When Kymm first mentioned coming up to northern California to spend some time with Beth I offered to meet her at the airport and drive her to Sacramento. It was a chance to spend a couple of hours with her, and get out of the house for the day, and I didn't expect to be invited to stay at Beth's as well. I was, however, so I gleefully put it on my calendar and tried to ignore the fact that I'd basically horned in on their time together. I knew it'd be a lot of fun.
I could tell a chronological story about how I recognised Kymm at the airport, where we all went out to eat, etc., but instead I'm going to skip the timeline and go straight to the heart of the matter.
Kymm has the loudest laugh I have ever heard from a human being. She flings her head back and cuts loose with a floor-shaking "HAW! HAW! HAW!" It is utterly impossible to not grin back at her even if you can manage to stifle your own laughter. The woman laughs from the soles of her feet all the way up to the roots of her hair. And she laughs a lot. It was like being around a laugh track. Everything just naturally seemed funnier when Kymm was laughing. Haw! Haw! Haw!
She also sleeps on her tummy with her hands tucked under her and her face beached upon an enormous pile of pillows. I peeked in her room on Sunday morning and there she was, washed up on the shore of dreams. I wasn't going to tell you this, but it's a pre-emptive strike because I just know she's going to tell everyone I snore. I don't know how she knows because I was sleeping in the living room. I'm sure they're dainty little ladylike snores, anyway. I'm perfectly sure I don't emit rip-snorting, log-sawing snorts. Although the cats all slept with her, and none of them so much as sat on the end of my bed. Hmmm.
Beth is slender, pale, and radiant with intelligence even when she's falling asleep in front of company. She simply swims upwards into consciousness, adds a cogent and germane comment to the conversation, then conks back out. (I believe this was the secret to her success in law school.) She would look absolutely smashing in any kind of period costume, and most vintage clothing. She has some gorgeous vintage furniture. She seems to really like old things, which doesn't explain her partner Jeremy at all because I think he's approximately 10 seconds over the age of jailbait. She makes excellent coffee which, as you know, means more to me than life itself, or at least before noon it does. Her house is beautiful, setting off my deepest envy because lord knows nothing like it exists in the town I live in for under 750 grand.
Her chief flaw as a person is, of course, her dreadful propensity for getting up at the crack of dawn and dashing around being alert. She tried to fool us by getting up half a day later than normal, i.e., 7 a.m., but I know it was merely a ruse. She's apparently a bit klutzy, although this is only a rumor, suffering from the inability to keep her coffee in her cup when near a keyboard. She does have dozens of them stacked up in her computer room, all in various stages of readiness for more coffee. Jeremy rescued them for her. Jeremy is a hero for driving all of us around town in my rental car. I can't enjoy the view if I'm driving, and half my reason for taking Kymm to see Beth was so I could look around at Sacramento. It's got some marvelous houses. Our hosts thoughtfully pointed out the house where the landlady killed nine of her boarders, and buried them in the rose garden. Apparently, she had some amazing roses as a result, but I'm sure that's not how she got caught.
I had a fabulously self-indulgent time talking about online diaries. They both read a ton of diaries; I keep up with the other 29 Archipelago diarists, and about 10 outside of that but not on a daily basis. We repeated scandalous gossip about everyone we read, except for Kymm who always said, "Oh, but they're sooo nice, I really like them." She will actually read someone's diary purely because they're nice and because they read hers, even if she thinks the diary is boring. I peered at her warily, not having previously realized the extent of Kymm's personal niceness. I wondered if I should join the Crit List. Kymm said no after I explained I didn't really care what anyone thought of my writing unless they themselves could kick my butt around the block with their writing, and it didn't appear to me that these sorts were in the majority on the previous Crit Lists. I have major attitude about who constitutes my peer group. I also wouldn't take critiques seriously if anyone used the non-word "critting" instead of critiquing to describe what they were doing, so I guess that settles that. I am clearly not a nice person at all because I don't understand bastardizing a perfectly useful and descriptive word that already exists and is only two letters longer. I am mostly alone in this deficiency, apparently.
And I haven't even mentioned the cats, have I? They're all clearly starving, beaten every day, not allowed to go anywhere at all, and have sad little deprived lives, as I'm sure you can tell by the previous entry's photos of Benny, Rudy, and Sally. The widdle woogums.
So it was a splendid weekend, if a bit meta at times for Jeremy (though he put up with us very sweetly, and we did try to fill in some of the blanks), and everyone told hysterically funny stories, and I reckon we all have enough blackmail material on each other to keep us friends for centuries now, and next Christmas we're going to do this again.
I can't wait.
