Hi! plumtreeblossom took a bunch of pictures of Festival@First 6 with my camera, and I’ve just finished selecting and uploading them to Flickr. (She had previously cropped and posted a bunch herself.)

The photos I’ve uploaded are available as a set in my Flickr photostream as well as in the Theatre@First Flickr pool; the ones plumtreeblossom uploaded a few days ago are also in the Theatre@First Flickr pool as well as posted to her journal.

And here are links to the individual shows (by Flickr tag):

• Cupid’s Beau
• Breakfast with Warhol
• The Usual
• Not Funny
• Helluva Poker Face
• Canyon’s Edge
• Season’s Greetings
• Dan in the Lion’s Den (plumtreeblossom’s play)

Sorry they aren’t cropped or colour-edited; I just haven’t had time.

(Cross-posted to my personal journal and theatreatfirst.)

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.

Today when I got home from work, I was too tired and low-brain-function to do anything actually useful. But repetitive stuff involving pictures was not beyond me, so I uploaded some of the photos I took when plumtreeblossom and I went to see the Big Apple Circus in April to Flickr. You can see them here.

On Friday I met plumtreeblossom after work (see her weekend write-up here) and we took the train to Quincy Center together. We had dinner at Outback Steakhouse. I don’t like their corporate politics, but I love their food and sometimes I just need a hunk of cow. As it turned out, I’m very glad we did, because I ordered an Australian beer I wasn’t familiar with — Cooper’s Brewery Sparkling Ale — and it was so good I ordered a second, and then went looking for it at the liquor store later in the week. (If you are wise enough to follow my example, be cautioned that it’s fermented in the bottle, so there’s some sediment in the bottom; you want to pour it into a glass.)

After a yummy dinner, we went to my house and watched Reefer Madness: The Movie Musical, which was very funny, and a little bit of the original 1930s exploitation/propaganda movie, which was a bonus on the DVD.

( Another few meals, another movie, some geekery, and some games with darxus and cathijosephine. )

At some point in the weekend, plumtreeblossom took a whole bunch of pictures of grim warrior beowabbit, including the one that I eventually munged into my new userpic, and I also took some pictures of her cats, who were sleeping together on her bed looking especially cute.

The one bad thing about the weekend is that towards the end of the workweek I’d been having little twinges in my hip, and they got considerably worse over the weekend. I’m going to need to drive to the T tomorrow (where parking is $7); there’s no way I can do the normally 15-minutes walk to the T station with the ice that’s on the sidewalks. I’m not sure if this is a return of my sciatica or if I did something to my hip slipping on the ice. But if a hurt hip is the price for all the joy and fun I had this weekend, it was worth it.

Another lovely weekend with my sweetie. Saturday afternoon I got ingredients for crockpot chicken and dumplings (incidentally having to get out and sprinkle kitty litter under my wheels three times to get out of the driveway!) and got that started. Picked up plumtreeblossom in the evening and we came back to Quincy for dinner. After dinner, we had a couple drinks and (as is often the case) ended up link-surfing on Wikipedia, and finally landed on this site of colour photographs of Tsarist Russia by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii. I forget how we ended up on the topic, but something reminded me of that exhibit and those photos — oh, I remember now! We’d been listening to recordings from old phonograph cylinders on Wikipedia, and plumtreeblossom mentioned how weird it felt to be listening to recordings from the 19th century and how it made that era seem less distant, and that reminded me of how it felt to see colour photographs from before the Russian Revolution, so I googled to find the Prokudin-Gorskii exhibit again.

This morning (after shovelling out the car with cathijosephine’s help), I drove cathijosephine and m_c_t to the T station so they could go to the airport for m_c_t’s flight back to the Wrong Left Coast. It was lovely having him here, and I’ll miss him.

When I got back my darling was making me bacon and eggs and we had a lovely breakfast before running out to the store so she could do a shopping run. (It’s handy to do that when I can drive her, so she can get heavy stuff and not have to carry it from the grocery store to the T to her house. And it’s fun to shop together.) I had only been planning on getting a couple things myself, but I failed to exercise any self-restraint and now I have yummy things in the fridge.

Then I drove her home, and came back to Quincy (stopping to get a few things for the house, notably sand, which yesterday’s experience demonstrated I need). I picked up some Chinese food on the way and ate it with cathijosephine and darxus.

I have a large number of things I needed to get done this weekend that I didn’t do, but I don’t particularly care. Life is full, and life is good.

EDIT: I forgot to mention; she gave me a couple more pieces of purple clothing, adding to the sweater she gave me a few weeks ago. ( And she took a picture of me in my new purple hoodie. )

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.

① A few of the first pictures from my new camera!
② Tonight’s rehearsal was great! I’m so happy to be a part of this project!

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. )