trochee

I spent Thanksgiving day at the home of some family friends from back in the 404, and got to sit at the "kids table" -- a gaggle of thirty-somethings, with one 4-year-old, who decided to climb all over me like I was a jungle gym. I think she's great, so I may have encouraged her a little.

Friday imtboo and I rented a car and drove to Anacortes, and thence took the ferry to Orcas Island and spent the long weekend together in a lodge on Orcas Island. Was really relaxing and settling for me -- and for her -- to have time just for the two of us, with no distractions -- no internet, no homework, no wondering whose house we're sleeping at tonight. It's so quiet out there on the island; we just spent those two and a half days relaxing, getting a chance to feel each other; to take small risks with each other, and to reassert what good things we have together.

We communicate really well. I felt comfortable and safe there with her; some things that evoke fear and concern for her, she was able to bring up with me. In the way these things always are, they turned out much smaller in the warm sunlight of sharing them with each other, and were replaced by strength and more love.

Coming back Sunday night, we both wanted to go home. Sadly, our homes are still different. But we each wanted to go home, and we did -- but it's clear to us both that we want our home to be together. We've known that for a while, but this just reinforced that feeling -- now we're looking to move together at the end of January, and this trip together makes me even happier that we're doing it.

I'm very happy. It was a lovely weekend and I'm looking forward to having more time like that. And also to have more time like that here in the Pac-NW urban life as well. It feels so good to be happy in my life.

I woke up this morning after imtboo had left to go to parts East for an acting gig.

It felt quiet and peaceful, but i was wishing she was there. Then I found a little love letter she had written me and left on my backpack before she left, and I felt quiet and peaceful, and full instead of empty.

I feel lucky.

Today they celebrate 35 years of state-sanctioning of their heterosexual union, one product of which is me!

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.

The trochee channel has been effectively offline for some time now, due to what we might call technical difficulties (experiments to run, thesis to write, etcetera).

A far-too-irregularly scheduled summer vacation is also imminent. I will probably not be keeping up with LJ for the next ten days or so; if there's anything you think I'd really like or need to see, please send me email at [the obvious user name] at g mail . I still won't get back to you fast, bein' on an island in coastal New England with lousy internet access -- but I might be more likely to get back to you when I return.

Love to you all.

in no particular order,

• i have a two-page set of comments from my advisor, and she thinks I'm going about the approach of an entire section wrong, and wants me to reorganize the rest of the chapter as well.
• the printer is broken; I can't even print them out to cross off the comments I feel like I've dealt with
• somebody's blowing up working-class commuters in London.
• I have no results from an earlier round of experiments; they'll need to be revised again
• my eye itches
• my department is eliminating all space for TAs; all the grad students will be in trailers except for the traitors to other departments like me
• i've invaded the privacy of a very dear friend, due to my own thoughtlessness
• i didn't finish the sections i wanted to rewrite and expand yesterday (on why CFGs are unsatisfying but they're what we got, and on lexicalized CFGs)

I've rented a place on Capitol Hill. The apartment is a beautiful corner unit on the top floor, hardwood floors, lots of convenient cabinets and built-in bookshelves (including some along the top of two walls in the living room) a decent sized kitchen with a gas range, two blocks from a bus line to the UW. The landlord apartment manager seems really friendly, in a good way -- he's about my age; he's a writer who likes Neal Stephenson and Salman Rushdie, and his partner is a Bastyr-educated midwife. He was so eager to rent the place that he knocked off $400 from the first month's rent just for getting the application in today.

Extra bonus: the previous tenant was moving out but didn't know what to do with the moderately-nice [Ikea-class] sofa she couldn't use in her new place. So I get it -- for free. It folds out into a bed!

Biggest negative (not huge): it's in Cap Hill, not East Cap Hill or the CD. I've been looking in general for a place farther east and not in the middle of hipster alley. ah well. as a feckless carless wonder, it will be nice to be near Broadway. And it's still walking distance to about four grocery stores.

Big uncomfortable moment past: calling current landlord to explain that I'm moving out and he may expect a reference call from my new potential landlords. They didn't answer, so I left a rather awkward message explaining that due to some complicated circumstances, I am moving out and K and A are staying in the apartment. I of course am staying on the lease and told them my cell number so they could get a hold of me if there was ever a problem with the lease. I'm trying so hard to be responsible about it, but I know it's going to make the landlords at the current place nervous.

ah well. I am happy to have chosen a place. Hope there's no big nasty blowup with the old landlord.