Beowabbit

Lovely weekend. (Isn’t that how all my posts start?)

On Friday, I met plumtreeblossom after work in Central Square (with some difficulty, since I was incorrect about where the CVS we were supposed to meet was), and we went to Shalimar of India, where I had exceptionally good lamb korma. Then we went to joyeous’ birthday party, where we had a delightful time chatting with folks, watching Treehouse of Horror and (if I’m remembering correctly) little snippets of Return of the Living Dead in honour of it being Friday the 13th, petting her housemate’s very soft bunny rabbit, and generally having a lovely time. Thanks to audioboy for giving us a ride back to Mare’s place.

On Saturday, we met a friend to go to the Flea, where we had a productive day of shopping. Then we got a ride to my house in Quincy, where we had a game of Munchkin (plumtreeblossom’s first) with cathijosephine and darxus and watched a little bit of Spun, a creepy-funny movie about speed freaks that they were watching when we came in. I like the fact that we spent our Valentine’s Day with three other people, and that didn’t detract from it being a sweet, romantic date

On Sunday, after breakfast at a little hole-in-the-wall diner near my house, we went to the Museum of Science, where in addition to wandering around the permanent exhibits a bit we saw the frog exhibit and watched an IMAX movie on the Spirit and Opportunity Mars rovers. Then after a brief stop at the Cambridgeside Galleria so we could both drool over gadgets I took her home. We both have tomorrow (Presidents’ Day) off, so we’ll have a day to rest and recover from all the fun. And we do have an awful lot of fun.

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. )

Among other wonderful things I did this weekend, I marched with plumtreeblossom in the Obama-supporters contingent in the Pride parade. I took lots of pictures. And a generous person marching with us took a couple of me and plumtreeblossom:


I’m eventually going to upload a whole bunch of them to Flickr, but for now, here’s a representative sample.

After the Pride march, we hung out with the delightful surrealestate at the festival and wandered around and collected swag and ate festival food. We also sat at the Poly Boston table for a while.

Other wonderful things I did this weekend were go to the annual Beginning of Summer party where we didn’t stay very long (we were tired from Pride) but I got to see lots of wonderful people and I took some pictures of firespinners which you all should pester me to post, have yummy breakfast at the Burren with plumtreeblossom, and help darxus and cathijosephine pack for the move to darxus’ new place.

I would be much more eloquent about all this if I weren’t so tired. But it was all wonderful.

Huge thanks to sunspiral and roozle (and a bunch of volunteers) for a wonderful party, to David W. and the other people who organized the Obama contingent to march (they were very well organized!), to plumtreeblossom for a wonderful weekend and especially for letting me know there was an Obama contingent to march with, and to alan7388 for doing a fabulous job putting together the Poly Boston table at the festival. And to darxus for pizza, and to cathijosephine for deciding it should be pineapple-and-bacon. And to surrealestate just for being surrealestate.

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...

So plumtreeblossom and I had a lovely morning, with inter alia brunch at a little hole-in-the-wall diner near my house. It was pleasant and sunny when we went in. When we came out it was grey and windy and cold and we thought a storm might be coming in. But by the time I dropped her off in Davis, it was sunny and nice again.

Sadly I didn’t get to see any of Somerville Open Studios, but darxus (aided and abetted by cathijosephine met me at Marathon Sports to buy shoes. See, I have this problem that I buy cheap shoes, and more than half the time they’re crummy and hurt and fall apart right away, so I’m not willing to spend good money on shoes, since it’s not a good investment because they probably won’t work out. The more clever among you may detect a certain amount of circularity to this logic. Anyway, inspired by darxus’ experience getting fitted for shoes there, I met them and got myself a pair of significantly less cheap shoes.

They gave me 9½ wide shoes, which is crazy, because I take 9½ regular. These new shoes feel weird. For example, my little toes don’t hurt. How can you tell you have your shoes on properly if your toes don’t hurt? But I’ll give them another couple days...

Then we went to Cambridge Common for lunch. Since I had had brunch fairly recently, I just had an appetizer — yummy, yummy sweet-potato fries! I have to go back there.

Then cathijosephine and I wandered around in quest of a fax machine, getting distracted by a bookstore along the way, and finally succeeding at a Staples. Then we went back to darxus’ place for a little bit. While I was there, I got a call from docorion, returning my call earlier when we were trying to figure out where we could send a fax from. So I asked him if he had dinner plans, and since he didn’t, I met him in Davis and we went to Redbones for barbecue and had a great time hanging out and chatting.

The one downside to the day is my back. I hurt it recently, probably yesterday morning when I was moving some boxes of papers into the crawlspace above the garage. (This involved carrying heavy bulky boxes up a ladder, so I was holding them in odd ways to keep my center of balance over the ladder.) It was distinctly noticeable yesterday, but wasn’t too bad. (It was still an excellent excuse to get a massage from plumtreeblossom, though!) Today it’s gotten worse over the course of the day. In particular, it really doesn’t like getting into and out of the car, which I’ve been doing a lot of. I look forward to a good night’s sleep and hopefully it will be better tomorrow morning.

In other news, in less than a week, plumtreeblossom and I will be in Las Vegas, meeting sionnagh and her father for a couple of days! That will be delightful; I’m looking forward to them meeting each other.

Now it’s time to take my painkiller and go to sleep. G’night, all!