Beowabbit

Power: on
Water: flowing and potable
Trees: standing
House: warm
Basement: dry
Cat: sleeping

My work is closed today, and the Boston subway shut down at 2:00pm, but all is well so far in Quincy. I hope things are going as well for everybody reading this.

Another delightful weekend. On Friday, I met plumtreeblossom at her house (on the late side, because she had a surprise wedding to perform). Neither of us had had dinner, so we grabbed an exceptionally yummy dinner at Sound Bites. At her place we had a great time hanging out on the porch with vanguardcdk, who is excellent company.

Yesterday, we went to the annual Earth Day festival on the Charles River Esplanade, which included a concert by OK Go. As we arrived, OK Go were performing a really lovely song on handbells. We wandered a bit, and plumtreeblossom went swagging, said swag this year mostly consisting of food. It looked nommy. I took a little time out and just sat by the river, enjoying the first sunny day after a week of grey rainy skies, while plumtreeblossom braved one of the muddier parts of the festival.

When we’d wandered through the whole thing, we still had a fair amount of time before we’d want dinner, so we decided to see a movie. We were choosing between Pirates of the Caribbean and Thor, and the schedule favoured Thor, which was what we saw. It was fluffy fun. After all the walking (and free samples) we weren’t all that hungry, so we went to the South Station concourse and got grilled cheese sandwiches from Cheeseboy, a relatively new grilled-cheese stand there, on our way home.

Today, which turned out again to be gorgeous and sunny, we spent a big chunk of the afternoon outside working in the yard. plumtreeblossom weeded and tended the flowerbeds, and made a new one along the driveway; we sprayed for bugs (since some of the plants are showing signs of depradations), I mowed, and we planted new cosmos seeds. We’ve already got very vigorous lupines from last year. The potted grape and blackberry plants I got a few weeks ago are doing well (although the blackberry is a bit chewed up); the blueberry plant is so chewed up that I worry it might not make it. Then we did a little shopping (during which I got some pachysandra for a particular patch on the front lawn where currently nothing grows but the occasional sparse weed), and I drove plumtreeblossom home.

Oh, mixed in there was a bit of concern about being able to get the car to start, but we eventually did.

When I got back home, I planted the pachysandra and discovered, perhaps, why that particular spot has trouble growing anything. Well, one problem is that it’s in shade almost all the time, but also, the soil is spectacularly rocky. It’s about half gravel by volume. But even if the pachysandra don’t do very well, they’ll be an improvement.

Oh, and I got enough sleep! That never happens.

So it was a delightful weekend!

I’ve been meaning to post this for ages.

So, as I have mentioned, I will be moving to MIT towards the end of this month.

That means my group has an open Unix/Linux sysadmin position. Want one?

( More information. )

If this sounds interesting to you (or to someone you know), ping me, and I’ll put you in touch with my boss.

Last night plumtreeblossom and I joined quem98 and a bunch of her friends for a really delightful dinner that involved meeting a bunch of interesting people for the first time. I wish I knew all their LJ names. It was a wonderful group of people. (Dinner was at Namaskar, and I had the Lamb Kashmir which I highly recommend.)

Then today, plumtreeblossom and I went to the circus. The nonprofit Big Apple Circus, in particular, which was set up outside Boston City Hall, with all their tents in a big concrete courtyard. (It’s weird to feel completely like you’re indoors in the concession “building” and to notice a street light poking up through a hole in the floor.) There were a couple of impressive aerial acts, a pair of impressive jugglers, a guy who did implausible things balancing urns on his head (ending with one that must have been about sixty pounds if it was actually ceramic, and it probably needed to be ceramic and that heavy in order to have the kind of momentum it did), lots of silly and entertaining clown acts, acrobats on horseback, trained dogs (all shelter rescues), and lots and lots of fun. I got lots of photos. Let’s see if I get organized enough to post them.

After that, I wasn’t quite ready to say goodbye to my sweetie, so I asked if she wanted to sit somewhere for some coffee. We ended up at Faneuil Hall having an early (and tasty) dinner, instead. (And on the train on the way home, I realized we’d forgotten the coffee we were originally searching for, despite passing some yummy coffee-roasting smells.)

So, a wonderful weekend.

plumtreeblossom’s mom has been visiting her this weekend, and I spent a bunch of the last couple days with them. After work on Friday I met them at the Kendall Square Legal Sea Foods for dinner. I forget what the fish I had was (it was a special, so I can’t just check the online menu), but it was deliciously prepared in an elegant sauce that involved lemon, butter, and mustard, and it was “breaded” with shredded potato, which worked very well. plumtreeblossom had filet mignon, and her mom had lobster.

Then this morning I brought over corned beef and some veggies, which we put in plumtreeblossom’s crockpot for the day while (after bacon and eggs which plumtreeblossom) we went to the Aquarium for the afternoon. It was unusually crowded (neither plumtreeblossom nor I had seen it quite that crowded before, and we got a wheelchair for plumtreeblossom’s mom, who broke her foot a couple months ago and isn’t up to lots of walking yet, and it was quite a challenge getting through the crowds to see the exhibits with the wheelchair. We’d see a gap we could squeeze into and start for it, but within three or four seconds it was full. So there was a lot of waiting, but it was still quite a lot of fun for all three of us. The sea lions and penguins were utterly adorable as always. (sionnagh, I told them how you used to feed the penguins. They were all rockhoppers then, right? Now they’re all or mostly African penguins.)

Then we came back to plumtreeblossom’s place (where her wildflower garden is doing quite nicely, thank you) for corned beef, which we got to share with her housemate vanguardcdk who arrived just as we did. After dinner there was cake with ice cream, and then we sat on the balcony and chatted for a while.

Now I am home, and I think I’m going to go to bed early (maybe after reading a little more of Harry Potter). It makes sense that I’m sleepy, since I woke up out of a prosaic-but-inexplicably-creepy dream at 6:30 this morning (which would count as sleeping in for ka9sqb, I’m sure, but is unthinkably early for me) and couldn’t get back to sleep.

In other news, I have a doctor’s appointment (with another doctor in my PCP’s office since he said it had to be a morning appointment and he didn’t have any available until the very end of August) to gauge the results of my hormone treatment. I presume it will involve bloodwork and that’s why the time of day matters. (The short subjective version is that I’m doing much better since I started treatment, but don’t feel like I’m quite there yet, so I think my thyroid dosage needs some tweaking. I think my testosterone dosage is probably fine.)

I love my house. It has a deck. Nice people come and eat on the deck with me. Some of them cook for me, and some of them bring me food. I love my friends, too, and my sweet chef plumtreeblossom.

Got to see the fireworks tonight, although in the rain and wind we weren’t sure we were going to last that long for a while. plumtreeblossom, cathijosephine, darxus and I set off for the fireworks over the Charles tonight (after a yummy dinner at Kagawa in Quincy), but due partly to mobility constraints and partly to scheduling constraints plumtreeblossom and I couldn’t stay with cathijosephine and darxus, so we ended up watching the fireworks from the Longfellow Bridge, from which we couldn’t hear the concert, but had a great view of the fireworks.

+: I got to bed unusually early last night, and got an unusually large amount of sleep.
-: Despite that, when my alarm went off I was incredibly tired, and hit snooze umpty-zillion times, and was late using my light box for the first time since I started using it.
(-: And I actually think the light box is more trouble than it’s worth, although I should probably give it a couple more weeks.)
+: Despite getting a late and slow start, I felt like I had a reasonably productive day at work.
++: And afterwards I got to hang out with plumtreeblossom and docorion and mud_puppy at Namaskar and have yummy Indian food.
-: My yummy Indian food was somewhat less yummy than it might have been, because I forgot to ask for no cilantro and no tomatoes.
+: plumtreeblossom’s yummy Indian food was highly yummy, as was the bread.
+: I got to hear some more of docorion’s fun stories.
+: plumtreeblossom gave me an awesome May Day present, an interactive book (not quite a pop-up book, but along those lines, with flaps to open and things to unfold) about pirates! It even has a compass and some jewels embedded in the front cover! Between the compass and the maps I’m sure to find some booty!
+: I got to unburden myself to plumtreeblossom a bit about my medical concerns (well, vent, really; she’s heard it all before).
++: And tomorrow I have an ENT appointment which I am really hopeful about.
+: And after dinner we hung out and chatted over tea at Diesel.
+: I drank a lot of tea at Diesel. And a lot of water and lassi at Namaskar. This is called “foreshadowing”.
-: This fire sure delayed my ride home. Instead of a train straight through from Davis to Quincy Center, it was a Red Line train from Davis to Kendall (where I could faintly smell smoke on the air), a shuttle bus from Kendall to Lechmere, the Green Line from Lechmere to Park Street, and the Red Line from Park Street to Quincy Center.
-: Boy howdy did I have to pee by the time I finally got home.
-: And I’m too tired to deal with the fridge, which I seem to have been attempting to create life from primordial ooze in.
-: And I think I’m too tired to do laundry.
++: But I’m about to go to sleep!
+++: And by this time tomorrow I might know more about my breathing problems and might even have a plan for what to do about them!

What a full and fine weekend! Saturday morning I had dim sum with plumtreeblossom and a bunch of her friends and mine (and in the process discovered that we have some friends in common I didn’t know about!). Dim sum was yummy as always, and I was ravenous when I got there, so I stuffed myself.

(I’d been running just a little bit late, so decided to take the car to the Quincy Center T station rather than walking. What I didn’t realize was that Quincy’s Veteran’s Day parade was about to start — I had no fewer than three intersections close just as I was about to go through them, had similar trouble getting back home (since some of the streets I’d come through were now blocked off), and ended up dropping my car off in a parking lot I could get to and walking. So I was sadly more than half an hour late, but fortunately that just meant there was lots of yummy stuff already on the table when I got there.)

Then the lovely (x3) minerva42, underwatercolor, plumtreeblossom, and I went to the Museum of Science, intending to see the Body Worlds 2 exhibit. Unfortunately when we got there we found out that the earliest entrance time that still had tickets available was 5:30 (6:00 by the time we’d finished talking about it), and minerva42 and underwatercolor had evening plans and hadn’t planned on spending that much time in the museum. So we all got exhibit hall tickets, and plumtreeblossom and I got tickets to a movie and to Body Worlds 2 as well.

The regular exhibits were fun, but not particularly new to any of us. (The electricity show, with the huge Van de Graaff generator, suffered from a presenter who could give Mumbles a run for his money.) Definitely fun, though, and we got to see tamarins! Yay monkeys!

Then we said goodbye to minerva42 and underwatercolor, and plumtreeblossom and I saw the ( 3D Mars movie ).

And finally, we got to go to the Body Worlds exhibit, which was amazing and somewhat awe-inspiring. ( Body Worlds 2 exhibit )

I could go on and on for ages about this exhibit (feel free to ask questions, or browse through the exhibit catalogue if you’re over at my house), but I’m running out of LJ-posting steam, so I’ll stop babbling now. (I definitely want to go back while it’s still in Boston, more than once if possible.)

plumtreeblossom and I then took the T to Quincy, where we both slept very well. I dropped her off at home, since she had a busy Sunday planned. [EDIT: Oh, I forgot to mention introducing plumtreeblossom to Sarsfield’s, an Irish pub in Quincy. We had a couple of yummy pints, but I like going there on weeknights better — it was extremely crowded.]

I had a busy Sunday planned, too, but so far I don’t seem to have actually gotten to any of it. :-)