![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Lagging behind -- Sunday
Jan. 23rd, 2003 03:09 pmThis was certainly a fully spoiled-rotten weekend for me. While people with social consciences froze in DC and other cities to protest a war that I too abhor, I did birthday stuff.
Woke up with Eric on Sunday, discussed logistics, went home to shower and change and put the clean bedding on the guest-room bed for David's mother. I had worn out being nervous, but I still was. Neither of our mothers really approves of the polyamory.
Having made the bed and tossed the resident cats out (Mary let them back in again before we left, but at least it was she who decided on the level of cat hair she wanted for the next 12 hours), I discovered that Lydy and Mary had pretty much agreed that they would be happy enough squished into the back set of the Saturn with Eric, rather than letting David drive Mary's car and Eric or Lydy drive ours.
We went and collected Eric. "Look," Mary said to him, "I've saved you all this space." That made us all laugh. We talked about Gibbon and cats on the drive, as I recall, as well as various features of the drivers and the landscape.
My brother was packing when we got there, and I was so befogged in my glasses that my mother had to say, "I assume you're Eric" to my newly-presented sweetie, but it all went well enough. The house smelled wonderful from the birthday dinner in progress.
We watched birds and the sunset, and talked about various things, and snarfed nuts and goat cheese and crackers and grapes. Eventually when my mother got a break from making dinner I opened the presents, which were terrifying numerous. Prizes at the moment include a Portmeirion tureen (and Lydy just gave me a tablecloth in the same pattern for Christmas), a large sage-green fuzzy sweater with pockets, and my brother's well-used and well-loved copy of John Bates's A NORTHWOODS COMPANION, FALL AND WINTER, which has already used a theatrical analogy about phenology, thus fitting ever so neatly into what I am trying to do with my novel.
Dinner was seitan and roasted vegetables and mushrooms in red wine sauce; brown rice; red cabbage cooked in beer with caraway seeds, vinegar, and red onion; orange, pinenut, and lettuce salad; hard rolls both white and whole-wheat. My mother was justifiably pleased with herself for producing a gourmet vegan meal that everybody would eat. The cake was splendid too. The icing recipe would, after a great deal of effort, have produced a vegan version of chiffon icing, which nobody likes, so the actual icing was rather too heavy for the structure of the cake. It tasted dandy, however. Chocolate cocoanut cake, with cocoanut milk providing the mouthfeel you'd get from dairy in a cake. Whee.
The candles were the kind that spark and then light themselves again after you blow them out. There were only five, and I found that with sufficient determination they could be defeated, so I hold that I got my wishes after all. David took a great many pictures, in his usual useful fashion. In my usual non-useful fashion I forgot to take the camera and take some of him. I do that when he carves turkeys for holidays, but I don't do so well at it the rest of the time.
We played with the cat and talked about cats past and present, and about history, and a bit about each other since there was a new person present. The cat liked Eric. Lydy and Matt got into a political discussion as the rest of us were putting on our boots and so forth to go home. That probably means that if we had stayed another half hour everybody would have woken up from food somnolence, but we all felt we had a lot to do, so we parted anyway. I hugged Matt goodbye and exhorted him to keep in touch. Eric had accurately divined that what he loved about Utah, whence he is returning, is the land rather than anything about the culture, and he really has been quite homesick, as Eric is for California on more levels.
It was a lovely congenial unconstrained occasion, and I was very grateful both that my sweeties and their sweeties were of such high quality, and that both mothers were willing to overlook their objections and see the quality in question.
I got home and resumed normal life by looking at email and watching "Buffy" with Raphael and glaring at my book balefully.
Pamela
Woke up with Eric on Sunday, discussed logistics, went home to shower and change and put the clean bedding on the guest-room bed for David's mother. I had worn out being nervous, but I still was. Neither of our mothers really approves of the polyamory.
Having made the bed and tossed the resident cats out (Mary let them back in again before we left, but at least it was she who decided on the level of cat hair she wanted for the next 12 hours), I discovered that Lydy and Mary had pretty much agreed that they would be happy enough squished into the back set of the Saturn with Eric, rather than letting David drive Mary's car and Eric or Lydy drive ours.
We went and collected Eric. "Look," Mary said to him, "I've saved you all this space." That made us all laugh. We talked about Gibbon and cats on the drive, as I recall, as well as various features of the drivers and the landscape.
My brother was packing when we got there, and I was so befogged in my glasses that my mother had to say, "I assume you're Eric" to my newly-presented sweetie, but it all went well enough. The house smelled wonderful from the birthday dinner in progress.
We watched birds and the sunset, and talked about various things, and snarfed nuts and goat cheese and crackers and grapes. Eventually when my mother got a break from making dinner I opened the presents, which were terrifying numerous. Prizes at the moment include a Portmeirion tureen (and Lydy just gave me a tablecloth in the same pattern for Christmas), a large sage-green fuzzy sweater with pockets, and my brother's well-used and well-loved copy of John Bates's A NORTHWOODS COMPANION, FALL AND WINTER, which has already used a theatrical analogy about phenology, thus fitting ever so neatly into what I am trying to do with my novel.
Dinner was seitan and roasted vegetables and mushrooms in red wine sauce; brown rice; red cabbage cooked in beer with caraway seeds, vinegar, and red onion; orange, pinenut, and lettuce salad; hard rolls both white and whole-wheat. My mother was justifiably pleased with herself for producing a gourmet vegan meal that everybody would eat. The cake was splendid too. The icing recipe would, after a great deal of effort, have produced a vegan version of chiffon icing, which nobody likes, so the actual icing was rather too heavy for the structure of the cake. It tasted dandy, however. Chocolate cocoanut cake, with cocoanut milk providing the mouthfeel you'd get from dairy in a cake. Whee.
The candles were the kind that spark and then light themselves again after you blow them out. There were only five, and I found that with sufficient determination they could be defeated, so I hold that I got my wishes after all. David took a great many pictures, in his usual useful fashion. In my usual non-useful fashion I forgot to take the camera and take some of him. I do that when he carves turkeys for holidays, but I don't do so well at it the rest of the time.
We played with the cat and talked about cats past and present, and about history, and a bit about each other since there was a new person present. The cat liked Eric. Lydy and Matt got into a political discussion as the rest of us were putting on our boots and so forth to go home. That probably means that if we had stayed another half hour everybody would have woken up from food somnolence, but we all felt we had a lot to do, so we parted anyway. I hugged Matt goodbye and exhorted him to keep in touch. Eric had accurately divined that what he loved about Utah, whence he is returning, is the land rather than anything about the culture, and he really has been quite homesick, as Eric is for California on more levels.
It was a lovely congenial unconstrained occasion, and I was very grateful both that my sweeties and their sweeties were of such high quality, and that both mothers were willing to overlook their objections and see the quality in question.
I got home and resumed normal life by looking at email and watching "Buffy" with Raphael and glaring at my book balefully.
Pamela
