no, sweets, i am alive, and we are having a good time, but i am much too tired to update this page.

i do like having von here, because he explains things to me, like how to tell one kind of pine from another, and what goes into sauces, and suspension in cars and trucks. also he brought me moral reinforcement in form of chocolate, most of which he ate on arrival (while peremptorily alloting me small squares every 20mins or so) oh! oh! and he made a clasp out of a paperclip for my broken necklace. i always knew it was useful to have a man around the house. *beam*

in reply to queries from various, no, he hasn't let me cook yet, no doubt he thinks i'll poison him and harvard will lose one of its best minds. but he ate my longan wood-ear on the first night. i am brewing pear soup for breakfast tomorrow. rock sugar and pear slices and almond slices in it but it seems short of something i can't think what. it just doesn't look like my mater's.

the world according to von:

is filled with ugly dogwoods (!), useful witchhazel, beautiful magnolias (heartily agree - i think he'll help me pilfer some blooms from the tree behind the rotunda later). also we spent time arguing about whether that anomaly of an anthropology building was a harvard-style building.

and now the weekend is nearly all gone and von is leaving tomorrow afternoon. this weekend felt like springbreak, more than springbreak did, because i didn't think about work and we walked ard for ages and the weather was lovely and i felt relaxed and cheery. i left him in the computer lab writing up his grant application (although he was reading the annotated pratchett files when i left)

the rest of weekend, in stats:

times walked downtown: 1
times walked back from downtown: 2.5
times von did his trogdor the dragon routine: uncountable
times von drew trogdor the dragon on blackboard: 1
times ended up wrestling each other so that he would not say the t-word: too many times
bruises on wrists (mine) resultant: painful and many

sit down dinners:

at rapture (pan-seared tuna, kampung chicken, chocolate cake)
at bizou (pate, meatloaf and salmon, banana bread with vanilla icecream and praline sauce) )
at southern culture (crawfish quesadilla, jerk pork, orange roughy)


beers consumed:

starr hill amber, red nectar ale, some other kind of ale that was bizarrely fruity.

other food consumed:

banana nut pancake (3), bacon waffle (2), beef and onion pancake (3), grits (1 bowl), coffee (very many mugs), egg (1, overeasy) - all at tavern. wood-ear (2 bowls - at home), omelette (1), egg/cheese croissant (1), rice pudding (1) - all at europa. icecream from chaps (3 scoops), arch's (not yet), pizza (3 slices, tomato feta spinach - sylvia's).

why it would be nice to have von gone:

getting rid of that automatic spellcheck over my shoulder, who has twice reproved me in the writing of this entry alone.

disappointments:

when he arrived he cheerfully ate my sugar free cookies and pronounced them perfectly edible. i thought he would liberate me from their oppression for once and for all and deliver me into the welcoming arms of the sugared tin, but two-thirds of a tin still smirk at me. of course, i would probably discover tomorrow that he'd done the unforgivable thing of eating my last raisined cookie from the sugared tin or something. oh well.

vaguely cross:

about how von didn't think maurice was so amazing and didn't get beyond the first few chapters. this crosses me because i think it is very good, and i had sacrificingly kept the book in my room all week for him when he gets here. i could have expelled the book from the room and emancipated myself, and then i would have not been in harm's way all week, as i had been!!!! the thing about taking books out of the library as incentive for working is that you might just take a really long lunch and read it all at once. on the other hand, the paper is going to get written somehow or other when the time comes, so i might as well reward myself for it now.

time to make list of things to do.