting caught up. Then nex0s rode with me partway to K.’s performance, and we got to talk some more on the subway.

Kala’s performance Saturday night was amazing! She’s a composer in residence at Tribeca Performing Arts Center, and this was a work-in-progress performance. It was really powerful. It’s called Axis of Beauty, and it’s a response to the war and the US war propaganda that depersonalizes an entire culture. It consisted of K. narrating and playing piano (sometimes by plucking the strings) and drums; her friend and collaborator Sukato playing ukelele, doumbek (a kind of drum), violin strummed like a guitar, and her voice (and “playing her voice” is probably a better description of it than “singing”); recorded electronic music, and recorded interviews with Iraqis about their experience of the war, which she used (with permission) from War News Radio. It all worked together really, really well.

I was really glad for the opportunity to meet Sukato, whom I’d heard a lot about, and after the performance I had the pleasant surprise of meeting Kala’s father and stepmother, who took us out to dinner. K.’s sweetie Alex was also there, and it was nice to see him, but he didn’t join us for dinner.)

Then I went back to eisa’s, and we got more good conversation in before going to sleep. eisa rocks.

Sunday morning, eisa went off to spend the day with her father, and I headed downtown to meet sexykneesocks for brunch at Shopsin’s. I had a really great time. I got biscuits and gravy; sexykneesocks had a bowl of grits with her meal, so we both went to New York City for Southern food. :-)

Then I had a few hours to kill before seeing K. again, so I wandered around a bit, including taking a brief nap in Central Park until the rain woke me up and getting my film from Hawai‘i developed.

Then Sunday late afternoon I met K. at the new Fifth Avenue Apple store, which looks entirely appropriate as a tabernacle for the Cult of Steve, and we wandered around Central Park for a while. It was really good to see her, and to do a bit of catching up. Then I rode back to Tribeca with her (where she was going to see another performance) before turning around to get my car out of the garage and drive home.

Due to a misguided notion of how to get to I-95 in NYC, and a long foray in Connecticut looking for fuel, it was 1:30 before I got home. And due to LiveJournal and email, it was 3:00 before I was in bed. I’m going to do better tonight. :-)

Today I met gishmi1ish for dinner in Central Square. I wanted to introduce her to Baraka Café, the great Tunisian place on Pearl Street, but it’s closed on Mondays, so we ended up at Mary Chung’s, which still made us both happy. She’s a good sport for listening to my sleep-dep blather about my week in Hawai‘i and my weekend in New York; I feel like I talked non-stop, but it sure was fun.

You know, I’m lucky to have such wonderful people in my life.

Now is time to sleep!

Just got home from a fabulous, delightful weekend in New York City. I hope to write all about the weekend when I have time, but for now, I’ll just mention that at the performance I met K.’s good friend and collaborator Sukato (an expected pleasure) and also K.’s father and stepmother (an unexpected pleasure), and also that the squirrels in Central Park are amazingly tame and that it is financially stupid to drive down to NYC when there are busses that will take me there for $20-$30 round-trip (not that that’s going to stop me from doing it again). Now to sleep! Well, first to shower, because I don’t think I’m willing to sleep with myself before a shower.

Too tired to do the rest of my trip justice, but I had a great rest of the evening on Saturday with K., slept well, and saw eisa on Sunday. We went to a place called Popover Café, which was yummy, and she introduced me to Red Dwarf, which I’d never seen before.

It was an excellent and relaxing trip.

Reminder to self: Self should post about the books self is reading.

I'm posting this from Kala's stairwell due to the kind assistance of an anonymous neighbour of hers (well, not quite anonymous, but the only name I have for them is LINKSYS.)

I made it onto the 9:00 bus this morning with a few minutes to spare, and (much to everyone's surprise) the bus made it to New York on schedule — that never happens! (Since we passed a Fung Wah bus on the side of the road about to be towed, I'm glad I didn't take the 8:00 bus.)

nex0s met me at the bus stop in Chinatown, and we had yummy Dim Sum and did a lot of catching up. Then we walked to Kala's place and Kala met us and we went for a walk around the neighborhood, and Kala and nex0s chatted about music and the city. Then Kala and I went back to her place (which looks great!) and got to catch up and looked at photos. It's been great to see her. Then I went out to meet beetiger for dinner. We ended up at a place that mostly does Peking roast duck, which I'd never had before; it was yummy.

Now I am hoping K.'s phone starts working so I can tell her I'm back. :-) Still, the stairwell has hot and cold running net, so I'm doing fine. [Edit: I got in mere moments after posting that.]

It's great to be on a trip and not be worrying about the moving pod in the driveway!

(1) I am going to NYC the last weekend in February, the 25th and 26th. I am mostly going to be visiting K., but I would love to see other NYC-area peoples. I am probably taking the Fung Wah bus to Chinatown Saturday morning and back Sunday evening. Saturday early afternoon or Sunday late afternoon/early evening would probably be good times to see me. Yay!

(2) Only I could get lost on the way home from the IHOP that’s about ten blocks from my house, and which I’ve been to several times. I’m used to walking from near there, but a couple blocks over. So I was on autopilot, and turned a block too early, and continued on autopilot until I was far away from my house in an unknown direction.

My new boots are starting to get broken in.

(3) However, my feet had better be happy again by tomorrow evening, ’cause I’m going contra dancing at the Thursday Used-To-Be-VFW dance now at Springstep Center in Medford. I haven’t been in a long time, and not since they moved to their new location, but I’m looking forward to it and it will be good for me. Ooh! I just looked at the web page, and the Greenfield dance band is playing! That should be good! Would be lovely to see any of my contra-dancing friends there.

Work has been a little frustrating lately, mainly because of (what I still presume are) ongoing hardware problems talking to our backup hardware. But classes start on Monday, so soon I’ll be too busy with other things to gripe about that. :-)

Had a lovely chat with Kala last night, mostly about her work (and music in general).

docorion just fed me coffee. He’s my new superhero. (Although he looks nothing like Too Much Coffee Man. :-)

Reading: I just finished The Italian Boy, and really enjoyed it. I’ve started on a work-related book (by my friend yesthattom), The Theory and Practice of System Administration. It’s useful and fun. I’m probably going to mix some fiction in with it, though.

Watching: I finished the Ralph Bakshi animated movie Wizards on the train last night. It’s very fun, but sexist in a casual, offhand way that I found particularly disturbing. (An example is this bit of voice-over narration: “The mutants had left for Blackwolf’s army, leaving only their wives.”) But I still enjoyed it. (I’d seen it before — I saw it in the theater when it came out originally in 1977¹, and of course I own the DVD, so I’ve seen it more recently than that, too.)

Planning: Today Kala and I are planning to go see Wallace & Gromit at the local second-run theater here in Quincy, which I haven’t checked out yet. Tomorrow I’m going to drive her down to NYC and help her move some stuff to her new apartment. (I saw photos last night; it looks really nice, and I’m looking forward to seeing it in person. It’s got an unfinished brick wall and red-laquered floorboards.)

I guess that’s the news for now. Y’all be good now, hear? And come back any time!

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¹ cathijosephine, this is your cue.

Very tired, so this will be just the nutshell summary:

Had a lovely drive down to NYC with eisa and Puppy Monster. Spent one hour and fifteen minutes driving around looking for parking, before boymeat Googled and guided me via phone to a parking garage that wasn’t full. Actually, probably spent more than that, since I didn’t think to look at the dashboard clock until the first time it occurred to me that I’d been driving around for an unusually long time. Got to hang out with boymeat and eisa and the pup. boymeat’s apartment is great! At a party, got to see my first menorah lighting, which was a little odd with the Christmas music playing.

Had plans to see Kala today, for brunch and an art exhibit, but she had something come up (long story involving computer failure) and that fell through, which I’m sorry about but completely understand. Somehow, between sleeping later, finding myself a neat Greek lunch counter near the garage I ended up at, and dawdling on my way back to Boston, I managed not to get home any earlier than I’d planned.

Now I must fall down.