(1) I forgot to mention in my post about the weekend that Saturday morning plumtreeblossom and I got together with my old college friend beeiger her son projectmothra, and her girlfriend lediva for early brunch at Johnny D’s, and we had a delightful time.

(2) I’ve switched my phone service over to a new carrier, and I can send and receive voice calls and send text messages, but so far I haven’t been able to receive text messages. Perhaps the SMS routing system is independent from the voice-call routing system and that part of the switch hasn’t happened yet, but in any case, for now, don’t assume I can get your text messages. My phone number hasn’t changed.

(3) I have some health news (on balance good, but leaving me pretty dissatisfied with the state of my health care) which I will eventually post about. Anyway, the tingling, itching, and occasional pain in my hands and feet is gone now. :-)

(4) A lovely coda to my extended weekend was having cathijosephine and m_c_t ask if I wanted to meet them for a trip to the beach so they could fly their kites. I joined them, had a great time watching them fly kites and hanging out, and was introduced to a wonderful beach just a short walk from the T, which I look forward to taking plumtreeblossom to soon. (We had a kind of stressful experience towards the end of the evening, after it had gotten dark, when after a long walk across he beach m_c_t discovered he didn’t have his phone. The three of us spread out and retraced the path he and I had been walking, constantly calling the phone so it would be ringing, and we did find it. That was a huge relief!)

(5) And then on the way home I had an extra-thick double-malted frappe for dinner (because the places that served real food had just closed, but I’m not complaining!).

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!

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.

Hi! I had a fabulous weekend, involving dinner, good conversation, and Reefer Madness: The Musical with eisa on Saturday, and then a date with plumtreeblossom that started with a three-course dinner on Sunday, and continued with a trip to the Topsfield Fair on the holiday Monday. We had a fabulous time eating fair food, riding the Ferris wheel, eating fair food, petting the bunnies, eating fair food, browsing the fair museum, eating fair food, checking out the cattle and newborn baby piglets and raptors, eating fair food, seeing the giant pumpkin (1400 pounds!), eating fair food, petting and feeding critters at the petting zoo, and eating fair food. And plumtreeblossom rode an elephant and I got pictures of her on it! And I got pictures of a kangaroo and a camel and the raptors and piglets and lots of other nifty things. And the food was good. I had a wonderful weekend. I love my darling and love doing simple outdoorsy stuff with her, and it was wonderful to see eisa and get caught up a bit, and I got some nice relaxing time with cathijosephine in there, too.

Oh, I also slept about twelve hours Saturday night! This means I did not get as much done on Sunday as I might have liked, but I seem to have needed the sleep; I felt great during that fraction of Sunday that I was awake for.

Also, I've gotten through selecting and commenting the first (and largest and best) batch of my Montréal photos: the animal photos I took at the Biodôme de Montréal. Some of them are pretty nifty, and this is the sort of thing my new camera is wonderful for (and why I wanted it). You can see them in this Flickr photoset. I will be posting a few more Montréal photos at some point, but I really went overboard in the Biodôme.

Of course, I also hope to post my Topsfield photos soon. Amusingly, both the Biodôme and the fair had ring-tailed lemurs, so I got two opportunities to photograph ring-tailed lemurs in one month. The ones at the Biodôme had been pretty sedentary, but at the fair I saw a pretty impressive behaviour. They would be on the side of the cage and jump backwards to land onto a perch in the middle of the cage. It was nifty to watch, and I wish I had been able to get some video of it. They did a lot of jumping, but the backwards jumps were especially delightful.

PS — My weekend was so fabulous that I haven’t come close to catching up with LiveJournal, and probably won’t. If you posted something I should see, feel free to point me at it.

Wednesday after work plumtreeblossom and I went to the final outdoor Landmarks Orchestra concert at the Hatch Shell of the season, Verdi’s Requiem. (The shell was insanely crowded, with a full orchestra, four solists, and, according to the program, a “double chorus”, whatever that means.) It’s not my favorite piece of music, but I had a great time with my sweetie; I love listening to music outdoors. I’m very lucky to live in a city with these sorts of opportunities.

And there were a few toddlers who danced to the music, up by the stage. They were adorable, especially the first one, who looked so earnest and at the same time, so into what she was doing! If she’d still been there by the end of the concert I would have gone up to her and thanked her for her performance.

Thursday I met plumtreeblossom and most of Team Uterus from her show in Festival@First V — surrealestate, wellstar, saraheeyore, and the wonderful oakenguy, who organized the trip — to see the MIT Musical Theatre Guild’s performance of Into the Woods, with a brief (but lovely) appearance and amazing, awesome sets by fellow Uterus Fairy brief_life. We had a wonderful, wonderful time!

When I got home from work last night, cathijosephine and m_c_t asked me if I wanted to go out for margaritas (oh, and maybe food, while we were at it). Yes, I did. So we had a lovely time drinking margaritas and coladas and eating potato skins at Acapulco’s in Quincy Center.

And tonight sweet plumtreeblossom and I are going to Providence for WaterFire, one of our favourite romantic dates. And tomorrow we get to have dim sum with NPCs¹ J. and S. and some of their friends, which I’m sure will be lovely.

I do still need a few more days in the week, though.

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¹ I.e., they don’t have LJ accounts.

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!

plumtreeblossom and I had many quotable lines last night that unfortunately I can't remember. What I do remember is that we sat out on the porch for a long time drinking bourbon and having lovely conversation, as is our pre-sleep tradition.

In the rain. With lots of lightning off in the distance. It was lovely.

To be truthful, when the rain started to get heavy, plumtreeblossom did go inside and get an umbrella. I think we were out there for a half hour, with her holding the umbrella over us. It was a magical time.

Then I slept well and long (and this morning I feel almost completely over whatever little ick I've had lately). I had an odd dream about plumtreeblossom and I getting back into the UN-administered camp where we'd been living (it didn't feel like a refugee camp, more like a bustling little developed-world city, but it was small and it was under UN administration; the staff were francophone, although most of them spoke good English too) after having been away. plumtreeblossom thought she couldn't find her passport, but she had an expired one, but it turned out that the one she thought was expired wasn't. She was talking all the UN staff involved in checking our passports into joining her community theater project. Nifty dream!

Late Wednesday night (if I’m understanding the chronology correctly) plumtreeblossom hurt her foot really badly. Poor sweetie!

Thursday night I got together with xmelancholia and cathijosephine for pizza at cathijosephine’s place and had a lovely time. Lots of catching up, and lots of stories to tell.

After that, I got my car and drove to pick up my cane (which I got last summer when I had sciatica and had lent to somebody) and took it over to plumtreeblossom’s, and stayed over so I could drive her to work the next morning and she wouldn’t have to hobble to the T.

Had another lovely night with plumtreeblossom on Friday night; I picked her up at work to save wear and tear on her poor toes, we had yummy dinner at Sound Bites, and we went to a party (where, delightful surprise, we bumped into surrealestate).

Today plumtreeblossom and I went back to Nantasket Beach and had a wonderful time. This time we ended up at the more populous end of the beach, by the bathhouse and across the street from a little commercial strip. I got in a 20-30min nap, which was lovely. I waded into the water a bit, but it was a bit too cold for me. plumtreeblossom was braver than I was and swam a couple times (getting completely submerged). Yay for my salty sweetie. After the beach we stopped in at a little art gallery by the beach and browsed for a while. And we had Dairy Queen for dinner on the way back. :-)

EDIT: The beach trip set plumtreeblossom’s toes back a bit in their healing, but she’s still making enormous progress; today she was walking almost normally and not using the cane much, while on Thursday she hadn’t been able to take a step without pain. I’m very encouraged.

It’s been a lovely weekend so far, and tomorrow I have dinner scheduled with chienne_folle, so the loveliness is not over.

So plumtreeblossom and I will be marching in the annual GLBTQFFAORTFMOMGBBQ Pride Parade tomorrow! There’s no Poly Boston group marching this year (although there will be a Poly Boston table at the festival afterwards, thanks to the unparalleled — unparalleled by me, at any rate! — gumption and efforts of alan7388. So I will be marching with the Obama supporters, which I’m thrilled to be doing anyway. Then we’ll be hanging out at the Poly Boston table at the festival before going to plumtreeblossom’s place to catch our breath and change for a pool party. Whee!

Happy Pride, everybody!

PS — Governor Deval Patrick’s daughter recently came out as lesbian. He’s always been a strong, strong supporter of same-sex marriage, and I’m sure that made it easier for her. The two of them will be marching together in the parade. He’s also strong supporter of Barack Obama (who sadly doesn’t support same-sex marriage, although he supports civil unions and supports states being left alone to decide the issue for themselves). A few years ago (after the fateful DNC speech, but before he was seriously working towards a presidential candidacy) I saw Obama in person when he introduced Patrick while Patrick was running for governor. I was very proud to contribute to Patrick’s campaign and to vote for him, and I was thrilled when he won, and I’m very proud to contribute to Obama’s campaign and to vote for him, and I sure hope to be thrilled when he wins.

Last night, plumtreeblossom and I got dinner (meant to go to Frank’s Steak House since I was craving meat, but they had a long wait so we had a lovely meal at a Thai/Chinese place across the street) and saw Speed Racer, which was good psychedelic mindless fun.

This morning, after brunch at Redbones, we went up to Canobie Lake Park, which was really fabulous. I forgot to bring my camera, so plumtreeblossom lent me hers, and I got a couple great pictures of her on the antique carousel (with a fully functional 1922 Wurlitzer organ), and a couple shots from the top of the comparably antique wooden rollercoaster, which I hope will come out OK since I was bouncing around and pretty much unable to aim the camera at the time. We had a delightful time with rides, games, food and snack, and each other’s company. A wonderful little micro-vacation less than an hours’ ride from Boston. We think we want to try to organize a Poly Boston outing up there sometime soon.

One slightly disturbing thing about our time there was that I had my first ever light beer, and my first ever Coors. What I wanted (on discovering their only beer choice was Coors Light) was water, but they didn’t serve water, and my other choices were sugary sodas.¹ So of the choices available to me, I took the one closest to water. I had a college roommate who said that Adolph Coors should be imprisoned for his politics and shot for his beer. It wasn’t that bad (I’d swap the punishments), but it wasn’t beer. However, that’s another experience that Saint Peter can hold against me when I’m at the Pearly Gates.

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¹ Mind you, I had quite a lot of sugar today; I just wasn’t interested in soda.