claude cla-claude claude claude

Today was a truly lovely day, possibly excepting all of the manual labor in the middle of it. I failed to live up to my goal of getting up early to plant flowers, but I did mange to get up in time to meet Terry for brunch. I told her about my trip to Ukraine, she told me about her trip to Italy, and we complained about work--all in all, a good way to spend a couple of lazy Sunday hours.

After brunch, I did a couple of loads of laundry, filled my car up with gas, swept up my patio (the concrete part, not the garden part), and cleaned off my patio furniture. This was quite the undertaking - when I bought the table last summer, it was a floor model, and so when they shipped it to me, they taped the legs to the top of the table. The problem with this was that they used standard packing tape, which made certain areas of the top extremely sticky, and the stickiness trapped all sorts of dirt and detritus. So I first had to clean off the grime w/some standard household cleaner, and then I attacked the stickiness with some Goo Gone (which worked better this time, since I was more patient and actually let it sit for awhile rather than trying to tackle it immediately). But while I still have lots of flowers to plant, hopefully over the next few evenings, my patio now looks like someplace where people (especially myself) would like to spend time going forward.

I managed to take a shower, make cookies, and buy a watermelon before some of my friends showed up this evening for an informal dinner of take-out pizza. Claude was the first to arrive, and we were soon joined by Vidya, Sri, Oniel, Zach and Maggie (aka Mr. and Mrs. Stinkubus, long story). It was a delightful evening - it was good to spend some time with Zach and Maggie, since I saw them at their wedding two weeks ago but didn't actually get to spend any real time talking to them, and the rest of my friends were amusing as always. I'm sad that Zach and Maggie are moving to Yale and that Claudia will soon join them, but I suppose it will all work out. At least I still have Vidya, Sri, Oniel, and Adit...that's pretty good. And I have several good friends at work, and I would have several more friends if I spent more time with other people (I realized today that I haven't seen Shedletsky since Easter, which was forever ago). But I'm not going to spend time with anyone tonight; instead, it's time for bed!