The roses in the backyard have put out a couple of blooms. This is the only full blown rose. The others have stayed in tight buds for two weeks now. I think they need some fertilizing and mulching. I was a little put off by the faded lavender color (so very Gothic, don't you think?) until I actually sniffed it. I nearly swooned with delight. It has a heady, old-fashioned scent. You wouldn't want too many of them in the house at once unless you were prepared to toss antimacassars on the backs of your chairs and ring for the servant to serve tea. The fragrance made me think of a Tissot painting.
We had our first party in our new place Friday night. It wasn't the official housewarming party, we expect to hold that in June after we get back from Japan and we'll invite absolutely everyone. But we asked the Friday Night Beers gang to come over and see the place, boxes and all, as a special one-off visit to our neighborhood and a kind of "last time the gang's all together" party. It's pretty far from where everyone else lives and works, so we won't be seeing them every Friday the way we used to. Everyone admired our house, drank beer and talked high tech geekery, then walked over to an Italian restaurant for a nice, long meal.
I was happy to show off the place even though we haven't unpacked half the things we ought to have. Our bedroom is in good shape, and the bathroom is in order, but the kitchen is at sixes and sevens, and I can't hang up my coats in the downstairs closet until I set up bookshelves in the kitchen to store the boxes of glassware and pots and pans currently stashed in the downstairs closet. The bookshelves are behind the living room furniture. It's a puzzle, and you can't move one thing without displacing three others. At least the upstairs is liveable.
Saturday Denise came over and gave me a load of shit. Literally. She drove up with six bags of steer manure in her trunk, and handed me a shovel. "Thanks!" I said dubiously. "Just what I've always wanted! Kind of!" She gave me some peat moss, too, so apparently I'm committed to growing roses now. It was a genuinely thoughtful gift, actually, because she's got a hatchback car and I wouldn't have been able to haul so many bags in my Mazda's trunk. We made a lot of jokes about bullshitting each other as we hauled them into the backyard. Then we washed up and went to check out the local Mexican restaurant. Two enthusiastic thumbs up for the alta cocina of Don Pico. Denise's fish tacos were orgasmically good, and my enchiladas were fantastic.
Around two o'clock I suddenly became so tired I could hardly keep my eyes open. It was almost painful being that sleepy. I bagged out on going over to see Denise's garden and came home to fall into a deep, dreamless sleep of three hours. I often take naps on the weekend just for fun. This wasn't for fun, this was out of necessity. I think the stress of moving and the usual work stuff came crashing down on me. Boom! Nap attack. The cats were pleased. They know all about suddenly falling over and going to sleep in weird places.
Later that night I couldn't go to sleep right away so I watched a documentary about the Beach Boys. Wow. It was disturbing, and interesting, and left me with much greater respect for a band I've always taken for granted. I've got to get a copy of Pet Sounds now.
Today I have done nothing particularly useful, but I have had fun. Woke up with a sick headache (stress, stress, stress) and feebly hobbled around doing laundry. I can't do much else when my head is throbbing violently, but I can always do laundry. Eventually, John and I went off to investigate the nearest dim sum restaurant. It was acceptable, but we probably won't go back. We were put off by being the only customers. I watched a Chinese soap opera called Healing Hands which was obviously a General Hospital sort of show. It was pretty good, despite my lack of Cantonese.
When I got home I called Little Owl and chatted on the phone for ages. She's just moved to the East Bay, and I wanted to welcome her and see if they got a permanent place to stay. All is well, they move in next week, so we'll try to hook up soon. Then I called Denise and apologized for being sick, and talked about her website. She needs to be on the Web, and I want to work on her site for her because I can do much trickier and exciting things with a photographer's website than I am willing to do for a diary site with its focus on text. I've also committed to working up the Corflu 18 website but I haven't heard a peep from Bob Webber for two months. Maybe he hasn't confirmed a hotel yet. At any rate, I have much HTML coding ahead of me, and I'm excited about design again.
The headache is receding, and I feel the urge to get a little more unpacking done. Actually, I feel the urge to buy books and roses online, so I'm going to avoid that by doing something useful instead. I'm pretty sure I can wrestle one of the bookshelves into the kitchen by myself, and that will mean at least an hour of hefting boxes from one spot to the next, by which time the urge to spend money will surely have passed. If not, at least I earned those books and roses.
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