halloweeny

Woke up, did some stuff around the house, took care of the garden.  Talked to the little kids a couple houses down, I asked them what they were going to be for Halloween and they told me they don’t celebrate Halloween because they celebrate Hanukkah.  I didn’t know before today that the two were ever mutually exclusive, I thought rejection of Halloween as a satanic holiday was the exclusive province of fundamentalist christians in this country.  It would appear I was wrong.  Got hold of Charlie and tried to convince him it would be a good day to be outside and disc golfing.  Went over to his place and prodded him a bit until he quit working and went outside with me.  Disc golf at Endicott, I didn’t keep score although I feel like I did fairly well in general.  Better than yesterday, which is a nice feeling.

Afterwards Charlie and I fought rush hour traffic to eat dinner at Whole Foods and then we popped over to the Joes which was deserted, presumably due to everyone else being at home handing out candy.  I’ve been boycotting the trick or treat the last couple years because there has been an overly high population of thuggish 14 year olds who didn’t bother to don their masks when pounding on my door.   Talked to Upstairs Neighbor who told me her husband bought a meat smoker, which explained the general aura of campfire cookouts permeating my apartment.  Went to the gym with Charlie and C., they played basketball and I worked out.  I spent the evening at home and went over to Charlie’s after midnight; we played FIFA and I slept at his place.

 

this is going to be a disc golf-y week

Because the weather is lovely for this time of year – 70ish and mostly sunny. Spent the night at Charlie’s, got lucky, went to tasty Thai for some linner and then headed to disc golf at Endicott. Had pad thai at tasty Thai, which is pretty much the only place I ever want to eat it again. I’ve tried it at several other places and it’s never been nearly as good. This is my self-reminder. We walked a little in the loop afterwards as we were waiting to see if M. would want to go to disc golf, and then we played a little FIFA while still waiting. M. was a no show. Didn’t keep score at disc golf, it got off to a not fantastic start and I didn’t bother.  Had a funny moment on the last hole where I went to throw a disc too hard, slipped on the acorns underfoot and fell flat on my ass.

Ate yesterday’s leftover burrito remnants for dinner, went to Marshalls, watched some TV, played computer gamed, suffered from severe insomnia. Bah.

 

10.28

Had a not exceedingly interesting day, did a lot of cleaning and such.  Charlie called to say hi and let me know that he was coming home this evening.  Was supposed to play tennis with R. and some other people in the evening but it was cancelled because they were having a cookout instead.  R. invited me to go along and I ate a burger for the first time in ages because I didn’t want to be rude.  There was also an amusing incident where the resident of the apartment we were at discovered one of her radiators was leaking and causing mushrooms to grow in her carpet.  Had a good time with them.  Ate gooey butter cake for the first time ever, it was OK but I don’t think I’d make any special effort to seek it out.

Made it home in time to watch the second half of the 4th game of the world series, Red Sox won, woohoo.  Charlie got home just after the end of the game, he’d been listening to it on the radio and getting a play by play from his mom at the end.  We hung out and chatted about the weekend and put the winter duvet on the bed and fell asleep early-ish.

The summer insects have stopped making noise in the last week or two, the trees are about as colorful as I think they’re going to get, winter is on its way.

 

I got my period this morning and I always forget how devastatingly shitty it can make me feel. It shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise, every 30 days should not be too infrequent to completely blank on it. But once again, I I found myself incapable of anything more than lying in bed attempting to not to think about how my internal organs are trying to expel themselves from my body and how I feel increasingly nauseated. Ah well, not much can be done about that. Charlie called to say hi from Chicago but we didn’t talk long. Spent the rest of the day being slothlike and playing games on the computer.

 

city museum birthday extravaganza

Went to Target to get all sorts of household items that I managed to run out of all at once. I guess that’s efficient, right? Didn’t have a terribly exciting afternoon, did a bit of cleaning and some computer games. Talked to R. around dinner time about the City Museum 10th anniversary thing that we were going to this evening and arranged to meet at his apartment. Stuffed bites of an egg sandwich into my mouth as I ran around putting on appropriate clothes and drove to R.’s. While waiting for him to come outside a very friendly and apparently homeless black cat showed up, wanting to rub itself on my legs, although I couldn’t tell if it was purring or not. R. said he’d seen it around and wasn’t sure if it was a stray but he thought so, considering it was pretty thin. It had a funny furless patch on the underneath of its chest but we couldn’t figure out exactly what was going on there because it was too dark.

We went to pick up another of R.’s friends, a guy who I had a funny connection to. In college he lived across the hall from a girl I was sort of friends with in high school. We headed to the city museum where we eventually rendezvoused with more people. The event was pretty great, our general activities involved wandering interspersed with popping into the special events they had going on. Chronologically:

• wandering on first floor/procuring drinks
• watching bellydancers
• wandering in caves
• climbing in the outdoor structures
• more caves
• brief attendance at musical performance
• arcade games/end of burlesque show
• architectural rooms
• Hibernauts
• burlesque show

I ran into C., CW, Mac, and B. there and saw multiple other people that I knew. It was a really eclectic mix of people, the bellydancers attracted middle aged couples and the rock music attracted the hipsters and the roller derby (that we did not see) attracted the gothy types and the burlesque attracted boys and their drunky girlfriends and the proximity to Halloween attracted quite a lot of people in costume. Additionally there was a wedding taking place, which just added a little bit to the crazy. Altogether a great time.

R. and I went home and the cat was still outside his apartment, still being friendly. I felt bad for it and told him I’d bring cat food so he could feed it, which he seemed fairly neutral about. I guess I’ll see if it’s around the next time I’m over there.

 

gloom

I got woken up early because Charlie had to be awake early to drive to Chicago. He went back to his place to pack and whatever and I went back to sleep. He came to my place again to say goodbye (he was also supposed to pick up a coat but he forgot) and give me my frisbees in case I wanted to play disc golf. He hit the road and I didn’t do much productive the rest of the day other than working on my painting, which I supposed is a worthwhile endeavor. I had errands to do and things like that but I felt vaguely malaised so it was a good day to lounge around, kind of rainy and gloomy. Charlie called in the afternoon to say that he was at a mall in Chicago to buy a coat since he had forgotten to take one and it was cold up in the northern realms. Amusingly he misplaced his car at the mall. For dinner I cooked up asparagus risotto from the Joes with shrimp in it which made an excellent meal.  Watched some TV in the evening, didn’t stay up excessively late.

 

Slept over at Charlie’s, woke up before he did and cleaned up some of his crap. I’m not entirely sure he appreciated it. I wanted to rearrange his bedroom but I would like to note it’s not because I’m an interfering weirdo, it’s because he has his bed blocking both the closet door, the other door and it generally makes it awkward to get into the room. Sadly that plan was vetoed, he likes his ill-arranged room how it is, thankyouverymuch.

Came home and worked on the Utah painting. I finally figured that I would actually get somewhere with it only if I just didn’t care how the first layer of paint went on and just got the white out of the canvas. That was an important lesson I learned in the painting class I took this spring, that one should consider the first coat of paint to be the first of several and just try to get the general colors blocked in rather than doing detail in one inch patches at a time. That’s something that used to really hold me up, just the idea that I wasn’t getting anywhere on these huge canvases and I was never going to finish so why bother? When I get all the white covered, it feels a lot more like I’m making progress.

Had yesterday’s leftovers for dinner, the fish reheated well but the pasta was a bit dry. Then I went over to Charlie’s to watch the Red Sox/Rockies playoff with him and some of the amis. This was a generally tolerable activity, the game was a crushing victory and thus not terribly exciting, so I played some yahoo games and whatnot at the same time. I get along fine with most of Charlie’s friends but there’s one guy who thinks he’s funnier than he is and sort of tries to pick on me in an unfunny way. It doesn’t hurt my feelings or anything, it’s just lame and irritating and I honestly wish he just wouldn’t talk to me if he can’t find a more adult/socially normal way to interact. After the friends took off Charlie and I played some FIFA soccer and then came back to my place to sleep. We went to bed early-ish (for us) since he had to get up early-ish but we weren’t tired and just chatted for a while. We fell asleep squished tightly together; sometimes I wonder how we manage to untangle ourselves in the night without waking up.

 

elk, bison, hiking, tennis = failure; disc golf = success

I don’t remember if I called Charlie or if he called me but he was sleepy and wanted me to come over and cuddle him. So I did. We were very lazy about getting up and doing anything productive. Once we finally dragged ourselves out of bed, we came back to my place and ate gourmet sandwiches – turns out that if you buy the fancy seasoned turkey and fine aged british cheddar and toast it and add lettuce and tomato, it tastes just like a $7 cafe sandwich. Who would have thought. Makes me more inclined to do my own food and eat out less for lunch, anyway.

We finally got going and decided to go to Lone Elk park to hike, it was a beautiful sunny crisp day and it seemed like a good idea to get outside. We drove down there and did a vehicular lap of the park since we hadn’t been there before, and lo and behold it turns out it’s elk mating season and there were signs everywhere warning us that the elk might be vicious and we should keep at least 100 feet away from them at all times. This made us a bit wary of actually hiking, in case we happened upon stray angry elk. So instead we drove around the bison loop, which was a bit less exciting than I’d hoped. The elk were all on the move, but the bison were just laying in the middle of a field like lumpy overgrown cows. At any rate, the park is really lovely, hilly and the trees were actually showing signs of fall color instead of just turning brown and shriveled like most of the leaves around here. We predicted that maximum color would be in about another week.

I suggested that we go to Castlewood SP to hike instead since it wouldn’t have the elk menace but when we tried to drive over there, we somehow missed the road we needed to take (I think it was in a construction zone) and found ourselves headed north. I then suggested we look for a school/park to play tennis but we couldn’t find one with courts. So we kept heading north and finally figured we could just go play disc golf at Creve Coeur lake.

So we did that, and it was fun because it was a nice day to be outside. I sucked and Charlie was decent, although he was in a bad mood and groused about it. He cheered up a bit when we encountered a really neat phenomenon as the sun was going down. The entire park (and it’s a big park) had billions of spider webs spun across the lawn in dense parallel lines. We could see them because they were lit up by the low angle of the sunlight. It was one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen. Some of the trees also had long lines of webs, and we saw one medium size spider climbing around on a tree but I can’t think there were enough spiders of that size to do all the lawn webbing. I wondered what purpose it served, whether that park in particular has insects that fly very low to the lawn or whether spiders construct webs like that all over the place and we never notice because the sun is never aligned for us to see them.

We finished disc golf as the sun was setting and went to dinner at Carrabbas. I had trout and Charlie had veal something or other. The trout was great and he seemed pretty pleased with the veal/pasta bowl, although I don’t think it was as good as the goat cheese chicken we shared the last time we ate there. Our waiter irritated me, he was overly informal and just rubbed me the wrong way. Oh well, that’s how these things go sometimes.

We went to the gym after dinner, shot baskets together (I did better than I would have expected since it was the first time I’d shot a basketball in about 3 years) and then he played a basketball game and I worked out. Came home, showered, cleaned up and did some dishes and relaxed a bit then went over to Charlie’s to hang out. Played FIFA and then slept over there. I feel bad that I’m neglecting the cat, it’s been staring out the window at me when I leave lately.

 

this is the problem with not writing things right away

I’m actually writing this a couple days after the fact and I can’t remember what I did on monday. Bloody hell.  OK, I slept over at Charlie’s, eventually we got up, hung out, he instructed me a bit in the ways of interweb card playing and then I came home so he could get some work done.  I talked to my mom on the phone about how firefox works and why she should get rid of her AOL dial up and then Charlie came back over here.  We made random freezer products for dinner and debated going to the grocery store to get ingredients for an exotic stew but instead we went for a drive around the city.  After finding ourselves up near the airport we went to the only Wendy’s in the greater STL region that is actually open, only to find that they don’t make chicken strips anymore.  The whole thing was a bit disappointing, after not being able to get Wendy’s for something like 1 1/2 years.

Headed back to Charlie’s place to find C. and one of his friends there and another girl joined us a little later.  We all hung out and watched TV and listened to music and everyone other than me played drinking games.  At 2am we found ourselves watching a Discovery channel program about dangerous jobs and the job du jour was logging.  We watched it with the sound off and made up our own commentary and dialogue which was pretty much the funniest thing ever.  The logging was rather insane.  They have a giant claw device that can cut a tree down in about 1.2 seconds and another machine that’s sort of like a cheese grater that just grabs the tree up and juggles it in midair while running from one end to the other shaving the branches off like the whole thing is made of butter.  Then there were clips of the forest intact, partially deforested, and gone and it was just horrifying to see the devastated landscape.  After that things became sleepy and whatnot and Charlie and I fell asleep on the couch while watching who knows what on TV.  I woke up at 4am and dragged myself home.

 

sporting sunday

Went to sports bar with Charlie around noon to watch football. First copy of The Economist arrived yesterday, hooray, I brought it along in case football was not adequately scintillating. The sports bar is close and not smoky but that’s about all it has going for it, they aren’t very good at getting the TVs set to the games we requested and the food is a bit overpriced and nothing anything special. Speaking of food, we did notice the other day that House of India is open again, yay for that. We watched the first half of the games and I read a bit but the game Charlie was interested in turned into a bit of a blowout so we went home and napped. He’d been up late and I hadn’t slept well. We played some FIFA soccer, hung out a bit with C., ordered pizza for dinner and watched the Red Sox/Indians final playoff game, which was rather exciting. I’m somewhat contractually obligated to cheer for the Red Sox, although I always feel so bad for the teams that lose in the playoffs when they all sit around looking tragic/weepy at the end of the game.

I went home for a little while to socialize with the cat and whatnot and then went back over to Charlie’s to sleep. We read the Economist in bed for a while and then I got tired and he wasn’t so I went to sleep and he went to play video games/do whatever late night activities he does.