I Think That Was a Good Weekend
Although right now I am suffering from the well known Sunday evening syndrome, the consequence of having exchanged about ten face to face sentences with a real person for the entire day, being sleep deprived, not having accomplished as much as I wanted, and the sun setting at a completely unreasonable hour.
There has been dancing, good dancing at that, despite the old creeper earlier described. Dancing was continued on Saturday, when I got to work on the new moves learned the night before, practice my leading, and the sweetest of all, leading a guy. I'm still a worthless lead but he is a terrible follow and I suspect we were looking like two drunken college kids — I was too busy telling him on which foot to be to pay attention to the mirrors, and that was probably a good thing. I don't think he'll ever let me do it again, but at least we had a good laugh and I'm pretty sure he'll stop complaining that I mess up my footwork when switching between lead and follow.
There has been cooking and baking, and although I keep complaining that I don't like it when it's cloudy outside, baking a pumpkin pie in a cool, overcast November morning feels very homey. The smell of cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, cloves and allspice filled the whole apartment for most of the day until forced to recede by the strong aroma of lemongrass chicken cooking. (Talking about which: marinate chicken chunks in olive oil, soy sauce, lemongrass and ginger, sauté it until slightly browned, set it aside ; cook the shredded carrots in the same pan, put the chicken back, add a mixture of brown sugar, water, more soy sauce and ginger to keep moist and simmer on low until your guest arrives and the accompanying rice is done.)
There has been socializing, too, as I took my most recent roommate to a party organized by old friends[1]. A very large party that was, so we talked to a bunch of different folks and even I met a few new people. The wine was mostly terrible, I must say, but other than that and annoyingly immature kids[2], the event was a huge success. I had a lovely time catching up with pals, introducing them to my crazy New Yorker liberal of a roommate, stealing borrowing their hats, receiving compliments on my look[3], pretending to speak Italian, and making a fool of myself.
There has been some work done, too, some progress on a very, very dull and mind-numbing task I decided to complete myself when I had the possibility to delegate it to someone else because, well, I'm all sorts of stupid at times, and a good push to the project I did not have time to take a look at for the past week. Unfortunately the most urgent of my research questions is still leaving me very much puzzled, and I'm still behind on about every item of my to-do list.
And I still don't have plane tickets for the holidays.
