空白になったまんまの Saturday

Today I accidentally stumbled across a hairstyle for myself that I really like. I don't think I could do it on purpose though. I had my hair parted in the middle and used two barrettes to pin it up on the sides. Well, it was coming out anyway, so halfway through dinner I took out the barettes and just sort of half-assedly pinned back my hair over my ears. This resulted in a lot of the not-pinned in hair on the top kind of falling over the pinned back hair. It was a sort of cool effect. I could see it looking really good if I lost about 30 pounds and was wearing black vinyl pants and a black lycra shirt or something. Very goth-wannabe. I guess if I had a digital camera I'd post a pic of this hairstyle, but since I don't, oh well. I don't even think anyone got a picture of it tonight, but we'll see when Tim puts up his pictures.

Uh, so the circumstances under which I stumbled across this haircut was the "wedding" dinner for beegle and elletweedy, since they're like married now, except they did a stealth marriage Friday morning and invited a bunch of us to come out to dinner with them tonight. (I think for quite some time I will refer to it as the "groundhog's day party" anyway, just for fun)

So it was at Cafe' Sam, which I had a really good experience at when we went there for Ralph's birthday about two years ago (whoa... everyone who was at that dinner is on LJ now, I just realized... or was anyone there besides me, mrpeck, ralphmelton, lorimelton, elletweedy, beegle, seanmcguire, and jeliza? That was the infamous "pay Laura a dollar to pee over the patio fence" dinner...) and had good food and good fun. This time I still had good fun, but maybe I just ordered all the wrong stuff to properly really enjoy my food. I got french onion soup, and it was like 2/3 cheese - and I hate when french onion soup is all cheese and no soup, so I was pretty unhappy with it. I tried to get Eli to eat it for me, but it didn't work. (Laura had a cheese appetizer that was yummy though. Also they gave us bread and apple butter, which was tasty.) I ordered the filet mignon for dinner. Now that itself was quite good. It was perfect as far as I could tell - medium rare, nice and chewy, etc. But, unknown to me they served it with potato salad and this weird bean mix. I hate potato salad. The bean mix was ok but tasted bad because it had mixed with the potato salad. My side was mashed sweet potatoes, but they were of a really weird consistency, which didn't quite sit right in my head for some reason. And then when I stole some of Eli's coffee after dinner, we ran out of half-and-half for it. Oops.

So even though the eating experience wasn't all it could be, it was still a good fun social experience. I got to meet Laura and Willie's friends John (jrl755) and Gina, and it turns out John works with and worked with several of my friends, including the WB Lycos crew, so that was fun to gossip about people. And I guess I got to remeet and actually talk to their friend Tim (doeblert), who is also interesting, if in my head I kept thinking he looks like a younger version of Alan Houser (who some of you knew from Claritech - for those that don't, he was the senior tech writer who did all the Perl and Framemaker hacking, which became my duty after he left, which was a good thing, except Alan is cool so I was mad when he left anyway). And I saw Yerin (cinyras), who I don't see very often these days. And I got to see Mike, and Ralph and Lori, and Laura and Willie of course, and all... I even got to make a toast at the restaurant because I was saying we should have a toast, except then since I've never actually made a toast before I had no idea what to say. So I said something like "To Laura and Willie... for pulling off a really good stealth marriage... almost... and for not being quite so stealthy that we still got to party with them tonight!"

After dinner we went back to Laura and Willie's apartment, where we feasted on a GORGEOUS wedding cake that Lori made. It was pretty and yummy and had tons of flowers (I walked into the living room after taking a picture of the cake and was like "They're deflowering the cake right now," and everyone laughed, and I thought they thought I meant "deflouring", except I realized about ten minutes later what they ACTUALLY thought I meant. Sometimes I feel like the only person in the world who is not always in the gutter). Oh yeah, I took a whole lot of pictures. About a roll worth between the restaurant and the apartment, and a few extra, mostly of their chihuahua Piglet. Also, they lent me a copy of Worms for the Dreamcast! WOOO! Worms! I guess none of you were really around for my Worms obsession except maybe happysteve because we always played in his room in AEPi (in the summer of '96) because he had an airconditioner and all. :)

We ate, drank, and were merry. People drank wine, champagne, etc, and told stories of blowing things up and such. It was pretty interesting. Eventually we all realized it was very late and we should go home. Anyway. It was a fun day.

Oh, I guess there was a little more to the day. Well, not really. I read "Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and me, Elizabeth" by E.L.Konigsburg. I think shimmeringjemmy might enjoy it, if she was in the mood to read children's books. I played some SSX and some SimCity. I looked at some more job pages and at my resume a little more and worked out some stuff. I can't decide if "To obtain a job where I get to hack Perl or Java and play with XML" would be taken the way I want it to if I made it an Objective line. Hmm.

I played with my hair and tried on some random dresses I had because I thought I could wear them tonight. I have a grey 70's dress I bought a few years ago that actually doesn't look as bad on me as I thought, but I didn't think I could wear it in winter. Eventually I decided on the dress I wore to like four weddings in 2001. I figured that this event was close enough. Heh.

Wow, I just went and looked at blk's pictures she posted of volleyball from Friday. I miss volleyball. Maybe I should make a point of setting aside this Friday to go play. I realized I most likely won't actually be on a team for GSA this year, since I couldn't actually make it to CS Grad Volleyball last semester when they scheduled it on top of Kiltie Band rehearsals and all. Sigh.

I wonder if I've mentioned quite enough people using the lj user= tag in this post. Maybe I should mention that I saw damion yesterday before a KGB event and I went "hello Mr. Ed!" and he actually remembered my name :) and that tonight we had a conversation about how sk4p and beegle are not the same person even if you never do see the two of them in the same room, which led Eli to try to remember if he had ever actually met Shawn. Hmm. Heh. Ok, this is long enough now. Bye.

nemurenai

Can't sleep. Yuck.

I feel like going back through LJ and deleting responses I've made that have any negative tone in them at all. I feel for some reason like I've been particularly negative-sounding in Shawn and Happy's journals in my responses lately for some reason. I'm sure if I slept some, I'd worry less about it.

Many people I know or know of in real life have been showing up on LJ. They tend to add other people on my list, but not me, as a friend. The question is whether this is because my entries are too long-winded and they don't want to read them, or if they don't like me, or if they think I don't like them, or what. Maybe it's up to me to make the first move and add them... yeah, I know I wrote another entry like this a few weeks ago.

It's just weird. LJ has such a weird social dynamic in some ways. Especially when people make it so only friends can post to their journals, making it harder to go "Hey, I noticed you're on here, how's it going?" to said newly LJ-enhanced people.

Now that I have time on my hands, I think I want to travel a little bit, if I can figure out a good balance between jobhunting and goofing off. Going home to Philly for a few days to visit my family is high on my list of places to go. The west coast would be nice, too. We shall see. The thing is that with e-savers and staying with friends, trips can be very affordable, so the financial aspect shouldn't bog me down too much. Although Eli will probably miss me if I continually spend time hopping around the country...

wow, yawning. Maybe I'll finally be able to sleep... I shouldn't have had that coffee after dinner.