Ye gods, I needed that

Today I didn’t have to go to work.  And that means I slept late, and did as little as I could contrive to do, and it was wonderful.

And I got to hang out this afternoon at the Austin Stories meetup with a bunch of people who didn’t have anything whatever to do with either place that I work.  And that was wonderful too.

If I’d been at all responsible I would have gone out and worked in the yard today, because it was a perfect day for yardwork:  The sky was utterly clear in the way that only a Texas sky can be after a winter norther, or for a few magical days in the spring.  The sun was warm, temperatures got up into the middle seventies, there was just a little more than enough wind to be ideal (although it was exactly the right amount of wind for the Zilker Kite Festival), in my neighborhood every third house had someone—usually a female someone—out in the yard digging something up or putting something in an already-dug hole, and the streets were full of girls in spaghetti-strap tanks, tinyshorts, and flip-flops, trying to pretend that it was summer already.

All the vegetation in Austin is deciding it’s spring, too.  As I drove around, I saw redbud and flowering quince blooming madly away on bare sticks and twigs, Confederate (Carolina) jessamine cascading over walls in great falls of yellow, western mountain laurel starting to unfold its mad purple dangling blooms that look like overgrown wisteria and smell like the tree is wearing lots too much cheap Woolworth’s perfume, and pink azaleas blossoms covering the bushes all up and down the Western Wall of the University.  (If you’ve seen the University from the Drag, you’ll know why the Western Wall has to have Capital Letters.)

(Damn, but I wish I had an inexpensive digital camera to carry about so I could take quick snapshots when I see something like a flowering quince bush that’s nothing but a bundle of sticks covered in dusty-red blossoms.  I’m absolutely devoted to my old Minolta XG-1 and I don’t ever want to give up my film, I don’t care if Eastman Kodak has proved to be a bunch of faithless bastards who abandoned the very technology that brung ’em, but having a digital cam would make transferring things so much more mechanically convenient when I want to pitch a picture up to the Web.  I look at the wonderful botanical pictures that Rusty posts, and I’m eaten alive with envy.)

Oh, I did do one virtuous thing today:  I replaced the leaking valve in and put a new seat on our toilet, so the water bill isn’t pouring away down the sewer and you don’t get scratches on the back of your thighs when you sit down.  That was as responsible as it got, though.

This afternoon I went to the Austin Stories meet up at Halcyon Coffee Bar.  It’s the first thing in thirty days I’ve done that wasn’t just work or lying at home with family, trying to catch up on sleep.  Thirty days since I did something that was just about me.  I counted.

I was the second person to get there, followed by Stephanie, but I didn’t recognize the first—Linda—because she just joined Austin Stories and hadn’t been to any event before.  (I know, sorta, how that is:  when I went to my first meeting, at Azul Tequila, I just plain got lucky in guessing that the couple right behind me were Jette and Chip.)  However, Linda found us at the table out front before things had been going on very long.

The meetup was a fairly good sized bunch, as they go:  ten showed up through the afternoon.  Besides Linda, Stephanie, and me, there were Jette and Chip, Greg, Kramer, Janice, and someone else whose name I’m supposed to know and I can’t think of it for anything!  All I can remember is that she has a big, whooping kind of laugh that might, some other time, have irritated the daylights out of me, but today it fitted my mood and the event, and it was all right.  Oh, and someone showed up who appeared to know Jette; she doesn’t have a blog, but is down here from Syracuse University, interviewing to see if she wants to try getting into the University’s graduate school in RTVF.  During the conversation, she mentioned that she’d grown up in Baltimore, so I had to say, “Oh, you’s a Bawlamoron too, hon?” and then explained that L had grown up there.  Of course, that brought a question about just where L had grown up (the Ramblewood area of the city) and where she’d gone to school (The Park School).  That produced an “eeewwwwwwww . . .” moment, since Christi (I believe her name was, it’s late) had gone to Friends, and Park and Friends have had a rivalry for ever and ever.  It wasn’t a very serious moment, though.

Janice, who besides being a blogger is also my fourth cousin once removed on my mother’s side, did have one piece of sad family news to pass on:  she’d just received an email from our mutual cousin Ruth Adele saying that Ruth Adele’s husband, Dan, has a brain tumor.  Now Dan is 78, and certainly he can’t live forever, but it’s still sad that the older Cunningham descendents whom we’ve seen at reunions each year, since about the time that God was a little boy, are dying off.  These are the ones my parents’ age, after all.  It’s one thing when Cousin Emmett, who was the last of the original patriarch and matriarch’s grandchildren, died in early 1986 at the age of 85.  That was my grandparents’ generation, and of course they were old and old people die.  It starts to get different when it’s people your parents’ age who are dying.  (Of course, I’m one to talk, since my own father, who was only a year younger than Dan, has been dead for eight years now.)

So we all hung out at our sidewalk tables from three until five-something and drank coffee things mostly, and talked and talked and talked and almost none of it involved computers (no more than you’d expect, of course, in a group whose common interest is blogging) or taxes.

And that was really, really great.

Henry Fonda designed the sociological flowerbed for the plastics of Darryl F. Zanuck.  Fnord.