Beowabbit

Happy birthday to silverlibre, my very favourite mother in the whole wild world! I wish everybody I loved were lucky enough to have such a wonderful, amazing mother.

I hope your day is awesome! And congratulations on your first birthday with grandbabies! Much love to you adn ka9sqb.

Whoops!  I’m almost too late with this.  (In my defense, I did leave a message on her answering machine.)

Happy birthday <lj user='bcat1'>!  I hope your day was wonderful and I can’t wait to see you again.  Much love to my little sister and to her whole family. 

OK, I should have posted these ages and ages ago, but here finally are the pictures from my trip with plumtreeblossom to North Carolina last month to meet Rider and Genesis, bcat1’s and spacechicken’s twin babies: Visiting the babies, June 2010 (on Flickr).

(Sorry for the lack of editing and the somewhat austere captions.)

EDIT: spacechicken pointed out that I had a bunch of the photos miscaptioned as to which gorgeous little love-cupcake they depicted. Fixed now.

In the cab with plumtreeblossom on the way to the airport for a super-quick visit to North Carolina to meet our new niece and nephew, bcat1's and spacechicken's twins. Can't wait!

Much to tell; not enough time or awakeness to tell it all.

My last week at my old job was every bit as frantically busy as expected, but I think I covered the major bases, and I got a wonderful send-off. My boss gave me a really kind and touching goodbye. And the department threw me a little reception and bought me a wonderful going-away gift which I’m going to get a huge amount of use from (a streaming-video box that lets me watch Netflix and some other video-on-demand services on a TV).

I had a wonderful big dinner with friends on Friday to sort of mark the transition, and another one after my first day at work with bubblebabble, whom I am now working with, and bitty and plumtreeblossom. I’ve spent lots of lovely time with plumtreeblossom lately, including an unscheduled but delightful date on Sunday because she needed to come over to borrow a cup of Internet.

The new job is exciting and very busy and a little surreal in places, but in good ways. There’s a lot of ramping up to do, but I feel like I’m becoming part of the group quickly, and it seems clear already that the job is a good fit for me and I’m going to enjoy the work and the people.

This is definitely not doing the past few days justice, but I’m a bit fried right now, so it will have to do for now.

Oh! And I had a great phone call with bcat1 and spacechicken and silverlibre and ka9sqb over the weekend. And I think it was last week sometime that I got to hear the babies on the phone for the first time!

Anyway, rich full life with love and friendship and joy and change and stability and BABIES!!! and interesting work and, from time to time, even a little bit of sleep!

Oh, PS: This morning (heading in to MIT from plumtreeblossom’s, I ran into eisa in the T station! And then heliopsis and bedfull_o_books and A. and N. and J. from theatreatfirst whose LJ names I thought I knew but can’t find. It was the most social commute I’ve ever had, and if I believed in omens I would take it as a good one. Actually, I don’t believe in omens but I’m going to take it as a good one anyway.

spacechicken has posted some photos of his and bcat1’s twins to Facebook. Here they are!

I just got back from a fabulous little trip to New York with plumtreeblossom to find large quantities of presents from silverlibre and ka9sqb in Illinois and bcat1 and spacechicken in North Carolina on my doorstep. And an awful lot of them are the edible kind!

An one very special thing was in the box from Illinois: a photo album of baby pictures of me, depicting a typical day in my life as a baby. Yes, there will be scans.

But not tonight. Tonight bed. I am happily exhausted and need to go curl up with a kitty cat.

Happy birthday to my wonderful sister bcat1! I’m lucky to have such a fabulous sister, and President Obama is lucky to have such illustrious company on his birthday.

So I had jotted down all the things I did with silverlibre and ka9sqb while they were here on a piece of paper. Paper was a thin flat substance made from trees or other plant matter which could be marked with pigment to store writing. Unfortunately, it was easily lost, and the writing was easy to damage, for instance, if the paper were accidentally washed, and you couldn’t grep for things written on it, so it depended on elaborate, complex, and difficult filing schemes like “not putting important stuff in the middle of piles of useless stuff” or “keeping things in approximate chronological order, or some other sort of predictable order”, which is why nobody ever uses it any more. Or at least why I shouldn’t.

Anyway, I can’t really do an accurate day-by-day list of what we did, but here are some of the highlights:

• Meals including Firefly’s, Mother Anna’s (where plumtreeblossom and I have wanted to take them ever since we first went there, well before they planned to visit), my mother’s delicious beef roast, Namaskar, and many other excellent meals
• A duck tour of Boston with plumtreeblossom, which she had done before but none of the rest of us had. It was a lot of fun.
• A Boston Harbour cruise aboard a tall ship! This was really delightful, and my stepfather ka9sqb had a long chat with one of the crew, so we ended up learning quite a lot and getting some nifty stories. (He’s an incredible people person. My sister bcat1, his stepdaughter, comes by it honest. :-)
• A free outdoor concert at the Hatch Shell with plumtreeblossom, her housemate vanguardcdk, and cathijosephine (with beef roast as picnic dinner).
• Lots of sitting out on the back deck.
• EDIT: Oh, and I just remembered: the August Moon festival in Chinatown with plumtreeblossom. (She and I also went to Quincy’s August Moon festival today, albeit without my parents.)

Um, and many other things. Which I desperately want to write about but can’t quite remember right now. This is why you should never trust paper. (Anybody want to remind me of stuff I’ve missed?) You can trust my parents, though. They’re awesome!

Breakfast with my parents silverlibre and ka9sqb, as well as cathijosephine, at a nearby hole-in-the-wall diner. Then came back to the house for a bit. Then my parents and I went off and explored the commercial district near Quincy Center for a while, culminating in a ramble through the 18th-and-early-19th-century cemetery near the T station, before having a late lunch at a Taiwanese booth in a food court. (Actually, it’s pretty much the only occupant of the food court. There’s a sushi place and a little place you can buy beer and wine, but I never see them open.) Very good Taiwanese food, and the charming, friendly, and constantly happy-seeming woman who takes orders there alerted us to the August Moon festival on Sunday in Chinatown. (There’s also one in Quincy the following Sunday which I hope to go to, but my parents will already have left by then.)

Then I had to rush off to get the car and drive to plumtreeblossom’s to meet her after work and drive her and her cat Rowley to the vet’s. The vet visit went very well; we got seen right away and the vet was great. He was very good for the exam, and he got blood drawn and got subcutaneous fluids since he was dehydrated, and we took him home with some meds plumtreeblossom is going to be giving him. We don’t yet know what was wrong, but the vet was very helpful and seemed not to think it was terribly urgent, and more importantly, he seemed much better when we got him home! We wonder whether he just got so dehydrated that he was too lethargic to eat and drink, which kept him dehydrated, and the subcutaneous fluids helped a lot. Either that or the ordeal of the vet visit gave him a taste of what horrors might be visited on him if he didn’t start acting like his normal self. :-) Anyway, my beloved plumtreeblossom is much relieved.

Then I came home to homemade pizza (with amazing roasted garlic!) that cathijosephine had made using garlic pesto that plumtreeblossom gave me a few days ago, and which I got to share with my parents. As plumtreeblossom put it to me as I was leaving her place, I was having my belly filled with love from all directions. And darxus was here, and while I didn’t get to chat with him before he crashed, it was nice to see him briefly and know he was here.

My life is in pretty good shape, I would say.

After cathijosephine and darxus went to bed, silverlibre and ka9sqb and I stayed up chatting for a while, and I showed them the photos I posted from the Theatre@First one-acts and silverlibre showed me that video of lightning in slow motion that’s been going around the net but that I had missed, and I walked them back to their room so we could enjoy the night air together.

Now it’s way before my bedtime, but I might actually go to sleep. I ought to clean and straighten, but it’s been a rich full life day, and some extra sleep is probably a good idea, particularly since I think our plan for tomorrow involves the Aquarium and a tall-ship cruise.

EDIT: And I came home to an enticing package from sionnagh, which I probably would have waited until my birthday to open if I had any willpower. It had a lovely big very detailed atlas of Hawai‘i in it (a scientific atlas, with lots of information on weather patterns, flora and fauna, and the like, and plenty of text with the maps), a copy of Brokeback Mountain, and a lovely little miniature Japanese calligraphy set! Thank you, sionnagh!