• Our bus did not catch on fire.
• We spent a long time lost in the American Museum of Natural History, which is a great place to be lost. Among other things, we saw a neat IMAX movie about aquatic reptiles.
• We spent some time at a dog run on the AMNH grounds.
• We saw Bodies: The Exhibition, which is similar to Bodyworlds, but felt both a bit more commercial and a bit more informative (i.e., educational).
• We had several great meals, notably lunch today at Ben’s Kosher Deli, which I highly recommend, and drinks at a nice little Japanese restaurant across the street from our hotel (when we discovered the bar we were originally aiming for was too crowded and noisy).

Of course the best thing was my delightful traveling companion. And now to bed!

Sorry for my long absence here. I’ve been too busy enjoying life to post about it. In fact, I’ve started to post a couple times recently and not gotten very far. So, since I don’t seem to have the stamina for a long post, here are some bullet items:

• First, the bad news: As plumtreeblossom posted here, her lovely grey Siamese Rowley was diagnosed with kidney disease on Saturday. But evidently it hasn’t gotten too bad yet, and the vet says he’ll definitely get some weight back with a low-protein diet and subcutaneous fluids, and it might even cure him. So we’re very glad we took him in. (He’d been gradually but very steadily been losing weight over six months or so.)
• Everything else is good, starting with a lovely visit to see eisa in New York City a couple weekends ago, which involved good food (as always) and meeting a couple of her friends. It also involved getting introduced to a new TV show (on DVD), whereon more later.
• Mare and I saw Theatre@First’s production of The Winter’s Tale, excellently directed by dietrich. Loved the staging, loved the somewhat quirky play, loved the performance. Congratulations to all!
• The news from the vet was not good, but it was great to be there for plumtreeblossom and Rowley, and I’m really glad we got him to the vet. And that morning plumtreeblossom cooked me banana pancakes and bacon. She must love me!
• Besides The Winter’s Tale, I’ve been enjoying a lot of classic or retro movies and literature:
• On the bus on the way to New York, I finished the utterly bizarre Edison’s Conquest of Mars (Wikipedia; Gutenberg). ( Cut for length. )
• Preparatory to starting Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, I read Pride and Prejudice, and enjoyed it quite a bit. The funnier bits reminded me a little of Saki.
• plumtreeblossom and I watched a DVD she bought of a 1964 adaptation of The First Men in the Moon, which we both enjoyed a lot. ( Cut for length. )
• The TV show eisa introduced me to was Mad Men, which is retro in a different sort of way. ( Cut for length: Mad Men vs. Star Trek. )
• And it’s not historical or retro, but I also watched a weird French movie called La Moustache. ( Cut for length. )

OK, that was fairly long after all. Now it’s time for me to go to bed. Good night, all!

On Saturday, plumtreeblossom and I went to the American Museum of Natural History, one of my favourite places. sexykneesocks, who happened to be in town as well, met us there, and it was great catching up with her. I took lots of photos, which I will try to get posted at some point.

plumtreeblossom and I tried to go next door to the Rose Space Center, but we got there close enough to closing that we couldn't see a show, so we went back to the AMNH for another half hour or so.

After that, we met nex0s and midnightstation for dinner nearby, and had a fabulous time. I'd seen nex0s in Boston a few months ago, but I hadn't seen midnightstation in far too long.

On Sunday, we got together at Fred's, a dog-themed restaurant I've posted about before, for brunch with beetiger, eisa, and fairyleathrdady, who surprised us by paying for brunch. Lovely seeing all of them, and I'm so glad beetiger drove in to meet us.

Then we made our way back to Chinatown to take the Fung Wah back to Boston and had a lovely snuggly trip back with lots of nice conversation.

Y'all should also go read plumtreeblossom's post about the weekend here, since I'm posting this in a hurry and I'm certainly missing stuff.

Another lovely weekend with 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.

On Sunday, we went to a Poly Boston dim sum organized by a wonderful person whose LJ name, if he has one, I don't know. We had a wonderful, wonderful time. Thanks so much to the organizer!

Last night was the monthly Poly Boston dinner at Bertucci's (the first one in a while 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.

And this coming weekend plumtreeblossom and I are finally making a trip to New York City.

Whee!

---

¹ Sadly, the venue has already taken down the web page about it. If you are luckier than usual, I will eventually get around to posting some pictures, though. Because, you know, you all appreciated the Topsfield Fair pictures and the pictures of our trip to DC to meet bcat1 and spacechicken so much.²
² That I haven’t posted yet. Those pictures.

As I mentioned, eisa and I saw Pan’s Labyrinth on Saturday, and I loved it. I think that might be a movie I need to own, although I’m very glad I saw it on a big screen. (Actually, we got to the theater pretty late and ended up having to sit in the very front row, so I saw it on a trapezoidal screen which was big at the bottom and small at the top. :-)

( Dream, CPAP, good food, and dogs. )

Then we went to the American Museum of Natural History. We’d been there the last time (or so) I visited, but we’d only had time to see the Darwin exhibit (now in Boston at the Museum of Science, and to dash through a tiny bit of the rest of the museum. This time we spent almost all of our time in recently revamped Hall of Human Origins, which was really amazing. The science and physical discoveries presented there were very current; it was neat seeing casts of bones I’d read about in the news recently. Notably, they had a cast of a Homo floresiensis skull. That was very impressive. I’d love to go back to that exhibit. Before we left, eisa took me to see the dinosaur and extinct mammal fossils, mainly to show me a giant sloth and a glyptodont, both very impressive.

( Weird Japanese toothpaste. )

Highlights since I’ve been back (which are getting fewer column-inches than they deserve just because I’m exhausted and need to stop typing and start sleeping) are a delightful date with plumtreeblossom on Monday, which included some very nice hanging out with thanos73 and mynext_boldmove, and dinner (and dessert) tonight with cathijosephine and xmelancholia. Oh, and a highlight from before the trip was a couple phone calls with missingworlds, a good friend of mine from college.

I confess I’ve been mostly skimming LJ lately, so apologies if I’ve missed important stuff. If you invited me to a party or offered me a free car or the presidency of a small but peaceful and mineral-rich country on LJ recently, you might want to comment here to make sure I saw it.

Hi. A good friend of mine who lives and goes to grad school in New York is planning to move (within the city) in the next few months and while she’s considering finding a place on her own, she’s also considering living with housemates. If you’re either looking for a place in NYC or have a place to offer within the next few months, and you think you might be compatible with the sort of person I hang out with, feel free to comment here or email me at beowabbit@livejournal.com and I’ll either get you more details or pass along your information to her.

I hate the web browsers on my phone. I tried three times unsuccessfully to post the following from the road:

You know, I don’t generally think of mosquitos as a major hazard of the New York City subway system. Admittedly, it was an unusually swamp-like subway station.

My New York trip was delightful; I wish I had time to do it justice. Here’s the quick overview, though:

Saturday brunch with eisa and nex0s at a nice French café called French Roast at 85th and Broadway. We sat outside so Puppy Monster could hang out with us. The waitress really liked him, and brought him a pie tin of water. The food was good, and the conversation was excellent! I had a great time catching them up and getting caught up. Then nex0s rode with me partway to K.’s performance, and we got to talk some more on the subway.

Kala’s performance Saturday night was amazing! She’s a composer in residence at Tribeca Performing Arts Center, and this was a work-in-progress performance. It was really powerful. It’s called Axis of Beauty, and it’s a response to the war and the US war propaganda that depersonalizes an entire culture. It consisted of K. narrating and playing piano (sometimes by plucking the strings) and drums; her friend and collaborator Sukato playing ukelele, doumbek (a kind of drum), violin strummed like a guitar, and her voice (and “playing her voice” is probably a better description of it than “singing”); recorded electronic music, and recorded interviews with Iraqis about their experience of the war, which she used (with permission) from War News Radio. It all worked together really, really well.

I was really glad for the opportunity to meet Sukato, whom I’d heard a lot about, and after the performance I had the pleasant surprise of meeting Kala’s father and stepmother, who took us out to dinner. K.’s sweetie Alex was also there, and it was nice to see him, but he didn’t join us for dinner.)

Then I went back to eisa’s, and we got more good conversation in before going to sleep. eisa rocks.

Sunday morning, eisa went off to spend the day with her father, and I headed downtown to meet sexykneesocks for brunch at Shopsin’s. I had a really great time. I got biscuits and gravy; sexykneesocks had a bowl of grits with her meal, so we both went to New York City for Southern food. :-)

Then I had a few hours to kill before seeing K. again, so I wandered around a bit, including taking a brief nap in Central Park until the rain woke me up and getting my film from Hawai‘i developed.

Then Sunday late afternoon I met K. at the new Fifth Avenue Apple store, which looks entirely appropriate as a tabernacle for the Cult of Steve, and we wandered around Central Park for a while. It was really good to see her, and to do a bit of catching up. Then I rode back to Tribeca with her (where she was going to see another performance) before turning around to get my car out of the garage and drive home.

Due to a misguided notion of how to get to I-95 in NYC, and a long foray in Connecticut looking for fuel, it was 1:30 before I got home. And due to LiveJournal and email, it was 3:00 before I was in bed. I’m going to do better tonight. :-)

Today I met gishmi1ish for dinner in Central Square. I wanted to introduce her to Baraka Café, the great Tunisian place on Pearl Street, but it’s closed on Mondays, so we ended up at Mary Chung’s, which still made us both happy. She’s a good sport for listening to my sleep-dep blather about my week in Hawai‘i and my weekend in New York; I feel like I talked non-stop, but it sure was fun.

You know, I’m lucky to have such wonderful people in my life.

Now is time to sleep!

Too tired to do the rest of my trip justice, but I had a great rest of the evening on Saturday with K., slept well, and saw eisa on Sunday. We went to a place called Popover Café, which was yummy, and she introduced me to Red Dwarf, which I’d never seen before.

It was an excellent and relaxing trip.

Reminder to self: Self should post about the books self is reading.

(1) I am going to NYC the last weekend in February, the 25th and 26th. I am mostly going to be visiting K., but I would love to see other NYC-area peoples. I am probably taking the Fung Wah bus to Chinatown Saturday morning and back Sunday evening. Saturday early afternoon or Sunday late afternoon/early evening would probably be good times to see me. Yay!

(2) Only I could get lost on the way home from the IHOP that’s about ten blocks from my house, and which I’ve been to several times. I’m used to walking from near there, but a couple blocks over. So I was on autopilot, and turned a block too early, and continued on autopilot until I was far away from my house in an unknown direction.

My new boots are starting to get broken in.

(3) However, my feet had better be happy again by tomorrow evening, ’cause I’m going contra dancing at the Thursday Used-To-Be-VFW dance now at Springstep Center in Medford. I haven’t been in a long time, and not since they moved to their new location, but I’m looking forward to it and it will be good for me. Ooh! I just looked at the web page, and the Greenfield dance band is playing! That should be good! Would be lovely to see any of my contra-dancing friends there.