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plumtreeblossom has had some good news: (1) thanks to Jim Bunning backing down, her unemployment benefits were reinstated — along with most other people’s who were in her situation —, although there was a lot of confusion around that fact as Massachusetts’ unemployment office ramped up again, (2) she has a temp gig for the next few weeks, which she’s had a day of so far and it seems pleasant, if not as lucrative as one might want, and (3) I’m going to let her post about lest I steal her thunder.surrealestate and a bunch of her friends for games on Thursday (although I conked out kind of early), and had dinner with eisa on Friday.plumtreeblossom’s, and then last night she cooked dinner for me — a wonderful meal in the crockpot — before we went to a delightful and colourful birthday party where there was much dancing to ’80s music. (And I again conked out early, but I am told I was very cute snoozing in the dance hall.)plumtreeblossom and I got together with my old college friend beeiger her son projectmothra, and her girlfriend lediva for early brunch at Johnny D’s, and we had a delightful time.cathijosephine and m_c_t ask if I wanted to meet them for a trip to the beach so they could fly their kites. I joined them, had a great time watching them fly kites and hanging out, and was introduced to a wonderful beach just a short walk from the T, which I look forward to taking plumtreeblossom to soon. (We had a kind of stressful experience towards the end of the evening, after it had gotten dark, when after a long walk across he beach m_c_t discovered he didn’t have his phone. The three of us spread out and retraced the path he and I had been walking, constantly calling the phone so it would be ringing, and we did find it. That was a huge relief!)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.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.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif){kind=small}
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.plumtreeblossom for the Indian lunch buffet at Shalimar of India in Central Square. Yummy food and a nice little daytime mini-date.plumtreeblossom after work for fried chicken. The Popeye’s in Kenmore Square where we’d been planning on eating was insanely crowded due to a ball game, so plumtreeblossom suggested we turn it into an impromptu picnic. We walked a few blocks with our food to the Esplanade and had a lovely dinner by the Charles.plumtreeblossom’s house to dump off our stuff and get cleaned up, we went to a combination birthday (yay!) and going-away (boo!) party for Theatre@First stalwart and all-round sweetheart big_jewfro. We were unfortunately too tired to stay very long but we had just a wonderful time. plumtreeblossom managed to drag me into the karaoke room, which I thought I wouldn’t enjoy, but I had a fabulous time. It was a truly delightful party. I hope the Boston area ends up getting big_jewfro and his sweetie back eventually, but wherever he settles will be a big bright spot visible from orbit.plumtreeblossom’s house (fortunately only a few blocks from the party) we collapsed right away.plumtreeblossom’s been several times and said this year’s was the most crowded she’s seen. This is a free concert with an associated vast stretch of marketing tents, all with some connection ranging from direct to very tenuous with ecology. Oh, and food vendors, of course. We had a lovely time, but the crowd was very dense and it was a lot of walking and waiting. Lots and lots of cute dogs to look at! And the weather was spectacular. I’ve put a few photos on Flickr.eisa unload at her new apartment. Due to the large number of people and the relatively small amount of stuff it was very quick, and the traditional pizza was yummy. I’m delighted to have her (and her dogs) back in the area.plumtreeblossom and I discovered that the longest of the three escalator flights at the Porter Square T stop is exactly one hundred kisses long.eisa on Saturday, and then a date with plumtreeblossom that started with a three-course dinner on Sunday, and continued with a trip to the Topsfield Fair on the holiday Monday. We had a fabulous time eating fair food, riding the Ferris wheel, eating fair food, petting the bunnies, eating fair food, browsing the fair museum, eating fair food, checking out the cattle and newborn baby piglets and raptors, eating fair food, seeing the giant pumpkin (1400 pounds!), eating fair food, petting and feeding critters at the petting zoo, and eating fair food. And plumtreeblossom rode an elephant and I got pictures of her on it! And I got pictures of a kangaroo and a camel and the raptors and piglets and lots of other nifty things. And the food was good. I had a wonderful weekend. I love my darling and love doing simple outdoorsy stuff with her, and it was wonderful to see eisa and get caught up a bit, and I got some nice relaxing time with cathijosephine in there, too.
plumtreeblossom and I went to the final outdoor Landmarks Orchestra concert at the Hatch Shell of the season, Verdi’s Requiem. (The shell was insanely crowded, with a full orchestra, four solists, and, according to the program, a “double chorus”, whatever that means.) It’s not my favorite piece of music, but I had a great time with my sweetie; I love listening to music outdoors. I’m very lucky to live in a city with these sorts of opportunities.plumtreeblossom and most of Team Uterus from her show in Festival@First V — surrealestate, wellstar, saraheeyore, and the wonderful oakenguy, who organized the trip — to see the MIT Musical Theatre Guild’s performance of Into the Woods, with a brief (but lovely) appearance and amazing, awesome sets by fellow Uterus Fairy brief_life. We had a wonderful, wonderful time!cathijosephine and m_c_t asked me if I wanted to go out for margaritas (oh, and maybe food, while we were at it). Yes, I did. So we had a lovely time drinking margaritas and coladas and eating potato skins at Acapulco’s in Quincy Center.plumtreeblossom and I are going to Providence for WaterFire, one of our favourite romantic dates. And tomorrow we get to have dim sum with NPCs¹ J. and S. and some of their friends, which I’m sure will be lovely.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:
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 mealsplumtreeblossom, which she had done before but none of the rest of us had. It was a lot of fun.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. :-)plumtreeblossom, her housemate vanguardcdk, and cathijosephine (with beef roast as picnic dinner).plumtreeblossom. (She and I also went to Quincy’s August Moon festival today, albeit without my parents.)plumtreeblossom and I had many quotable lines last night that unfortunately I can't remember. What I do remember is that we sat out on the porch for a long time drinking bourbon and having lovely conversation, as is our pre-sleep tradition.plumtreeblossom did go inside and get an umbrella. I think we were out there for a half hour, with her holding the umbrella over us. It was a magical time.plumtreeblossom and I getting back into the UN-administered camp where we'd been living (it didn't feel like a refugee camp, more like a bustling little developed-world city, but it was small and it was under UN administration; the staff were francophone, although most of them spoke good English too) after having been away. plumtreeblossom thought she couldn't find her passport, but she had an expired one, but it turned out that the one she thought was expired wasn't. She was talking all the UN staff involved in checking our passports into joining her community theater project. Nifty dream! plumtreeblossom hurt her foot really badly. Poor sweetie!xmelancholia and cathijosephine for pizza at cathijosephine’s place and had a lovely time. Lots of catching up, and lots of stories to tell.plumtreeblossom’s, and stayed over so I could drive her to work the next morning and she wouldn’t have to hobble to the T.plumtreeblossom on Friday night; I picked her up at work to save wear and tear on her poor toes, we had yummy dinner at Sound Bites, and we went to a party (where, delightful surprise, we bumped into surrealestate).plumtreeblossom and I went back to Nantasket Beach and had a wonderful time. This time we ended up at the more populous end of the beach, by the bathhouse and across the street from a little commercial strip. I got in a 20-30min nap, which was lovely. I waded into the water a bit, but it was a bit too cold for me. plumtreeblossom was braver than I was and swam a couple times (getting completely submerged). Yay for my salty sweetie. After the beach we stopped in at a little art gallery by the beach and browsed for a while. And we had Dairy Queen for dinner on the way back. :-)plumtreeblossom’s toes back a bit in their healing, but she’s still making enormous progress; today she was walking almost normally and not using the cane much, while on Thursday she hadn’t been able to take a step without pain. I’m very encouraged.chienne_folle, so the loveliness is not over.plumtreeblossom and I will be marching in the annual GLBTQFFAORTFMOMGBBQ Pride Parade tomorrow! There’s no Poly Boston group marching this year (although there will be a Poly Boston table at the festival afterwards, thanks to the unparalleled — unparalleled by me, at any rate! — gumption and efforts of alan7388. So I will be marching with the Obama supporters, which I’m thrilled to be doing anyway. Then we’ll be hanging out at the Poly Boston table at the festival before going to plumtreeblossom’s place to catch our breath and change for a pool party. Whee!plumtreeblossom and I got dinner (meant to go to Frank’s Steak House since I was craving meat, but they had a long wait so we had a lovely meal at a Thai/Chinese place across the street) and saw Speed Racer, which was good psychedelic mindless fun.
This morning, after brunch at Redbones, we went up to Canobie Lake Park, which was really fabulous. I forgot to bring my camera, so plumtreeblossom lent me hers, and I got a couple great pictures of her on the antique carousel (with a fully functional 1922 Wurlitzer organ), and a couple shots from the top of the comparably antique wooden rollercoaster, which I hope will come out OK since I was bouncing around and pretty much unable to aim the camera at the time. We had a delightful time with rides, games, food and snack, and each other’s company. A wonderful little micro-vacation less than an hours’ ride from Boston. We think we want to try to organize a Poly Boston outing up there sometime soon.
One slightly disturbing thing about our time there was that I had my first ever light beer, and my first ever Coors. What I wanted (on discovering their only beer choice was Coors Light) was water, but they didn’t serve water, and my other choices were sugary sodas.¹ So of the choices available to me, I took the one closest to water. I had a college roommate who said that Adolph Coors should be imprisoned for his politics and shot for his beer. It wasn’t that bad (I’d swap the punishments), but it wasn’t beer. However, that’s another experience that Saint Peter can hold against me when I’m at the Pearly Gates.
plumtreeblossom. On Saturday we went to a sheepshearing festival¹ in Waltham with teratomarty and trouble4hire (big thanks to them for posting about it!) and had a lovely time. It was great hanging out with them, and great doing country-fair things within easy reach of Boston. (I drove, but the festival venue is bus-accessible.) While there, we bumped into mrpet and, lady_anemone. Anyway, after the festival, which was huge amounts of fun, the six of us wandered Moody Street and then had yummy tapas for dinner before plumtreeblossom and I went back to my house, where we watched the first two-thirds of Lust, Caution.plumtreeblossom's been able to make it to, because of theater commitments), and tonight plumtreeblossom, cathijosephine, and I get to go see Eddie Izzard perform! Life is incredibly full and fun.plumtreeblossom and I are finally making a trip to New York City.bcat1 and spacechicken so much.²
plumtreeblossom with wildflowers, from September. Two beauties of nature captured in one shot! More flower pics (and one more plumtreeblossom pic are here.darxus and cathijosephine and devoken came over to watch Dil To Pagal Hai (The Heart is Crazy, I think), which is pretty much the quintessential Bollywood movie and was (as my delightful plumtreeblossom, who sadly couldn’t make it, would say) made of awesome. The costumes and dance numbers were particularly impressive even for Bollywood. And today plumtreeblossom and I are driving out to Western Mass to go to the housewarming of a couple friends and former housemates of mine. And basically life is going well, except I need to get more sleep and not decide two hours after I should have been in bed that it’s really time to organize some pictures. :-)
plumtreeblossom and I were drinking our coffee and eating our muffins on her second-floor balcony, a particularly courageous squirrel showed up on the railing and hung out watching us. plumtreeblossom proposed the entirely plausible theory that it was interested in our muffins, and tossed some muffin crumbles towards it (about halfway between it and us). Sure enough, it came and checked them out, ate the smaller crumbs off the decking, and took a large piece under a wicker loveseat to devour at leisure. We tossed it some more, and it came and sat and ate in the open no more than a yard from me for a while, and then took its bounty back up on the railing and ate watching us for a while. Then it bounded off the railing into a tree.plumtreeblossom today. We woke up and puttered around the house for a while, then went out on a couple of errands, including brunch at the little diner near my house, and then spent all afternoon doing yardwork. My sweetie weeded my flower-patches! And machete'd down all the foliage that had overgrown the brick path to my porch, which was a very time-consuming job! And I mowed the lawn, and then weeded a bit as well. (I tried siphoning out the gas in my gas mower and going out and getting fresh gas, in case that was the problem, but it wasn't. So I mowed the lawn with my reel mower, which worked better this time than it had last time. Entirely adequate.)plumtreeblossom as how the next time my parents silverlibre and ka9sqb come to Boston I should take them there. And then it occurred to me that I was having such a delightful time (I mentioned that it sort of felt like being on vacation) that I should share it with them. So I called them, and plumtreeblossom and I got to have lovely little chats with them both.sionnagh on her birthday (July 8, or Double Independence Day as she calls it). Aside from Hamlet, the best dog in the world (see userpic), having a problem with a cut on his paw that won’t heal, it sounds like she’s doing really well. The fact that she had a birthday party the previous night, on the 7th, and it was still very much in evidence in the background of the phone call, speaks well. :-)pheromone, which was delightful.pheromone offered me the use of her tent Friday night, so instead I went up Friday night and came back Saturday afternoon. I am so glad I did that, and so grateful to pheromone for her hospitality. I got to see all sorts of wonderful people from out of town, such as onemintjulep (and I got to meet his sister, the_elle_word), K. and her sweetie A., and a couple people from New Hampshire who don’t use LiveJournal. Also got some hugs in with lilbjorn and docorion, of course.plumtreeblossom. You will forgive me if I don’t go into too much detail. Oh, and there was also good conversation!plumtreeblossom’s house, and the only place in the Boston area that I’ve found that has biscuits and gravy) before she went to Theatre@First for a work day or a rehearsal (I forget which). She’s a delight and I love her. (By the way, if I can let you in on a little secret, we’re dating.)cathijosephine came over for that and a beer. Had a great time with her, and I felt good about cooking, because I haven’t been doing nearly as much of that as I want to lately; it had been quite a while since I had the crockpot out. And it came out very good! I mentioned that I felt silly wasting all the broth but didn’t know what to do with it, and she had the awesome idea to cook pasta in it! So that’s what I did, and I just had some for lunch, and oh, my is it yumminess! That cathijosephine is smart! Walked her home (which was nice, because it was a gorgeous night and the first exercise I’d gotten all day), so I got to stop in and cuddle Chickenfinger a bit. Then I came home and puttered around on the computer for far too long and got to bed late, but I slept in a bit (I don’t have work today) and I feel really good today. The plan for the afternoon is scheduling logistics and house cleaning and organization before Diesel. pheromone on Tuesday, which was awesome! It was great to get there (my first time this summer), and great to get to spend the time with her. We did quite a bit of swimming and quite a bit of work on our impending melanomas. I’m so glad she suggested it! I might have forgotten to go all summer; now I want to go back as soon as possible.plumtreeblossom for Diesel-and-dinner (well, she had dinner; I had just had devoken got together some people to go see the new Harry Potter movie. (I hadn’t realized it was out yet, actually!) Since I recently discovered I can go to BiCamp on Friday night and stay till Saturday morning (rather than my previous plan to day-trip on Sunday morning), and I have to pack and get ready after work by then, and since I checked the T web site and knew going into it that I’d miss the last train and have to take a taxi home, this was a foolish decision. Like many foolish decisions, it’s one I don’t regret at all. Loved the movie, although I thought it was a bit compressed compared to the previous ones, and heavier on special effects. Very glad I went, and I got some great time to chat with devoken while we discovered that yes, we had missed the last train and in the cab ride (which we shared to her house, since she was more or less on the way to my house).
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