Good people

[liv]

I have been somewhat neglecting my journal for other kinds of socializing recently. So I should write about all the lovely people I've been hanging out with in the past couple of weeks.

There was doseybat's party two weeks ago. doseybat's parties are becoming almost a regular social event, but there are always a few new people so it's slightly different every time. But they are consistently lovely and full of good conversation, and tend to make me very bouncy. I embarrassed myself slightly by meeting people I know through LJ and taking a while to twig that the flesh-and-blood person was the same as the digital person. *waves sheepishly to 791point43 and deborah_c* deborah_c has the most fascinating voice. Also chatted to hairyears and alexa_robinson and Leo&Gemma (WANOLJ). And several people I already know and whose company I very much enjoy: karen2205, pseudomonas, lethargic_man and of course compilerbitch and doseybat. I didn't quite manage to talk to blue_mai as much as I'd hoped, but no party is perfect.

I wasn't entirely pleased with myself on Sunday. I felt I'd made so many plans with different people that I ended up letting all of them down. Which was in large part because I got to bed very late (even by party standards) and, um, didn't exactly sleep, so I didn't get up until lunch time. Messing with my sleep patterns like that tends to make me a bit grouchy anyway, which didn't help. I ended up abandoning my original plan of spending the day doing cultural stuff with lethargic_man and karen2205. At least I got to travel with lethargic_man as we were going the same way. Even that little space of time with him made me feel a great deal better.

ewtikins was very patient with my showing up later than we'd said. Yay mobile phones for taking up the slack of my lack of organization. I met ewtikins at tuesday_borders but it turns out we have loads of Jewish geography connections anyway. Plus, on the basis of the first meeting we seem to get on, so we wanted to make another opportunity to meet up. We had a very pleasant walk (I actually really like urban walking), during which ewtikins was ever so interesting and told me lots of cool stuff I didn't know, especially about edible things you can find in London parks. The smoke in the air from the explosion earlier in the day made breathing slightly uncomfortable, but also made very attractive patterns in the sky and caused a glorious sunset. By the time it was dark it was also quite cold, so we went to hide in a very very kosher cafe where we ran into some friends of ewtikins from Yakar, who were lovely.

I spent the evening with NZ, which is always a delight. She is in a bit of an awkward situation academically, but she is carrying on with her PhD regardless and hopefully will find a way to get it accredited. And socially and personally, she's happy and glowing and generally better than I've seen her in months, which is great. Had a lovely evening with her and her housemates (who are OULES people and know lots of my friends in a scary Oxbridge geography way), catching up, and being girly (you'll never believe what just happened at the party...) I'm still hoping to bring N to tuesday_borders at some point, but she's has such a full diary it's hard to fit in anything new. Which is of course a good thing.

I spent Monday being cultural (which I shall try to write up in a separate post), then headed to theladiesloos meet in the evening. That was a lot of fun, and strangely like transposing an active and friendly LJ community into meatspace. People discussed quite intimate things with people they'd only just met, and provided input to other conversations going on across the table, and were supportive when required and it was very nice. I only wish it hadn't been in a pub, which was noisy and smoky. I may propose a meet somewhere that isn't a pub, because it wasn't as if anyone was actually drinking to any significant extent, and there are lots of places that are better for conversation than pubs.

Then I headed back to compilerbitch and doseybat's place. (Side note: that flat really needs a name so it can be referred to in a less clunky way. Do you guys have any thoughts?) Despite being extraordinarily tired by this point, I still stayed up for ages chatting to doseybat and even later to compilerbitch. I really love spending time with the two of them, it's one of my greatest joys.

As a result we got up kind of late on Tuesday morning, and headed out to Cambridge somewhat slowly. Lunch with pseudomonas at the Computer Lab, then an afternoon with even more fun conversation. It ended up that compilerbitch dropped me off at home just at supper time, so the parents invited her to join us and we had an excellent evening. My parents really like compilerbitch, being people of taste, and they were ever so excited about her good job news.

Then I had a couple of days vegetating to recover before Gerv showed up on Saturday (which is the one thing I've managed to post about already). Then at the beginning of this week I headed to Southampton to hang out with blackherring for the few days she's in the country. Many thanks to jillt for her wonderful hospitality. pseudomonas was there too; it's so very lovely to have the three of us together with time just to appreciate eachother and cuddle and of course have long rambling conversations about anything and everything. We drank lots of tea and displayed a complete lack of willpower in Oxfam books. Yay.

jillt drove us to Heathrow stupid early to meet Mr Herring from his flight. And then I headed to lethargic_man's new place to help him move in. I don't know that I was much help, but I did at least provide company to make the job less dull. We did quite a lot of sorting out of bookshelves, and lethargic_man played me some of his delightfully eclectic music collection, and it was companionable and wonderful.

And after all that I met up with draconid to bring her home for dinner. So that was social as well. Yay draconid! We had a little bit of time in town on Thursday morning, so I did a whistlestop tour of the major sights and we got to chat more and yay.

And in yet more sociable news, I've been carrying on an interesting email conversation with timeplease, and I have got back in touch with loads of people I hadn't spoken to in ages by means of inviting them to my party. I even caved in and paid money to Friends Reunited, which is something of an evil site (it serves adverts to paid users, among other problems), but it has put me back in touch with a couple of people whose Hotmail addresses were filing my mails as spam, which is something. So I'm even more than usually snowed under by email at the moment, which is a good problem to have.

And my sibs are all coming home today (together with my cousin S), yay family. And my birthday party is on Tuesday, which I'm really really looking forward to. (By the way, is anybody driving to the party who might be able to give Screwy a lift? It's an absolute nightmare to get a wheelchair user to Southgate by public transport, as far as I can tell.)

Happy Christmas to those who celebrate Christmas.

Comments

[doseybat.livejournal.com]

is anybody driving to the party who might be able to give Screwy a lift?

Sarah says that if no one can give him a lift, she is willing to go and pick him up - give us a ring. (Though if someone else could, it would be preferable -- Sarah's ankles are a bid dead atm..)

[pne.livejournal.com]

Happy Christmas to those who celebrate Christmas.

Thank you!

We've spent Christmas Eve so far listening to some Christmas music, reading what Germans call "the Christmas story" (the beginning of Luke chapter 2) in English and German and A Visit from St. Nicholas. And Stella had made a really lovely three-course meal for the occasion.