Beowabbit

On Friday, plumtreeblossom, cathijosephine, and I went to see Eddie Izzard’s Force Majeur show, which was wonderfully hilarious. Can’t possibly do it justice. (And wow, the Wang Theatre is a stunning and stunningly restored venue!)

Beforehand, plumtreeblossom and I had had dinner nearby at Empire Garden, which was the site of our first date almost eight years ago, and I had a scorpion bowl for the first time.

On Saturday, we went to Johnny D’s for brunch with vanguardcdk for a late celebration of his birthday, and then headed to the Quincy house. I was exhausted — I’d been a bit underslept all week, and I had had to sleep without my CPAP machine the previous night because some bits were being cleaned — so I had a nice long nap, which is almost unheard of for me. Then I was thoroughly refreshed, and we did a bunch of yardwork (planting and watering our cosmos, and finally managing to take soil samples — previous efforts had been stymied by the weather). We finished just in time to enjoy a brief but torrential downpour from the dry comfort of the porch, had a yummy spaghetti and meatballs dinner, and then watched Ken Burns’ documentary The Shakers, from which we both learned an awful lot.

On Sunday we did a bunch more puttering around indoors and out (I was alternately working on house stuff and PMRP website stuff). I had a nice phone call with my mother silverlibre (and left voicemail for my sister). Then around 2pm when we started to feel a little eleven-o’clockish, plumtreeblossom had a culinary inspiration and made me a grilled-cheese sandwich for lunch with Cheddar, blue cheese, cream cheese, minced garlic, and roast beef. It was spectacular! And she doesn’t even like blue cheese herself. Now it’s her turn to take a nap, and she’s dozing in her room (which has become our nap room) while I catch up with the world.

How’s your weekend been?

(Brief because I really should be in bed.)

So plumtreeblossom and I had lovely plans scheduled for this weekend. Unfortunately, they were incompatible with the amount of coughing I’m still doing. (Was out 2½ days last week; ran out of the good cough syrup Thursday night, got a refill sent to the pharmacy at work on Friday, but didn’t know that it closes early on Fridays and didn’t get there in time. Otherwise I’d probably already be over my Terrible Lingering Cough.)

What we did instead was laze around the house in Quincy yesterday and today watching episodes of Slings and Arrows, which we’d wanted to see since hearing about it, sleeping a lot, and occasionally getting out of bed to eat. (plumtreeblossom observed that it was a bit strange that we were eating cheese dogs with our croissants for breakfast; I pointed out that since it was 1pm it was really a bit strange that we were eating croissants with our cheese dogs for lunch.) I slept a hair over twelve hours last night, and I’m still coughing a bit but feeling a lot better.

And now to bed. Well, after moving my laundry to the dryer so I have socks and underwear tomorrow morning.

Happy Thanksgiving to all, and especially to my darling beloved plumtreeblossom, with whom I’m sharing my seventh Thanksgiving today, and to my mother silverlibre, who came out from Illinois to share it with us. And happy Thanksgiving to all of you!

( Cut for politics of Thanksgiving. )

It’s been so long since I posted what was going on in my life that I’ve got a lot to catch up on. Apologies for filling up your F’list. If you’re lucky, I’ll run out of steam and you won’t have to plow through all of it.

But before I start trying to catch up, I have to at least put my fabulous weekend of food, arts, and love with my honeywuzzle into (metaphorical) bullet points.

Food: Saturday dinner was beef, carrots, and potatoes in the crockpot. (Also a sliced onion, but that didn’t come out very well the way I cooked it; next time I might go back to French onion soup.) The base was (originally alcoholic) apple cider.

Sunday morning my wuzzle made me something amazing that had just popped into her head the other day: pineapple upside-down pancakes! They were awesome. There’s a photo and some description in her journal.

Arts: On Saturday we saw Cirque du Soleil: Totem, which is currently touring in Boston. It was spectacular and lavish and stunning and impressive, but it also had some race and gender/power stuff in it that made me very uncomfortable. And unfortunately the acts that were technically most spectacular happened to be the ones that bugged me the most in that way. I had read a little bit about that before I went, and through the first part (before the intermission) I was thinking to myself, well, yeah, there’s some weird ethnic fetishization here and there, but all in all it’s not as bad as I’d feared. But oh, my, the second half made up for it! I hope to get time and mental energy to write more about this at some point, but given how unlikely that is, for now I’ll just point you to— oh, wait, I can’t; that’s a locked entry. Well, this YouTube video will give you a notion of what I’m talking about, although I don’t think you can see enough of the costumes in that to get a full sense of the spectacular wrongness. And one of the trapeze acts involved a woman being led blindfolded to a man on a trapeze, and then finding herself lifted into the air with him. She resists his advances for a while, but it’s all OK in the end because no means maybe and maybe means yes and she ends up happily acquiescing. OK, circus (like opera) is not where I would go for originality or emotional truth or serious discourse about power and consent, but really? In 2012? (That was another one of the ones that was just stunning and beautiful and impressive as a piece of circus art — lots of instances of her dropping and him catching her by an ankle or a wrist, for instance — that was marred for me by the politics of the thin veneer of narrative.) And I found it more frustrating because so many of the acts didn’t have stuff like that that bothered me, and I wish I’d been able to just revel in the spectacle and enjoy all of them. All that said, I am still very glad we went and had a fabulous time. EDIT: This YouTube video gives a bit of a flavour of the show. (The Sioux hoop dance you see a bit of in that video was apparently actually done by Sioux hoop dancers and done in consultation with some office of the Sioux Nation; that’s not the horribly wrong roller-skating bit I’m talking about above.)

On Sunday we saw the Randolph Theater Company’s performance of Avenue Q, which was spectacular and hilarious and a great demonstration of the fact that racism in art doesn’t bother me nearly as much, if at all, when it’s consciously (even if frivolously) being addressed as a topic of the work.

Love: See above about the pineapple upside-down pancakes. While she was cooking me sweet love in a frying pan, I was doing her laundry. (The dryer at her house is busted, and three flights down from her apartment anyway.) And the first cosmos of the season blossomed this weekend while she was here; my flowers date from her giving me some wildflower seeds (notably cosmos) as a gift early in our relationship so they have a bit of a special meaning for us.

There was also a conversation in the car about cannibalism (with a detour into black pudding) which reminded me how well suited we are to one another. I love this wuzzle!

Um, I guess that was a bit longer than bullet points. Sorry!

Since last weekend (Circus weekend!), I’ve been busy.

You might need to click this twice; I do, on two different browsers:

• Monday was the regular Poly Boston dinner at Bertucci’s. Unfortunately plumtreeblossom couldn’t make it because of rehearsal. It was quite fun, with a bunch of cool new people!
• Tuesday I had dinner with xmelancholia near (my) work; she introduced me to a new-to-me restaurant, Mulan. I loved their chicken in chili sauce. More importantly, I loved the opportunity to catch up with xmelancholia. She rocks, and I hadn’t seen her in a while.
• Wednesday I usually get together with cathijosephine for dinner, but she was out of town for a funeral (my sympathies to buxom_bey, whose relative’s funeral it was), so plumtreeblossom and I went over to hang out with surrealestate, DD, and little J, and we had a blast. Love that little baby! (Actually, love all of them!)
• Thursday I got together with teratomarty, who works near me. Among the impetuses (impetusses? impeti?) for getting together were some biological specimens (small animals, mostly arthropods) in jars that I had aquired, and wanted to pass along to him. I had enjoyed the food at Mulan so much on Tuesday that I suggested we go there again. Had a great time.
• Friday morning in the shower I heard that the annual sheepshearing festival at Gore Place was going to be Saturday. Oops! plumtreeblossom and I love that event, and had tried unsuccessfully a month or so ago to figure out when it was. We ended up shuffling some plans around so we could go.
• Friday night I drove to the airport to pick up bedfull_o_books, who was arriving at Logan after a very very long series of flights from Beirut. Got to hear about her fabulous visit to Lebanon and Egypt with r_ness, and she brought me some Lebanese coffee with cardamom which I look forward to making.
• Saturday I slept really late (needed to; the flight was delayed, and I was sleep-deprived anyway to start with), so we were late to the sheepshearing festival, but we got there in time to enjoy epic fair noms, stroll among the vendors (and make some impulse purchases), and see the border collie demo (border collies managing sheep and goats). I had foolishly forgotten to bring my good camera, but I got a few photos on my phone which I may get around to posting eventually. Afterwards, we had dinner at Blue Ribbon Barbeque in Arlington, which I’d never been to before (although I’ve had it catered at work a few times). The brisket was quite good. (The sausage was good too, but, contrary to the menu’s assertion, it was not at all spicy.)
• Today, after sleeping in (which we both needed) and breakfast at The Broken Yolk, I came home to Quincy for a very productive afternoon of yardwork and working on the house. I completed three of my four painting projects; just have a final coat on the office door left to do. I didn’t get as much cleaning done as I’d like, but I got lots of work done on the yard and I have the pleasant aches of a productive day of physical labour.

So, busy and happy (and as always, epically in love with my honeywuzzle).

Just wanted to let you all know I’m still here. :-)

plumtreeblossom and I have a busy and fun weekend ahead of us, starting with Pride and Prejudice again tonight and including dinner with vanguardcdk, his parents, and cathijosephine on Sunday.

And wow, typing this on a touchscreen is a tedious process!

plumtreeblossom’s short play “Dan in the Lion’s Den” has been chosen to be one of the Hovey Players’ summer shorts! I am unsurprised (it’s a great little comedy) but delighted, and so excited to see it! When Theatre@First performed it, plumtreeblossom directed it herself (and ended up changing genders of two of the three characters to match the fabulous actors she cast), so it’ll be exciting to see what another director and cast does with it. I can’t wait!

(The other play I recognized is Chris Lockheardt’s very funny “Not Funny”, which T@F has also done. Judging by the two shorts I’m familiar with, this is going to be a good festival!)

My love also grows delicious cucumbers on her balcony and makes awesome pickles out of them; I just had some.

Last night plumtreeblossom and I had a lovely dinner and drinks with cathijosephine and vanguardcdk at Five Horses, a new upscalish restaurant in Davis Square that pheromone and Dreaming had introduced us to. It was Yum! Mee! And the company was excellent. Was great to get some catching up — I hadn’t seen cathijosephine in a couple weeks, and while I see vanguardcdk on a fairly regular basis, it’s nice to get to sit and have a relaxed chat.

The food was, well, “spectacular” would only be a very slight overstatement. I think “superb” is the right adjective. I love that place. It’s yuppified comfort food. They have bread and butter on their menu — bread and butter — and yes, it’s definitely worth the $4 or so, at least if you like the flavour of goat milk. My Kentucky-fried Cornish game hen (with jalapeño mashed potatoes and macaroni and cheese flavoured with pork belly) was as yummy as it was last time, and we all had lots of appetizers to share. And the Old Fashioned I had was very good, very mellow.

And when we got back to plumtreeblossom’s place (also vanguardcdk’s place) she and I put some fruit to drying overnight in her food dryer, so we each have snacks for work today.

Anyway, there’s this morning’s effort at approximating a post a day for a while. :-)

Well, the hip was much improved by the time I went to bed last night. It was much worse this morning. And it was a lot worse after I got into my car. [EDIT: Drove it to the T station and took the T to work, which was at least three mistakes.]

Had to take a taxi to tonight’s Poly Boston dinner (which was lovely; I treated the haze of pain I was in with a haze of wine) and from there to plumtreeblossom’s place, but I’m done having to move very far for a while. And with some luck, I’ll be able to walk tomorrow, and without some luck, at least I have a doctor’s appointment scheduled for Thursday.

‘Codeine... bourbon.’ —reported last words of Tallulah Bankhead

Had a lovely small-plate dinner and three lovely (and imaginatively named) mixed drinks with cathijosephine and ragingamazon and some friends of ragingamazon’s at the lovely stealth bar Brick & Mortar upstairs from Central Kitchen in Cambridge. We had a delightful time, and I look forward to going back there soon!