don't tell her to turn down, put on your shades if you can't see

I had a v. productive day, even though I didn't get out of bed until almost eleven. Once I finally dragged myself out of bed, I went on a mad dash to unpack as much as possible before Felicia's arrival. There's nothing like an impending houseguest to force progress on unpacking, and I did a lot today -- my kitchen is now fully put together! I still need to clear out the stuff hanging out in the dining area, my bedroom is a mess, and I need to organize my file cabinet, but things are coming along. I also spent some quality time washing linens and cleaning the bathroom, so my place is feeling much more livable than it was when I got home from Europe a couple of weeks ago.

My timeline became unexpectedly compressed when John and Jess called from downtown Palo Alto and ended up coming over. It was great to see them, as per usual; unfortunately, I could only offer them water, since stocking my fridge has not taken priority, but they seemed to accept my lack of social graces. I'm looking forward to being fully unpacked so that I can properly entertain -- this is the perfect place for having people over, and I'm eager to start cooking again now that I have a fully-stocked kitchen and a dishwasher. So hopefully later this summer I will start planning parties; the trick is finding friends to attend those parties, but I'll figure it out.

Anyway, John and Jess left about fifteen minutes before Felicia came over. She's doing a weekend dance event at Stanford, and so she's staying with me tonight. It's been great to catch up with her; with my travels and my generally busy last few months, I haven't seen her in awhile. We had dinner at the Peninsula Creamery (I'm fully returning to my glorious Palo Alto lifestyle, including all the restaurants from my college days), and then hung out at my place. She left briefly to do the group photo with the dance group, and when she returned, we watched the end of "Blades of Glory" and several Food Network shows.

Now, I'm going to let her get to sleep, and I'm going to try to get up early enough to accomplish a lot more tomorrow. I want to increase my writing time, though, rather than just focusing on housework, so we'll see how that works out. Goodnight!