Saturday, Sunday, here comes Monday

Saturday (after I last posted) I went to the party (after driving quite a long way in an unfamiliar metro area), and got to find silamander and apollinax's house tucked away. silamander is moving south; it was nice to show up for the going-away party (which was redubbed a "Bon Voyage" party midway, because so many people are sure he's returning). apollinax and bicoastal are moving in together into the city, and seem happy about that.

In addition to my hosts, I saw cleverpig (just filed her PhD, yay!) and bicoastal (backing slowly away from LJ, seems happy, may get a chance to see her again while I'm here), also S. who's busy looking for sales engineer work in the Bay Area; greymalkin42 rounds out the list of LJ name-checking I can do from this party.

Both apollinax and bicoastal seem to have grown in some way since I last knew them -- I doubt that they're actually taller than I remember, but both of them seem to carry themselves with a quiet confidence in their lives that I envy (and that I think they have always had, but only in the last years grown into). apollinax is definitely going to be the sort of faculty that all the starry-eyed undergrads imprint on -- he's handsome, softspoken, and super-smart. But it will break the heart of those impressionable young things when they find out he's with bicoastal, because they'll know there's no hope.

To take a page from beckyb: the grilled asparagus was spectacularly good; a small plateful was in front of me and I think I ate quite a few.

And of course, my old dear friends IZ and AA were there. IZ and AA are the sort of friends that I don't see for two years and then suddenly we're in a room together and there's no catching up to do -- fun experiences to share, but none of the sense of "I must see how this person has changed before I can be comfortable with him". I've known them for more than ten years, and that confidence is still there. It's really quite wonderful to find that feeling every time it happens. AA's boy and IZ and I have matching hairstyles now, which I was startled by -- I asked IZ "how long have you had long hair?" and to my relief it was only a few months. (I had this awkward feeling that it was how it had been for five years -- it has been a long time since I've seen him -- and that would be strange.) But our bubbly language-geek/theater-geek rapport was there right away, starting off immediately with breaking down the semiotics of the Star Wars movies, just like old times.

That conversation made me wish even more that imtboo was there. I know she would like that conversation; IZ is a fellow playwright and equally interested in the headaches and victories of being a writer and an actor and a director, and equally good at the rocketing back and forth with the techies and staying afloat. You'd like each other. And Boo, I miss you. I wish I wasn't staying away from you this long.

AA offered me the chance to crash in her spare bedroom in Berkeley rather than drive back to Palo Alto, and I took her up on the offer. We chatted for a while, and her boy C. came over, and he went straight to bed. She followed him, and I made my way to the spare bedroom and crashed out hard.

The next morning, AA made waffles and we ate them with nectarines (yum) and jam. We walked to C.'s house, and I played with his friendly cat Tilly-of-the-small-eyes while AA did some vegetable garden work. We wandered over to AA's parents' house, a few blocks farther, and I contemplated my envy that she lives so close to her folks: lapartera and trombo2, I wish you lived in the same town as me, only fifteen blocks away; I could come over (as we did) to hang out, sit on the back porch in the sun by the lemon tree, have tea, and talk about politics, indigenous art, and the origin of knitting (C is learning to knit; apparently all the cool boys are doing that). I debated with AA's dad about the Nostratic theory, which I'm quite skeptical of, and we sat on the washing machine to keep it from running through the house on its own. IZ came by on his bike, and eventually (after three hours!) all us kids left again to go to the wine shop. We bought two bottles of cider and a bottle of wine and met IZ's girl (M) back at C's house; we sat in the yard there and ate expensive potato chips with sourcream while we drank the cider, and then rolled back to AA's house.

I got to talk to imtboo just before we had dinner, and hung out with the whole gang there for a while longer, until it was really so late that I had to leave in order to make it back to PA before midnight, when my rental car turned into a pumpkin (okay, not really a pumpkin -- I just didn't want to be up too late driving in a strange town). Late night, slightly tired driving is not much fun, and I got back to the hotel tired and ready for bed, with a sore neck from driving in heavy traffic. I checked my email, and went to sleep.