Another lovely weekend with plumtreeblossom. On Saturday we went to a sheepshearing festival¹ in Waltham with teratomarty and trouble4hire (big thanks to them for posting about it!) and had a lovely time. It was great hanging out with them, and great doing country-fair things within easy reach of Boston. (I drove, but the festival venue is bus-accessible.) While there, we bumped into mrpet and, lady_anemone. Anyway, after the festival, which was huge amounts of fun, the six of us wandered Moody Street and then had yummy tapas for dinner before plumtreeblossom and I went back to my house, where we watched the first two-thirds of Lust, Caution.

On Sunday, we went to a Poly Boston dim sum organized by a wonderful person whose LJ name, if he has one, I don't know. We had a wonderful, wonderful time. Thanks so much to the organizer!

Last night was the monthly Poly Boston dinner at Bertucci's (the first one in a while plumtreeblossom's been able to make it to, because of theater commitments), and tonight plumtreeblossom, cathijosephine, and I get to go see Eddie Izzard perform! Life is incredibly full and fun.

And this coming weekend plumtreeblossom and I are finally making a trip to New York City.

Whee!

---

¹ Sadly, the venue has already taken down the web page about it. If you are luckier than usual, I will eventually get around to posting some pictures, though. Because, you know, you all appreciated the Topsfield Fair pictures and the pictures of our trip to DC to meet bcat1 and spacechicken so much.²
² That I haven’t posted yet. Those pictures.

(Cross-posted from polyboston for the benefit of Boston-area poly-friendly people who might show up if I give you the extra nudge. :-)

Hi! Just wanted to remind folks about tomorrow’s monthly Poly Boston dinner at the Alewife Bertucci’s. Details are on the calendar, but the short of it is: 7:00pm at the Alewife Bertucci’s, and it would be nice if you could RSVP so I know how big a table to get us. (Commenting here is fine.) See folks there!

In case anyone cares, I plan on being at Diesel tonight.

Just a reminder of tomorrow’s Poly Boston dinner tomorrow at 7 at the Alewife Bertucci’s. Details are on the calendar. If you’re planning on going, it would be nice if you could RSVP by email or comment here, although that’s not required.

[Cross-posted to polyboston.]

Being social, anyway.

I think I already mentioned that the Poly Boston Bertucci’s dinner was well-attended, fun, and educational.

Tuesday I wasn’t expecting to go to the Diesel since I got to work very late and I had a bunch of stuff to do at home. But I had a successful afternoon at work and came to a natural stopping point around six and decided to go ahead and go to the Diesel since I knew chienne_folle was going to be there. Had a nice (and somewhat quieter and more sedate than usual) time at the Diesel, followed by a very pleasant dinner with chienne_folle and adrian_turtle at Yoshi’s.

And today was The Nightmare Before Christmas 3D with golux_org, lycaena, warlord_mit, and the ever-delectable plumtreeblossom. Many thanks to plumtreeblossom for organizing that! This was the first time I’d seen a 3D movie on the big screen, and it was done with polarized filters rather than the traditional 50s-style red-green glasses, so the colours were all bright and vivid. It was tremendous fun! (It was also the first time I’d seen The Nightmare Before Christmas on the big screen at all; I didn’t see it in the theatres when it first came out.)

Now time to tidy my room a bit, throw some food in the crockpot, and sleep.

I’ve had lots of wonderful stuff going on since I posted last, and I’m not going to bother trying to catch up. But I wanted to post about seeing plumtreeblossom last night, which was lovely. I brought over dinner in my crock pot, a pre-marinated turkey tenderloin which I had cooked according to a recipe cathijosephine had come up with: cooked for about 5hrs in soy sauce and apple juice, along with lots of quartered small potatoes. I threw in a few spices, too, but I don’t remember exactly what they were. (Pretty sure there was some ginger.) I cooked it on high and it came out amazingly tender, and the potatoes sucked up all the soy-sauce and turkey flavour and were quite yummy themselves. For dessert we had the remainder of a cheesecake plumtreeblossom had made the last time I was over and it was still yum-m-mee. And we had some red wine (don’t remember what kind). Lovely, lovely dinner.

I stayed over at her place last night, and it was the first time we’d tried that on a “school night”, and also the first time I’d taken my CPAP machine away from home. Success on both counts! I admit, waking up at 6:00am is not exactly something I’d just happen to do on my own, but I didn’t complain, and plumtreeblossom made me coffee. :-) I’d been worried that without my humidifier in the room (which makes a huge difference) I’d get completely dry the way I did a few times the first week I was using the machine, but plumtreeblossom has a really pretty lighted ultrasonic humidifier (sort of a cross between a humidifier and a decorative fountain) that she had brought into her room, and it seems to have done the trick.

I’m going to take this opportunity to comment about how much of a difference the CPAP machine has been making. A couple days recently at work I’ve been able to start working on a project in the morning, and just keep working on the same project for the whole day, and not get sidetracked, and not get overwhelmed, and remember what I was working on even when somebody comes in my office and asks me a question. I remember being able to do that! And it’s so good to be able to do it again. The same thing is going on, to a less dramatic because less easily quantifiable degree, in the rest of my life. There are a lot of things (like finishing unpacking) that I’d basically been stalled on for a long time that I’m seeing myself start to make some progress on again. There are all sorts of things — often trivial little things — that I used to think of and think, well, maybe I’ll do that someday if I have the energy, and now I think of them and (sometimes, anyway) I just go ahead and do them, or at least start them. And I’m still absent-minded and spacey sometimes, but my memory (and especially my ability to keep track of things) is clearly much improved. And my alertness and sense that I’m catching what’s going on around me is better. Yay!

Oh, and tonight’s Poly Boston dinner at Bertucci’s was well-attended and full of interesting conversation. (For instance, I learned a lot about the history of Islam, and about particularly flammable radio transmitters.) I think I may make that a monthly thing, since it seems like a venue that works really well.

Assuming no more surprises, I plan on being at Diesel tonight (probably between 6 and 7).

(1) Here, I told y’all about my incorrect contact-lens prescription, and getting it changed. On Friday, I picked up the new lenses — and they’re even worse than the original prescription! They’re a stronger prescription, and I told the optometrist when I went back to tell him the original prescription was wrong that I thought it was an overcorrection, so now that I realize that I’m not at all surprised that the new one is even worse. I could go back and try to get it adjusted again, but I have no confidence in this guy any more. I could try to get him a prescription for the exact same lenses I used to have (of which I still have a couple pairs, and in fact they’re what I’m wearing now to type this; the only thing that bugs me about them is that they’re very floppy and physically hard to handle). Or I could consider the $300 or so I’ve spent on this so far (lenses and exam) squandered and start over with another optometrist. Grump.

(2) Pride was fun, but wet. Very wet. And it was less fun for cathijosephine, who was staffing the table at the rally on the common while we marched, and who had the shelter break spectacularly and collapse in a gust of wind. It was only prevented from falling her (I understand; I wasn’t there for this) by the quick-thinking cute burly guys in kilts from the Utilikilts booth across the way, who caught it as it fell. And all this happened just as the parade was ending, so (I presume; I didn’t actually hear this from her) before the rally and the booth had had much traffic.

The march itself was fun, though. I was surprised at the size of the crowds watching, given the weather. We handed out almost all the cards I printed, I believe, and a bunch of pamphlets. The signs cathijosephine and others made looked great. The actual marching contingent was pretty substantial. And I ran into gishmi1ish! That was a delightful surprise.

Have to go have a hot shower and do some laundry now...

[I started writing this on my phone on the T last Wednesday, and am just getting around to posting it now, so for purposes of the text below “today” means May 24, 2006.]

I just noticed in my Treo calendar that today is the birthday of my first real girlfriend. (I qualified that with “real” because before her, in high school, there was somebody I went out two or three times, shared tender I love yous with, and pined over for a year or so.)

She was, well, not somebody any of you will be able to imagine me dating. She was raised a fundamentalist conservative, and she was a bit homophobic (in the “uncomfortable around” sense). But when she was involved with me, she was in a questioning phase, unsure of the faith, politics, or values she grew up with, and willing at least to consider those I represented.

( Several more paragraphs. )

Karen, wherever you are, I hope you’re happy and I wish you well. I wouldn’t do it over again, but I don’t regret it a bit.

...but today, more of the grump.

My vacation was wonderful! Relaxing, refreshing, invigorating, and therapeutic. (And I picked a good week to miss, since New England had enough rain to produce major flooding while I was gone.)

I came back, underslept due to night flights but happy, did some organizing of my pictures (some of which will hopefully be forthcoming soon), and walked into a couple of crises. One of them was engendered by this dreadful article in the Herald and the unfortunate fallout it generated for the nice people who work at Diesel. I’m happy to say that last I heard (I wasn’t able to go tonight, and got a phone report during the evening), no creepy clueless people actually showed up tonight, but a number of them called the Diesel and threatened to. And it sort of threw a bunch of us into a flurry of damage control and planning.

(Note, by the way, that the tone of the actual quotes in the article does not match the tone of anything around them, including statements generally attributed to the interviewees but not inside quotation marks. I’m really glad I did not get quoted.)

So that was one little crisis.

The other one was at work. On Friday (while I was still on O‘ahu with sionnagh), an important server died with a hardware failure. So I knew I was coming in first thing on Monday to rebuild it.

Well, “first thing” would have meant not sleeping through my alarm due to jet lag. And for various boring technical reasons, rebuilding the machine was complex and is still not quite done to our satisfaction (and probably won’t be for a while). Anyway, I left work at a reasonable hour yesterday feeling optimistic about finishing this morning, and had a lovely time having tea and catching up with ragingamazon in Harvard Square and came home to sleep.

Only, more with the jetlag. Around 6:00am I realized if I actually did fall asleep I’d probably sleep through my alarm again, and got up to work on Poly Boston stuff and some other things. So I ended up going in for my second day of server rebuilding with no sleep, and stressed about what tonight’s Diesel social might be like. (Again, it seems to have turned out fine, not that I know from personal experience.) And I was slow at work because of that, and having lots of “Wait, what did I come in this room to do?” experiences. And at the end, I discovered some unpleasant complexity that I needed my boss’s help with, and we had a productive little ad-hoc debugging session together, and finally decided that we’d done all we could do today and most things were working well enough to leave... just about too late to make it worthwhile going to the Diesel (which by this time I knew would have been fun and not work).

OK, none of this sounds tragic, and it’s not, but the thing is that I’ve come home from vacation and I don’t have that relaxed “I’m home in my sanctuary and happy to be back” feeling I usually do. And probably going from warm sunshine to grey chilly drizzle doesn’t help, although I am very glad my new house is a lot drier than my old one.

I’ll feel a lot better when I’ve gotten more sleep, which I should try to do soon. Probably going to watch a movie first, though.

And I have awesome friends. Yay!