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.

I have lots of wonderful weekends, but I just had an especially wonderful one.

It started on Friday night, when warlord_mit and surrealestate had a wine tasting (with several selections from warlord_mit’s ample cellar) followed by a Chicago singalong. That was just about the most fun event I’ve been to since, well, probably the last party at their place. :-) plumtreeblossom and I had a great time.

On Saturday [EDIT: after a yummy breakfast of catching up with beetiger, her son projectmothra, and lediva at Johnny D’s], we needed to pick up new veterinary supplies for her cat Rowley from Angell Memorial Animal Hospital in JP, and since I really miss Jamaica Pond and plumtreeblossom has taken up long walks, I suggested that we combine pleasure and business and take a walk around Jamaica Pond first. Which we did, and we had a lovely and relaxing time and got to see lots of dogs and lots of scenery. (I did, however, break the screen on my old small camera while I was carrying it, though. Good think I have the awesome new one, and a camera on my cell phone.) Nice to enjoy the outdoors, now that Massachusetts has finally decided it’s summer after a couple months of Novembers.

After that, we went to Angell and picked up Rowley’s supplies and window-shopped for quite a while in their adoption center. Had a wonderful time visiting with all the animals! Then we went home to our respective houses.

Sunday was a workday at theatreatfirst, so I got to see plumtreeblossom again at that, as well as lots of other wonderful Firsties. It let out very early, so we had an early dinner together outdoors in Davis Square before going to her place to take care of Rowley.

( Don’t read if needles or related things upset you. )

And today I went in to town to meet plumtreeblossom for the Indian lunch buffet at Shalimar of India in Central Square. Yummy food and a nice little daytime mini-date.

Oh, and today was a good day to take off from work, apparently. I most often take the Green Line down Huntington Ave, and I would have been significantly delayed. That was a couple blocks from my building at work. I’m really glad nobody was hurt!

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. :-(

I got this meme from joyeous:

Please reply to this post with three boring things about you. [If you feel like it.]

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1. I am nearsighted, but I wear glasses or contact lenses, so I can see.
2. In the winter, I get cold sometimes.
3. Sometimes I put twist-ties on my desk, because I think I might need to use them soon. But usually I don’t need to use them soon.

Yeah, yeah, according to the political spectrum quiz all the cool kids are doing these days, I’m a left-libertarian¹ non-interventionist cultural liberal. We all knew that.

I agree with the criticism somebody on my Friends-list (not identified because s/he posted it in a locked post) made: A lot of the questions were in two parts, like “22. Laws regulating private behavior are put forth by the weak, who prefer security to freedom.” Well, what if you think that laws regulating private behaviour are put forth by the strong, who prefer security to freedom? Or that they’re put forth by the weak, who prefer Cocoa Puffs to freedom? Or that they’re put forward by the strong, despite preferring freedom to security, but that they are still an Abomination in the sight of the majes? There were a lot of two-part questions like that where the answer I had to give probably obscured rather than clarified my actual political beliefs. (And of course there were a lot of “No, really, it’s an awful lot more complicated than that” questions, but that’s sort of unavoidable.)

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¹ I originally mistyped that as “libertartian”; I think that’s actually a better description of me.

So last night at plumtreeblossom’s, I had an odd dream about sewing needles. (Or they might have been pins, but in that case they didn’t have pinheads.) They were burrowing around in somebody’s shirt collar like worms in dirt. In the dream, that wasn’t strange or disquieting; that was just what needles did, what they were supposed to do, and it showed that the ecosystem of his shirt was healthy.

(Had a lovely, lovely date, and finally got to watch Jefferson in Paris, which I’ve had out from GreenCine for ages. Also had the world’s hugest takeout order from the Midwest Grill — we were expecting two entree-sized portions; instead we got two catering platters.)

I haven’t done one of these in a long time, but coraline encouraged people on her F’list to, so I decided I would. I had been planning on taking a new picture with the wonderful new camera plumtreeblossom, eisa, beetiger, docorion, mrpet, nex0s, and angeltigriss got me for my birthday (THANK YOU ALL SO MUCH! IT ROCKS!), but it’s late and I have a very big day ahead of me tomorrow, so I’m just going to reuse an old picture from the mid ’90s or so of me swimming at the Ledges in Vermont. It shows off my best assets: my smile, and my joy in being among people I love. (sionnagh, zzbottom, and his then-wife whose LJ name I’ve spaced on were there with me.)

Me at the Ledges Me in the water at the Ledges (Harriman Reservoir, Vermont), probably mid-’90s.

Hmmmm. I look a lot different now, but I think I’m still that happy pretty often.

First picture I’ve ever taken with my laptop camera. Sorry about the poor lighting; the walls and ceiling are better lit than I am.

( Photo here. )

By request. Let me know if you want this lj-cut; I figured it was small enough that wasn’t necessary.

So there’s this wonderful family photo of me at around two years old playing in Hyde Park. My mother made a copy for me, which I have somewhere very safe, I’m sure. But my sister also has a copy, and while we were down there last weekend I scanned it in. So here I am:

Me as a toddler 'dowsing' in Hyde Park, London, summer 1968. My parents spent three years in England for my father’s graduate work. This picture of me was taken by a family friend while we were in Hyde Park in London sometime in summer of 1968. My parents always called this my dowsing picture, although I sort of think it looks more like I’m ploughing. I was a cutie, wasn’t I?