Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

A little catching up.

Wednesday

I was to meet up with an old friend who now lives on the far side of the continent, her husband whom I had met once before, and a local friend I haven't been seeing enough of lately, to go to dinner. Leaving Baltimore, the traffic was abysmal. When I came to a dead stop on I95, I called and asked for cross-county directions so I could be off the Interstates. The source of that backup was a pair of accidents, one in the median and one on the right shoulder, nearly across from each other. When I switched on WTOP I heard about more mess on the roadways. On the twisty back roads traffic was merely slow and heavy, not insane nor backed up by wrecks. There was a light rain falling (apparently it was a much heavier rain on some parts of the DC Beltway), a huge number of police cars, and an absurd number of accidents.

Once we were all assembled (thanks to the alternate route I was not the person most delayed), we set about chosing a restaurant. Good food. Good company. Good conversation. Good evening. The only problem is that I'll miss them so much more when they've gone back to the left coast, now that I've had this reminder of what fun they are to hang out with and talk to. A wide range of topics, ever shifting, as most of the really good conversations are.

As an extra treat, the evening included good Scotch. I can add one more to the list of Scotches way out of my price range that I know whether I like. (Glenmorangie. I don't like it quite as much as Balvenie Doublewood or Balvenie Portwood, but it's definitely in the "oh yes please" column.) The funny thing is that for the previous few days I'd been craving Scotch -- I wanted 25ml of whisky and an ice cube. But I didn't have any. There we were at the restaurant, and there was a list of whiskies on the menu, and I wasn't the only one tempted. So when dessert time came around, we gave in to temptation and two of us got whisky. One Balvenie Doublewood on the rocks, and the Glenmorangie which, it not being one I already knew, I didn't know whether I wanted it neat or not. (It turns out to be a good one to drink neat. (Oooh, listen to me trying to talk like someone who really knows all about Scotch whisky when it's really just that I pay a lot of attention because I know I'm still learning the subject at a beginner level (slowly because I so seldom get a chance to experiment on my budget[*]) and wind up taking notes.))

A movie was suggested afterwards, but I was too tired to consider it. Thinking that the Interstates would be clear by then, I set out for home. The one accident WTOP warned me about was cleared up by the time I got to it, but a short distance later there was an even worse one that didn't get announced until I was stuck in stop-and-go traffic on I95 beyond the point where I could have bailed out to another route. Argh. So the drive home took forever, and I was exhausted. Again, massive police presence, but it seemed most of the ones who would have been issuing speeding tickets were instead busy with accidents. "Water soluble driving skills", to borrow a phrase from an ex-housemate. Sheesh. And I nearly got run off the road by a pickup with a U-Haul trailer who used neither mirrors nor turn signals before changing lanes alongside me. BLEAH.

Thanksgiving Day

Slept very poorly. Did wake in time to hear "Alice's Restaurant Masacree" on the radio (plopping it on the turntable (I don't have that album on CD yet) works fine the rest of the year, but on Thanksgiving you really need to hear it on the radio, y'know?) but was moving very slowly on account of the poor sleep, and hit the road late. I had suspected that Mom had given me an earlier time than everyone else, but not being sure of that, I was trying for the time she'd told me.

This time I95 coming out of B'more was lovely. Well, not lovely, but at least nice. And sane. Traffic was awfully heavy, but it was consistently moving, at speeds ranging from ten-under to ten-over. Since I had managed to forget some details of the directions since last year, and the big roads seemed to be working, I figured I'd take the longer but easier to remember route. Mistake. Shortly after I got to I495, speeds dropped into the 5-15 MPH range. I arrived an hour later than I was told, a few minutes after what everyone else had been told, and well ahead of the last person we were waiting for. And already tired when I got into the car, I was stressed from the trip. The lesson: on a holiday just stay the [expletive] away from the Capital Beltway. If I can't remember the back route, wing it. Getting lost will be faster than getting on the Beltway on a major holiday.

But again, good company, good conversation, and good food. Some theological disagreements and kind of tense political disagreements (we had a mix of Bush and Kerry voters in the same room), but it says something about how I get along with these people that we could get away with arguing about both religion and politics -- the two things you're never supposed to risk bringing up at a party -- without, as far as I could tell, anybody's feelings getting bruised or anyone stomping away. Mom seemed a bit uncomofortable about the direction of the conversation and tried to nudge people in safer directions but we mostly self-moderated and kept it civil on the dangerous topics. (Let's see, we had a fundamentalist Christian, an eclectic mostly non-literalist Christian, Christians of unspecified stripe, a not-quite-militant atheist, an agnostic with sortakinda Deist leanings, and some flavour(s) of Jews ... and we started off on evolution and proceeded from there to such things as literalism vs. non-literalism, reliability of translations (briefly), epistemology (though we didn't call it that) and the nature of faith (the agnostic suggested it was stupid to believe we know things about God, and the thread of conversation was fortunately steered into a nature-of-faith discussion instead of some other directions it could have gone), same-sex marriage, the nature of sex and gender, and whether homosexuality is a "defect", all without any fights breaking out. I'm allowed to be impressed, right?) And then my uncle-in-law (is that a proper term?) beamed an e-Bible reader/search-tool and a Bible (one of about ten different translations he had with him) to my PDA./p>

(The political discussion got more intense but mostly involved fewer people at a time (if we brush aside what I consider inappropriate sarcastic political observations during the "take turns saying what we're thankful for" bit), and there was this "don't want to lose respect for the other person, whom I already know I like" vibe going on there. But I've been challenged to come up with harder evidence for the couple thousand arrests in NYC at the RNC than "it was well documented with first-person reports and otherwise in the blogosphere". Apparently, credible evidence means copies of arrest reports.)

Mom brought stuffed zucchini which she'd made meatless for my sake, and kept saying that it would've been better with the meat (hmm ... preemptive apology due to insecurity about the dish?), but folks reassured her that it was plenty tasty as-is. It's been a long time for me, but I still have taste-memories, and I really don't think meat would improve it. Then again, I was never the biggest meat fan even when I ate meat, so I'm not an unbiased observer. There was a moment of panic when someone remembered that the stuffing had sausage in it, but I calmed that by revealing that I really don't care for stuffing (uh, technically "dressing" if it's not cooked inside the bird, right? Or is it still called stufing?) anyhow, so they didn't have to make that vegetarian on my account. (Actually, if it's got meat in it and/or is cooked inside the turkey, that gives me an excuse for not eating it without hurting anyone's feelings. It's not like there was any shortage of food that I could eat.) The funniest thing about the stuffed zucchini was that as it was uncovered, three people reacted to the sight of green round things with hopeful cries of "Ooh! Dolmades?" before they discovered it was something else. Everything I could eat was worth eating second helpings of. (Unless I overlooked something or misunderstood who made what, I think four different people cooked.)

Once again, each time Mom tried to make a dig at me for the way I was dressed, others gently poked at her for it verbally. I appreciated that. And I got chided for not visiting between holidays. I need to remedy that.

The other invitation I got probably would have been a lot of fun as well, and certainly would have had food at least as good, but until I get better at that bilocation trick ...

This Weekend

At Darkover: playing with a pick-up band for the Playford dance workshop this afternoon/evening (Friday), then with The Homespun Ceilidh Band that night in the main programming room after the costume competition ends; and Saturday afternoon with The Homespun Ceilidh Band again in the music room, and later with a pick-up band for the Regency Ball. I may or may not attend the convention on Sunday, depending on where I wind up sleeping (I'll probably commute to the convention from home) and how tired I am by then.