Friday night and yesterday morning, I did more disassembling in my old bedroom. Slowly, slowly making progress. (I’m moved upstairs, but lots of my stuff is still downstairs.)

Yesterday evening, I picked up plumtreeblossom from the T and we both went grocery shopping. She loves coming out to the huge suburban grocery stores. We each got a huge heaping cartful. (Oh, also yesterday morning I had cleared out the fridge so there’d be any place to put any of this.) Then, after dropping our shopping loads at my house, we went out to the Finnish steam baths a few blocks away and had a lovely blast of heat in the middle of the winter. After that, we went to the Firefly’s Barbeque (gratuitous Flash/audio warning!) in Quincy for dinner, which is becoming one of our favourite dinner venues.

(I tried one of their hot sauces. plumtreeblossom asked me how it was, and I said it was tasty, but pretty mild. She had a teensy taste to see, and disagreed amusingly. To me, it seemed milder than Tabasco, although more flavourful; to her, it seemed stronger than Tabasco.)

Then we came back here, and plumtreeblossom got to stay in my new bedroom for the first time.

This morning, we loaded up the car with plumtreeblossom’s groceries, and went out to the little hole-in-the-wall diner we like to go to for a yummy breakfast. plumtreeblossom needed leaf bags, and we went a bit out of our way to a Lowe’s. (I was debating going to the Home Depot nearby, but ① I don’t like their politics or their labour practices, and ② I had this notion that there might be some stuff at the Lowe’s I wanted, too.) This turned out to be an incredible impulse-purchase success; the Lowe’s had porch swings (with canopies) on sale. They had four different kinds out, one which unfolds into a bed, and a very small one. I bought the one that unfolds into a bed for my deck, so I’m going to have comfy seating (and, when the weather gets a lot warmer, maybe occasionally sleeping) out there! It’s getting delivered in a week. plumtreeblossom had somebody measure the little two-person one so she could check whether it would fit on her balcony. When I dropped her off this afternoon we measured the balcony, and it will, so she’s getting it, and she’ll have a nice covered place to sit out there and have her morning coffee and cigarette. What delightful discoveries!

Oh, and we did find leaf bags. :-)

On the way out of the Lowe’s, I had some weird visual stuff going on in one of my eyes that it later turns out was probably connected with my first ever migraine. It looked like a curved streak in the field of vision of my left eye had kaleidoscope-like flashing lights overlaid over it. The headache, which started to develop around the time the visual weirdness shut off (it started and stopped very very suddenly) was pretty mild and didn’t really bother me, although I did (about an hour later) end up taking some ibuprofen for it. If that’s what my migraines are going to be like; I won’t so much mind having them, but hopefully this was a one-off thing.

After I dropped plumtreeblossom off and came back home, I had the pleasant surprise of a phone call from cathijosephine’s father. He had called basically to say hi and see how I was doing and offer his sympathy over last month’s unpleasantness. That was nice!

So so far, it’s been a fabulous weekend. The rest of tonight is going to be about more house reorganizing (and maybe even cleaning and laundry).

My flowers have started to bloom. Here’s one:


Click the image (or follow this link) for a gallery with a few other photos.

Two of the wildflower species in the mix have really taken off and gotten tall where I planted them. (Some others blew elsewhere in the yard and got a foothold there, I believe.) Thanks to plumtreeblossom’s research, I know that they are Cosmos and Coreopsis, and they’ve both gotten over a foot tall — the Cosmos well over.

Last night I saw my first blooms in the patch I’d deliberately planted, but they were something I hadn’t even noticed among the Cosmos and Coreopsis before — little white flowers maybe a centimeter and a half across. This morning one of the Coreopsis buds had blossomed into a lovely orange-yellow flower. Yay!

This is going to be short because I'm very sleepy, but I had another really lovely day with plumtreeblossom today. We woke up and puttered around the house for a while, then went out on a couple of errands, including brunch at the little diner near my house, and then spent all afternoon doing yardwork. My sweetie weeded my flower-patches! And machete'd down all the foliage that had overgrown the brick path to my porch, which was a very time-consuming job! And I mowed the lawn, and then weeded a bit as well. (I tried siphoning out the gas in my gas mower and going out and getting fresh gas, in case that was the problem, but it wasn't. So I mowed the lawn with my reel mower, which worked better this time than it had last time. Entirely adequate.)

Then we took the T to the North End (Boston's Italian neighbourhood) and had a very yummy meal and some wine out on the patio at a restaurant called Mother Anna's. I rarely make it to the North End, and I allowed to plumtreeblossom as how the next time my parents silverlibre and ka9sqb come to Boston I should take them there. And then it occurred to me that I was having such a delightful time (I mentioned that it sort of felt like being on vacation) that I should share it with them. So I called them, and plumtreeblossom and I got to have lovely little chats with them both.

Then we took the T here to her place. Between sun, physical labour, a yummy rich heavy meal, and wine, we are both very very sleepy, and I think (this is utterly unheard of for me) I might be asleep by 10 or 11. It's a very happy tired.

[EDIT: PS -- I'm going to be giving myself half as much testosterone twice as often now, and today I gave myself my first shot at the lower dose. I had been doing 200mlmg every two weeks, and I was kind of manic for the first couple of days and really dragging towards the end. This should even things out a bit.]

I love my house. It has a deck. Nice people come and eat on the deck with me. Some of them cook for me, and some of them bring me food. I love my friends, too, and my sweet chef plumtreeblossom.

Got to see the fireworks tonight, although in the rain and wind we weren’t sure we were going to last that long for a while. plumtreeblossom, cathijosephine, darxus and I set off for the fireworks over the Charles tonight (after a yummy dinner at Kagawa in Quincy), but due partly to mobility constraints and partly to scheduling constraints plumtreeblossom and I couldn’t stay with cathijosephine and darxus, so we ended up watching the fireworks from the Longfellow Bridge, from which we couldn’t hear the concert, but had a great view of the fireworks.

+: I got to bed unusually early last night, and got an unusually large amount of sleep.
-: Despite that, when my alarm went off I was incredibly tired, and hit snooze umpty-zillion times, and was late using my light box for the first time since I started using it.
(-: And I actually think the light box is more trouble than it’s worth, although I should probably give it a couple more weeks.)
+: Despite getting a late and slow start, I felt like I had a reasonably productive day at work.
++: And afterwards I got to hang out with plumtreeblossom and docorion and mud_puppy at Namaskar and have yummy Indian food.
-: My yummy Indian food was somewhat less yummy than it might have been, because I forgot to ask for no cilantro and no tomatoes.
+: plumtreeblossom’s yummy Indian food was highly yummy, as was the bread.
+: I got to hear some more of docorion’s fun stories.
+: plumtreeblossom gave me an awesome May Day present, an interactive book (not quite a pop-up book, but along those lines, with flaps to open and things to unfold) about pirates! It even has a compass and some jewels embedded in the front cover! Between the compass and the maps I’m sure to find some booty!
+: I got to unburden myself to plumtreeblossom a bit about my medical concerns (well, vent, really; she’s heard it all before).
++: And tomorrow I have an ENT appointment which I am really hopeful about.
+: And after dinner we hung out and chatted over tea at Diesel.
+: I drank a lot of tea at Diesel. And a lot of water and lassi at Namaskar. This is called “foreshadowing”.
-: This fire sure delayed my ride home. Instead of a train straight through from Davis to Quincy Center, it was a Red Line train from Davis to Kendall (where I could faintly smell smoke on the air), a shuttle bus from Kendall to Lechmere, the Green Line from Lechmere to Park Street, and the Red Line from Park Street to Quincy Center.
-: Boy howdy did I have to pee by the time I finally got home.
-: And I’m too tired to deal with the fridge, which I seem to have been attempting to create life from primordial ooze in.
-: And I think I’m too tired to do laundry.
++: But I’m about to go to sleep!
+++: And by this time tomorrow I might know more about my breathing problems and might even have a plan for what to do about them!

(1) I just got home from hearing (and watching) the first concert of Emperor Norton’s Stationary Marching Band. It was fabulous! I haven’t got the energy to write how fabulous it was, but it was exceptionally fabulous. Besides the awesome tide of music, there were circus-style performances: stilts, clowns, aerial silks, poi, hula hoops, belly dancing, and a couple of human marionettes. I was really tired, but I’m so glad I got myself there.

[EDIT: siderea has a great review here.]

(2) A couple weeks ago when I was over at plumtreeblossom’s, her cats were being especially cute and photogenic curled up on the bed, and so I recorded them for posterity.

And speaking of plumtreeblossom, we had a lovely time together this weekend. She came over on Saturday and made us yummy shepherd’s pie (leftovers of which I am having as I type), we watched The Forgotten, which was very interesting and sophisticated in some ways, and very cheesy in others, but was quite fun.

This morning we had brunch at a local diner, spent a little time along the Quincy shoreline, and then spent quite a lot of time at the huge Chinese grocery near my house that cathijosephine introduced me to. (And of course this means that we both came home with shocking quantities of interesting food.)

All in all, it’s been an excellent weekend.

Yay! Yummy dinner with cathijosephine and xmelancholia. (I made corned beef and cabbage.) And before that I met cathijosephine at a mall near my house and she introduced me to the most amazingest huge collection of stores — Kam Mun market, which has a department store and a large supermarket and some restaurants and a dozen or so smaller stores. I’d seen the exterior, and it just looked like a concrete box; I had no idea I could get so many different kinds of stuff inside. (plumtreeblossom, I bet we can find something analogous to the yukata you were looking for there.)

In other dinner news, I met plumtreeblossom for dinner in Chinatown on Tuesday. (We were both a little low-energy for Diesel.) We ended up at Empire Garden, which was where we had our first date—

CHORUS: Awwww...

—and had a lovely dinner and a fabulous time together.

Tomorrow night I have a second sleep study. I predict that they are going to find that my apnea is much worse, and that the pressure that had been working for me when I first got the CPAP machine isn’t working adequately any more. I really need to get around to making that appointment with an ENT, and y’all should feel free to nag me until I do.

And then I have a lovely and full weekend to look forward to.

Life is good.

But first the bad stuff: For those of you who aren’t in the area, it’s cold in the northeast! The sort of cold where my fingers in the nice thick gloves plumtreeblossom gave me hurt by the time I get to the the T station. The sort of cold where the couple times recently I’ve needed to run to catch a train I feel like there are needles in my chest. The sort of cold where my cheeks stay red and painful for a long time after I get to work. After long deliberation, winter has finally decided to come.

Now some good stuff: On Wednesday my lovely plumtreeblossom and I got together, intending to go to the Finnish steam bath in Quincy, but it turns out they’re closed on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, so we just went to Kagawa for yummy dinner. It had been a very stressful day for her (and a much less stressful but still somewhat frazzled day for me), but we had a warm and delightful time together and the cares fell away. And (as always happens when we see each other on a “school night”, and never happens otherwise) I got in to work on time the next morning. If any of my coworkers had been in, they would have been astonished.

And more good stuff: Yesterday I got to go over to darxus’ house to help him and cathijosephine clean (mostly by keeping them company) and have dinner, which was yummy potato pancakes and bacon, and brownies for dessert. I like the way cathijosephine cooks. Then we watched some Star Trek: TNG before I went home. A lovely and productive evening.

And even more good stuff: I feel kind of conceited telling this story in public, but it made me feel too good to escape notice here. Yesterday at work I got a phone call from an ex of mine whom I haven’t stayed in very close touch with over the past few years, although I still consider her a good friend. She said she was calling just because she’s been complimented a lot recently about how well she takes care of people she loves, and how well she takes care of herself — and she said she feels like she learned a lot of that from her relationship with me! So she was calling to thank me. That made me feel really, really good! We got to do some catching up on the phone, and we’ll get to do some more in person soon.

So I guess I can deal with a little cold weather. :-)

So, this morning it was pretty nice. As I was getting ready to leave the house, I realized I’d left my coat in the car last night, and vaguely considered not taking it and either wearing just my sweater, or my sweater and a light jacket. I was running late enough, though, that I went ahead and took not only the coat, but the entire car, leaving it parked on the top floor of the parking garage at the Quincy Center T station.

Then I had a reasonably productive day at work, followed by a brief check-in at Diesel (including a nice chat with dietrich), followed by a pleasant if admittedly slightly chilly walk to Something Something to pick something up, followed by a quick dinner in Davis (by myself, unless you count Terry), since I’d been ravenous before I left work, followed by a pleasant T ride to Quincy, followed by—

Um.

Isn’t my key supposed to go in the lock on the car further than this?

Yes, I’m quite sure it’s supposed to go in further than this. I believe it’s supposed to turn, too. And the door is supposed to open, and welcome me into the car AND OUT OF THIS INSANE FUCKING FREEZING WINDY COLD! I’m completely certain that’s what’s supposed to happen.

That’s not what’s happening.

If the lock on the other side weren’t already broken¹, I could try that door.

So, I can walk home and hope that when the sun comes out tomorrow morning the lock warms up enough for me to get in. [If I had taken the time to check the weather forecast I would have been less optimistic.] Oh! Or I could walk home, and walk to the automotive supply store in the morning and get some of that de-icer you can spray in your locks when they freeze, and see if that works! Yes, that’s a good idea. Too bad there’s no place open now, because I’ll be agitated until I get this resolved. Like, for instance, maybe a convenience store would have it.

Well, there’s actually a convenience store in the T station, and they didn’t have what I was looking for (de-icer for locks), but they did have de-icer for windows, and I figured if it melted ice it was worth a try. Said try, of course, involved wiggling my key in and out of the lock while spraying this stuff at the slot. (I needed the key both to hold the slot open and to help convey the de-icer into the lock, since this stuff didn’t come with the little tube that gets it into the lock. I suspect that’s the major distinction between this product and the kind sold for locks.) And I did this for a long time, in the freezing wind, with the de-icer stuff splashing onto my hands and being blown into my face, occasionally taking breaks to put my hands in my pockets to thaw. And I was just about ready to give up, when the key finally slipped all the way into the lock! Joy! Delight! Success! Er, Progress! The key did not turn, but at least something was happening, which confirmed me in my stubborn determination not to hurry home to a warm bed, but to keep standing there on the windy roof alternately muttering entreaties and threats to the lock under my breath. Actually, I didn’t mutter entreaties and threats to the lock under my breath, but it sounds very dramatic, so I certainly would have if I’d thought of it at the time. Anyway, it might have worked.

So I worked on the lock for another ten minutes or so, with a couple breaks to shelter from the wind in a stairwell, and finally it turned! Joy! Delight! Progress! Success!

Needless to say, the Diesel engine needed some coaxing to start, but that I’m familiar with, and now I’m home and warm and my car is sitting in the driveway. Unlocked. I have no intention of locking it again until the spring, since clearly no good comes of locking my car.

Oh, did I mention that the person who broke into my car a couple weeks ago took a glove? I think it might be time to get a new pair.

But for now, my hands are nice and warm, and my bed will be nice and warm, too.

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¹ This has nothing to do with the burglary; the passenger-side lock hasn’t worked since docorion got the car before me, I believe. Certainly not since I’ve had it.