Beowabbit

I have done many fun things lately (most of them with plumtreeblossom). In no particular order:

• Saw The Social Network and The King’s Speech. Both were great and had very good (if very different) acting. The King’s Speech led to a lot of poking around on the net looking up historical information and finding actual recordings of speeches (see comments) by George VI (including the eponymous one) and Edward VIII.
• Got together with desiringsubject and plumtreeblossom and a few other people after work a couple times for drinks and had an epically lovely time.
• Had my weekly dinner with cathijosephine (having had to cancel the previous week). Since the weather was so terrible and plumtreeblossom had had a rough and very wet and cold day at work, I asked if she could join us so she could decompress from the day (and get a ride and not have to trudge through the snow and ice), and that was lovely.
• Saw gilana and ladrescher in The Vagina Monologues. This ended up with a delightful bonus: We ran into joyeous at the show, and went out to Grendel’s afterwards. (Maybe sometime I’ll get my picture of the snow koala we saw on our way up; in the meantime, if you follow joyeous on Twitter or Facebook you can see her photo of it. Too cute!)
• Went to surrealestate and DD’s for games, and played Dominion for the first time in a very long time, and had a wonderful time. It’s so wonderful to have DD local again!
• Continued to enjoy owning a car again.

Another wonderful thing I have been doing a lot of is sleeping! I’ve always had a problem getting enough sleep, but lately I’ve been managing to get to sleep earlier than usual, and sleep late on weekends, and I’m feeling much better rested than usual. (Not that surrealestate and DD would have noticed this the other night. :-) I wonder if all the snow I’ve been having to shovel might have something to do with how well I’ve been sleeping. :-/

So in general, I am feeling very good. I am, however, not so thrilled these days with living on this side of the river. Anybody wanna buy half of a duplex in Quincy with a garage and ample off-street parking?

Sorry I’m so overdue for this. I’m so busy these days I’m not even keeping up with my very most favoritest webcomics. :-) (Sorry, Randy and Jeph!)

Had a fabulous visit from my parents (my mother silverlibre and stepfather ka9sqb), much of it spent with plumtreeblossom. Highlights were a yummy Thanksgiving dinner which vanguardcdk joined us for, lots of Brazilian barbecue, a little tour of my building at work, and a trip to the Museum of Science, which my parents really enjoyed.

(Aside: plumtreeblossom and I have Museum of Science memberships that let us bring guests for free. I’m just saying.)

Also made it to woodwardiocom and buxom_bey’s house for tree-trimming and socializing, which was lovely. Unfortunately, I missed a couple other gatherings I really wanted to make it to, due to Too Much Stuff in Too Few Hours.

I am in the middle of a huge cleaning and decrufting in my office, which as long as I’ve lived in this house has been the room I hid all my junk in when I couldn’t think of anyplace else to put it. A certain amount of progress is being made.

( Cut in case you don’t want to read about medical stuff. )

Work has been busy, fun, and full of adventure.

Sorry to be doing this in bullet-points, but at least I’ve finally gotten around to posting!

So, cathijosephine is going to be participating in the Three-Day Susan G. Komen Walk for the Cure to fundraise for breast-cancer research. Wanna sponsor her? She’s trying to get (at least) 100 people to donate $23.00 each. (She’s going to be walking with her mother in San Diego.)

She’s going to be blogging about her training walks at that link too, so even if you aren’t up for making a donation you might want to check out that link.

So I had my first migraine yesterday. I was very very lucky: it was quite short (only about 40min before it was mostly over), very mild, and it was the kind that does not involve much pain! (I know about those because sionnagh used to get them. Took years before she learned what they were, since you think of a migraine as involving, you know, a headache.)

( Details, of interest to me just because I’d never experienced it before. )

I hope this is not the start of a trend, although if they’re all that mild, it won’t be much of a problem.

Oh, and rehearsal was loads of fun!

Wow, it’s been an intense few days. The spectacular show I’ve been involved with had performances Thursday, Friday, and Saturday evenings, and Saturday afternoon. It was just spectacular — easily the most ambitious show I’ve ever been involved with. And it was huge amounts of fun.

Except for a day’s work on Friday — during which I passed out during a coughing fit and fell off my chair —, all my other time was spent with my poor sick plumtreeblossom. She says she was sicker than she’d ever been before in her adult life, and I can believe it. She’d have periods of not really being lucid, although she’d also have periods of being completely conscious of all the misery she was in. And she felt utterly terrible about having to miss the performances. (Actually, I was ill enough that if she’d been completely well, I’d have at least considered backing out of the performances because my cough was so bad. But I managed, and since all the coughing was away from the mikes I don’t think it distracted the audience too much.) On top of all this, she heard of an unexpected and tragic death in the family (her niece’s mother, who was still very much a part of her niece’s and her brother’s lives, died at 37 due to an undiagnosed congenital heart defect), so she had that to deal with too. Poor my honeywuzzle.

This was the first time I’d ever done Foley (sound effects), and it was a huge amount of fun. In fact, it was the first time for all four of us out on stage, but plumtreeblossom (Foley captain) had done such a fabulous job of training us and forging us into a team, and Sarah (Foley coordinator) did such a good job of figuring out how to adapt to plumtreeblossom’s absence on-stage, that it all flowed really smoothly.

I wish I’d been able to stay for strike and the cast party, but I wasn’t really feeling well enough for the labour (wouldn’t have wanted a repeat of my fainting experience earlier that day while I was carrying a heavy expensive speaker!) or for a late night of debauchery, and I needed to go see plumtreeblossom, who’d been a little concerned about being alone through the day’s two performances.

I can’t say enough about how wonderful the experience of being in that show was, and how proud I am of the entire group and how lucky I am to be able to do community theater and live radio drama with such a wonderful, talented bunch of people.

As far as our health, plumtreeblossom and I both seem to have turned a corner. Friday evening all my free thoughts were devoted to figuring out how I could get medical attention quickly after the show was over, and whether plumtreeblossom needed to go back to the ER. But Friday night something seemed to shift, and Saturday morning I was feeling not well, but much, much better. And plumtreeblossom was having a rough time on Saturday when she woke up, but after she got some calories in her she was doing a lot better than she’d been in a while. We were actually hopeful for a while that she might make it to the theater to watch the last performance, but she didn’t get better enough for that. But she was definitely better, and today she’s better still. So we’re both still coughing, aching, and exhausted, but I’m pretty sure we’re both over the worst of it and on the road to recovery.

➀ Today, for the first time since my cough developed, I woke up without any coughing fits! Oh, I’ve had the occasional cough this morning, but basically I’ve been fine. This is a red-letter day!

➁ I had an odd dream this morning. I had just moved into a little house by a canal in an industrial district with a bunch of other little houses nearby. ( The dream. )

I have lots of wonderful weekends, but I just had an especially wonderful one.

It started on Friday night, when warlord_mit and surrealestate had a wine tasting (with several selections from warlord_mit’s ample cellar) followed by a Chicago singalong. That was just about the most fun event I’ve been to since, well, probably the last party at their place. :-) plumtreeblossom and I had a great time.

On Saturday [EDIT: after a yummy breakfast of catching up with beetiger, her son projectmothra, and lediva at Johnny D’s], we needed to pick up new veterinary supplies for her cat Rowley from Angell Memorial Animal Hospital in JP, and since I really miss Jamaica Pond and plumtreeblossom has taken up long walks, I suggested that we combine pleasure and business and take a walk around Jamaica Pond first. Which we did, and we had a lovely and relaxing time and got to see lots of dogs and lots of scenery. (I did, however, break the screen on my old small camera while I was carrying it, though. Good think I have the awesome new one, and a camera on my cell phone.) Nice to enjoy the outdoors, now that Massachusetts has finally decided it’s summer after a couple months of Novembers.

After that, we went to Angell and picked up Rowley’s supplies and window-shopped for quite a while in their adoption center. Had a wonderful time visiting with all the animals! Then we went home to our respective houses.

Sunday was a workday at theatreatfirst, so I got to see plumtreeblossom again at that, as well as lots of other wonderful Firsties. It let out very early, so we had an early dinner together outdoors in Davis Square before going to her place to take care of Rowley.

( Don’t read if needles or related things upset you. )

And today I went in to town to meet plumtreeblossom for the Indian lunch buffet at Shalimar of India in Central Square. Yummy food and a nice little daytime mini-date.

Oh, and today was a good day to take off from work, apparently. I most often take the Green Line down Huntington Ave, and I would have been significantly delayed. That was a couple blocks from my building at work. I’m really glad nobody was hurt!

The good news: Thanks both to time and to the meds plumtreeblossom brought over, I’m doing much better. If you ignore the cough, I’m pretty much well. I went out of the house today. There’s this bright yellow thing in the sky that makes you warm. It was a little weird.

But the bad news is very bad. My housemates have this (darxus started feeling bad last night; cathijosephine realized she was sick early this evening). And so does my poor honeywuzzle. She seemed fine this morning, but by this evening (after I dropped her off in Davis) she was really sick.

I hope all of them get better very quickly, and I feel really really guilty. :-(

Lovely weekend overall, although it had apparent (but not real) tragedy in it and a certain amount of plans gone slightly awry.

plumtreeblossom and I had dinner on Friday night at Mike’s (if I’m remembering correctly) and then wandered over to Hollywood Video to pick out a movie for the night. We ended up getting Bon Cop, Bad Cop, a Canadian comedy-thriller about an Odd Couple–like pair of cops from Toronto and Montréal who have to work together when a body is found right on the Québec-Ontario border. I didn’t remember much about it, but I had heard something about it on the radio and knew I had bookmarked it as something I was interested in seeing. It was pretty fun, despite not being a genre either of us watches much.

On Saturday we ended up at Kelly’s Diner for breakfast, and then plumtreeblossom had to go run an errand, and I went back to her place. When she returned (surprised to find me there — the plan had been for me to go on ahead to my place and she’d meet me there, but I was too lazy) we went back to Quincy.

We found what at first appeared to be a very disturbing situation at my house, which plumtreeblossom has written about, so I won’t go into too much detail. Short version: we thought darxus snake Dorothy had died, but after we warmed her up she was fine. Major scare! So glad she’s OK.

OK, I’m falling asleep, so I’m going to go ahead and post this even though I haven’t caught up to the present.

In other news, my hip is all better (and was by Thursday or Friday).

Had a wonderful, if fairly quiet, New Year’s Eve. In the afternoon I took cathijosephine and m_c_t to a nearby mall so m_c_t could get boots. It was snowing heavily out, and the plows hadn’t had a chance to clear the streets, so getting there was kind of an adventure, and a slow one.

We had a great time at the mall, including a yummy meal from a Johnny Rockets in the food court. However, I had hurt my foot pretty badly overnight (scratching a really bad itch), and towards the end of our time at the mall I was feeling feverish and looking flushed. (Zeph and I had thought at the time that it had turned into a systemic infection, but considering how immediately I got better when she had me put some antiseptic/anaesthetic on it, I think it must just have been the pain.)

Anyway, because of the snow, it took us a lot longer than anticipated to get to and from the mall. When we got home cathijosephine took great care of me, plying me with all sorts of useful OTC drugs. (Wow, that anaesthetic/antiseptic spray was incredibly effective.)

plumtreeblossom and I had plans to go to what was by all accounts a stunningly awesome New Year’s Eve party, but unfortunately we would have had to walk there from the T through unplowed streets, and with my injured foot and the snowstorm, that was a non-starter. plumtreeblossom was incredibly understanding about the change in plans. As it happened, she got so cold walking the couple blocks to Sound Bites for dinner (where we both had very yummy food and wine) that she was just as glad we hadn’t tried to make it to the party. Instead, after dinner, we put a rather odd Gary Cooper movie in the DVD player and snuggled on the couch with the cats for a while before toasting the New Year as cued by her Blackberry.

This morning, I started 2008 2009 with pancakes, bacon, and Jell-O made by my beloved plumtreeblossom; that has to be a very good omen. (The Jell-O is because I’d had a sudden craving the previous night, due to her singing the Jell-O jingle from the radio show we did.) She also sewed some buttons on my coat.

When I got home today, I had a rather disturbing surprise. First of all, the cat was out of food; she had tried to get into the bag of food in the closet, but only succeeded in knocking it over with the opening folded under it so she couldn't get in. Second of all, it was 35° Fahrenheit in the house. Our boiler occasionally randomly shuts itself off for no reason, requiring a button press to turn it back on. I did that right away, but I am still wearing a coat and hat; it takes a while for the house to warm up from that temperature. Poor kitty! I hope it wasn't that cold all night.

Anyway, I was delighted to spend the last afternoon of 2008 with cathijosephine and m_c_t, and to spend the last night of 2008 and the first morning of 2009 with my beloved plumtreeblossom. That left me with a warmth inside that mere temperature can’t touch.

Oh, and I just a few minutes ago got a nice New Year’s phone call from sionnagh. (She says everybody in Hawai‘i is complaining and wearing sweaters because it’s gotten down to 68°F. Remind me again; why do I live in New England?)

I am blessed with many wonderful friends (many of whom I wish I could see more often [*casts a glance towards northern England*]), a spectacular family (of origin and of choice), and a life full of love.