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.

Had a fabulous, fabulous time last night at sunspiral and roozle’s amazing party.

darxus was there with cathijosephine’s DSLR camera (and cathijosephine), and he got some great pictures. They start here, and the first bunch are of firespinning (and firejuggling). He camera-geeks about how he took them in this entry. After the firespinning, there are some great indoor pictures (after plumtreeblossom and I had left), including a few lovely pictures of cathijosephine. And fans of cathijosephine, of buxom_bey, of gorgeous women kissing in general, or of fire will be interested in this shot.

[EDIT: Oops; I had linked to somebody else’s pictures too, but they’re in a locked post. Sorry!]

(I took some video of the firespinning; my little digicam does better at that than at still shots in low-light conditions for some reason. I haven’t looked to see whether any of it turned out yet.)

I also call your attention to this gorgeous sunset picture.

In other photo-related news, I got plumtreeblossom a camera yesterday, and from a purely selfish perspective it was a really wise investment on my part. This post of hers made me extremely happy. Awwww...

I'm in northeastern Connecticut camping with cathijosephine and darxus. I was very late getting out of Boston, due to a combination of factors including my own poor planning, and was stressed about that, but it wasn't insanely late by the time I got here (with our food and tents -- darxus and cathijosephine came down on darxus' bike), and we got the tents set up without too much trouble.

Oh, the sky was gorgeous! I really should have brought my big telescope. The stars were intense.

This morning Zeph made yummy breakfast of bacon and scrambled eggs and scrambled pancakes with berries. It's gorgeously sunny. We saw a couple raptors of some sort circling this morning. darxus has been getting lots of good pictures. Life is good.

I has a flavor. It a bacon flavor.

OK, I again should be asleep instead of posting, but this time I’m going to post. Quickly, though, with bed to follow.

• Wednesday and Friday: With a bunch of other people, saw off ragingamazon before her two-year adventure. (Well, “two-year adventure” is understating it. This is ragingamazon. Her whole life is an adventure.)
• Saturday night: Had a quick dinner in Davis with plumtreeblossom, followed by a very fun reading night, followed by other fun.
• Sunday morning: Went to a potluck brunch with plumtreeblossom, which involved catching up with all sorts of wonderful people I don’t see often enough, among them lilbjorn.
• Sunday evening: Went back to Body Worlds 2 at the Museum of Science, this time with chienne_folle. Really enjoyed it again. Afterwards got to catch up with chienne_folle over very good meatloaf (mine) and corn tamales (hers) at the Cheesecake Factory.
• Monday evening: Had cathijosephine over for a very unpretentious dinner.
• Today: Finally called an auto glass place to have my window replaced (reminds me, I need to get some stuff out of the car before they come over). Had dinner and a wonderful conversation with plumtreeblossom in Davis, and briefly dropped in on the Diesel social afterwards, although it was pretty quiet by that time.

In other news, I finished watching Catch 22. I had only watched it once before, as a child, in a Cinemascope print projected with an ordinary lens so everybody on the screen was noodle-thin, with one of the speakers torn so there was this hideous buzzing all the time. Oh, and the projector bulb burned out for about 10min at one point in the middle of the movie. (For all I know, the reels were shown out of order, too. This was Catch 22; how would I have known?) It made much more sense this time around.

Well, the good far outweighs the bad, but I’ll start with the bad because it’s more recent:

I had a lot of stuff to do over break at work, and I slept a lot for the first part of break, so I was at work late today (New Year's Day) to catch up. When I came out to my car, I discovered that somebody had broken in. They got my cache of parking-meter quarters. Unless they’re scattered somewhere in the car (which is quite possible; it was a mess), they also got my ~$70 Bluetooth GPS receiver, a somewhat prized possession. I am very relieved that they didn’t get into the trunk (not that that would have been easy) and get my CPAP machine, or my big weekend-away-from-home duffelbag. And I have little micro-cuts from sorting through things. (I’m guessing safety glass wasn’t as good in 1983 as it is now, or else that it degrades over time, because in addition to the safety-glass-style chunks, there was lots of tiny glass dust. And I was sorting through things to see what they’d taken.)

I’ll need to do a better search (and clean out the glass) in the light sometime. [Just as I was about to post this I thought to run out and check: They didn’t take my EZ-Pass, which would have let them put tolls on my credit card until I noticed and cancelled it.]

The good, though, was very good! Fabulous New Year’s Eve party with fabulous people, including a few from out of town I was expecting to see and one from out of town I was pleasantly surprised to see, wonderful New Year’s Day brunch (at which I discovered that bacon and cheddar waffles are really yummy!), and all of it spent with the lovely and delightful plumtreeblossom. It was a very good New Year’s Eve, and a good beginning to the new year.

May you all have love, snuggles, good old friends, good new friends, and all the bacon and cheddar waffles you want in the new year!

[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.

Just got home from a fabulous, delightful weekend in New York City. I hope to write all about the weekend when I have time, but for now, I’ll just mention that at the performance I met K.’s good friend and collaborator Sukato (an expected pleasure) and also K.’s father and stepmother (an unexpected pleasure), and also that the squirrels in Central Park are amazingly tame and that it is financially stupid to drive down to NYC when there are busses that will take me there for $20-$30 round-trip (not that that’s going to stop me from doing it again). Now to sleep! Well, first to shower, because I don’t think I’m willing to sleep with myself before a shower.

This social-networking site may lay bare your life and the lives of everybody you’ve ever met in a cavalierly whimsical way, but you cannot resist it, for it is purple. Here I am. (New and improved! Now with working link!)

PS — Yes, Hawai‘i is awesome, although currently I have discovered that being jetlagged, sleeping fifteen hours, and then drinking lots of coffee might not be the wisest course of action.

woodwardiocom is a hunk. Here’s proof. (He’s also smart, funny, and talented.)

Large chunks of my friends list already know this, but I thought I’d point the rest of you at the pictures.

In case I don’t post tomorrow, happy birthday to sandhawke.

I’ve had some fabulous times lately, but I’m so far behind in posting about them that I’m just going to post about yesterday evening. Had a wonderful dinner at Baraka Café, a Tunisian place in Central Square, with purrfab, followed by a meander around the neighbourhood, punctuated with lots of pausing to look at and smell flowers, and check out a nifty 1930’s-or-so truck (no longer drivable; evidently last on the road in 1998, according to the inspection sticker), a Jaguar (“Mmmm, shiny!” said purrfab), some yard art, a little balancing cow in somebody’s window, and the choir practicing at a Korean church. All of this was the background for some excellent conversation.

Then I stopped by ivyvigne’s, and ended up hanging out for quite a while with her and somebody whose LJ name I don’t know. That was delightful. It’s nice to be hanging out with some people who are as cuddly as I am again – I had a bunch of people like that in college, but through the years I’ve had less and less of it in my life. And ivyvigne has cool friends (and housemates). My one regret was that I didn’t end up hanging out at all with apassingfeeling’s pug Elliott [fixed spelling]. Oh, well; next time.