Beowabbit

I’m too sleepy to do justice to my lovely date with plumtreeblossom, so I’ll just point y’all at her post about it. I’ll just add that Casino Royale is the first post-Connory Bond movie that I think deserves a place next to the original Connory ones (and a place next to Ian Fleming’s novels).

(But the product placements were very annoying.)

Oh, I’ll also add that plumtreeblossom is a cutie and a delight!

After my lovely date with plumtreeblossom, I drove cathijosephine and her luggage home to her place from darxus’, and then we took her cat Chickenfinger whom I’d been catsitting over to her place from mine.

(darxus has posted links to their India pictures, both his and cathijosephine’s, in his journal at http://darxus.livejournal.com/160407.html. I haven’t looked through all of them, but I got to see some of them on the camera over dinner after I picked them up. Wow. Just wow.)

PS — and as plumtreeblossom says, Tú y yo near Powderhouse Circle has amazing food. I want to go back there lots and lots.

Saw the Fireworks with cathijosephine and her family and her friend C. They were amazing — better than last year! Here are some pictures. They don’t capture the size — probably a fifth of the arc of the sky, from where we were sitting — or the brightness, but they’re better than nothing. I have some video I may trim down and post a link to at some point, too.

Did I mention that the fireworks were amazing? They were amazing.

( pictures )

PS — A few more are available in the gallery. I think these are the best, though.

PPS — The fireworks were amazing!

These are pictures of what will hopefully soon be my new house in Quincy; it’s the left right half of this duplex. Cross your fingers for me!

House, deck, and garage

House

This is quick, because I’m very sleepy, but I’ve been meaning for a while to point people at my friend ragingamazon’s journal. She’s a photojournalist, and she’s spending three months in Israel (with side trips). That means especially interesting stories and pictures. (This userpic is cropped with permission from a picture she took, by the way.)

Yes, I should be asleep, but I’m still on Hawai‘i time, which means I’m still puttering around at 2:00am EST.

I’ve started a page with free (public-domain) LiveJournal userpics cropped and resized from pictures I’ve taken. Right now there are only a handful, but I’ll add to them. Feel free to grab and use, for LiveJournal or anything else. (Note that I’m only releasing the cropped, resized 100x100-pixel images into the public domain; the originals are not, although if you want a larger version of one of them drop me a note or comment and I might be happy to accommodate you.)

The userpics are available at http://www.aq.org/~js/clipart/userpics/, or in a less-scrolling-required grid format at http://www.aq.org/~js/clipart/userpics/grid.html.

(By the way, I used to use the gecko picture there as one of my own userpics, but I’ve retired it.)

So last night’s Poly Boston dinner at Sol, the Brazilian barbeque buffet in Kenmore Square, was lots of fun and well-attended. I think there were about ten people there, maybe more, including one person for whom it was their first Poly Boston event and one for whom it was their second. The food was yummy, and the company was lots of fun. Especially the green company. (One of us had turned green, but it had nothing to do with envy, nor with the food.)

I had been thinking of going out to Western Mass for the bowling trip, but I decided yesterday or thereabouts that my life between now and when I leave for Hawai’i on the 10th is way too full. So of course I puttered around and procrastinated most of today instead of getting ready for my trip. :-)

This morning, though, I went over to visit Bearpaw (a friend and former housemate who lives nearby) and Schnapps. Schnapps was sionnagh’s cat when she first moved in with me (and Bearpaw). But by the time the household separated, Schnapps had bonded strongly with Bearpaw and (especially) his partner Lisa, and sionnagh and docorion and I had a dog that Schnapps did not get along with, so Schnapps stayed with Bearpaw and Lisa.

Schnapps has had serious kidney failure for several months now (it was diagnosed last summer), and is probably near the end of her days. She’s lost a lot of her vision and (I think probably) her hearing. But she’s still energetic enough to climb up on my lap, and seems content to curl up by the window in the sun.

I put some pictures of her in my photo gallery. (Also, if you scroll down to the bottom, there are a few pictures from Ottawa Pride back in 1995. See, I told you I’d been procrastinating.)

I’ve finally got my pictures from Shayde’s birthday party aboard the Fame organized and resized, and checked in with people for permission to post them. So here they are!

OK, this is not really going to be entertaining to anybody but me, but I picked up a box of juice off the shelf at a Store 24 near my house on the way home tonight, and noticed that it had another language on the other side. And I noticed it was in Cyrillic. And I noticed it was not Russian, but Bulgarian. Not a language I’m used to seeing in a random convenience store.

( Tangerine Carrot Lemon & Apple Premium Juice )

So sionnagh and I went to the Turbo Tabla bellydance concert at Karim Nagi Mohammed’s Arabesque series at Club Passim. Wow, that was an awesome experience.

( micro-review, with pictures )

If you like Arabic music or dance music, you should go to http://www.turbotabla.com/cds/ and follow the links to listen to some samples and consider buying a CD or two. I haven’t listened to the first Turbo Tabla CD, but I’ve listened to several tracks of the Bellydance Overdrive CD (which are very similar to the second half of the concert, but more processed), and it’s great.

This has been a public service announcement. We now return you to your regularly scheduled blog, already in progress.