light my candle

I am beyond tired, but I've had a v. lovely day! I awoke in Ritu's bed, vacated it, showered, and was mostly dressed by the time she got home from work. Then, I kept her awake in a nefarious attempt to make her as loopy as possible by taking her out for breakfast to the diner down the street, which was all sorts of fun. Then we came home, I grabbed my laptop and notebook and other supplies, and she went to sleep while I wandered out into the city to get some work done. I ended up at a tea place, where I had a v. terrible earl grey tea (I think they put vanilla into it, which I'm pretty sure Earl Grey would not have approved of), which I nursed for several hours while procrastinating and trying to figure out how to structure the next scene and what information I need to impart.

I got hungry at some point, so I wandered around and had lunch at some Thai place, which was pretty tasty. Then I had half an hour to kill, so I tried to go to Starbucks, but the seats were all taken, so I bought a bottle of water and sat in the park across from Ritu's building. It turns out the park is a playground and adults aren't supposed to be there without kids, but I must have looked unthreatening because no one harassed me, and I actually wrote a couple of pages of zee romance novel while sitting on a bench.

At that point, it was time to go wake Ritu up. Her boyfriend Bill (whom she met at the glorious German wedding we went to last summer) got into town this afternoon and was already there, but it took quite some doing to rouse Ritu and get her showered/dressed/packed. And by 'some doing' I mean I heckled her for an hour and a half. We eventually got ready, got to Grand Central, got on a train, and spent a couple of hours hanging out on zee train before arriving in New Haven, home of Yale University, and more importantly home to some of my v. favorite people, Claudia (aka Claud, aka Claude the Fraude), Zach (aka Stinkubus), and Maggie (aka...she's too sweet to be aka anything). They've all been here forever, but it's the first time I've made it up to New Haven, which is v., v. exciting....

...and we had a totally lovely, awesome evening. Claudia picked us up at the train station and brought us to Zach and Maggie's, where we had pizza ordered in (there was a gluten free version for Claude, which was delightful, but I was bad and tried the New Haven classic pizzas, which were also delightful but probably unwise). Zach made us drinks (first a gin martini, then a gin/elderflower concoction, then whatever whisky/rye/bourbon we wanted), Maggie made a salad, and later Maggie gave us bourbon vanilla ice cream with a caramel/ground cherry sauce. Yum yum. We laughed ridiculously hard, reminisced excessively, and probably made Bill doubt his decision to be part of the madness, but it was all quite entertaining. And now, I'm exhausted, and I must go to bed before staying up this late ruins all the good work I've done trying to get adjusted to the time change. Goodnight!