hello there

Well hello there! More often than not I don't post regular blog entries over the weekend, but I'm making an exception today for pretty obvious reasons: this very entry marks the first time I am posting to my new blog, hosted by Squarespace, without also posting to LiveJournal. Although I had been cross-posting for a week, this entry right here makes it official: I am done with LiveJournal. There are many reasons I'm finally leaving that platform after using it almost daily for fifteen years, but one of them, I suppose, is ease of consolidation of all the things I like to share.

For some reason I have this vague notion in the back of my head that I should somehow change the approach to exactly what I do write here -- it feels more public now, in a way, although I've long been saying my LiveJournal was less private than I stupidly assumed for many years -- but I bet I'll get over that pretty quickly.

I'm also writing this entry without doing it in code format. This means I can just do keyboard commands and voila!, the text formatting changes to, say, italics (as I just did for voila!). That's easier and faster. I don't see any easy way to insert the requisite DLU pictures, though. No, wait! *quickly Googles* -- okay, "content blocks" got it. Let's try that now! I need to tell you about going to Happy Hour with Laney last night anyway.

Interesting. I have to add another "block" for adding more text below the photo. Also I usually make the photos a link to their photo page on Flickr, and I'm not sure how I feel about that. I'm not sure it matters; the only reason they were always link codes on LiveJournal was because LiveJournal did not host photos. Here I can just add them.

Anyway! So I met with Laney for Happy Hour last night. Shobhit could not join because he was working. As you can see, Neon Taco on Broadway -- actually an alternate name for Nacho Borracho -- is a very colorful place. Neither of us had been there before and I had suggested as this month's location because I had gotten an email from Yelp with "best margaritas in town," and this place was on the list.

I hadn't left work until 5:00, because the "Town Hall" had predictably run long and the subsequent "Happy Hour" got to a late start. I could never have gotten the free food I love so much and still gotten out of there by 5:00. And I did get a free drink: a can of berry hard cider again. It's the best I can get at these work functions since they otherwise only offer beer and wine, no cocktails. That was the start of quite a bit of drinking I did last night, though.

So I rode my bike straight from there to meet Laney. Or rather, straight to the Capitol Hill library to pick up a DVD, and then to Nacho Borracho where Laney was already waiting. This was one of those places where you order at the bar, but they also have a separate window for ordering food (that would be the Neon Taco part, I guess?). They also had lots of frozen drinks on tap, and I had two of them: a type of Moscow Mule that was very red due to the addition of a currant liqueur I can't recall the name of; and then a very delicious frozen pineapple margarita. Laney bought the first round of drinks and I bought the second; she also bought a plate of veggie nachos for us to share, which were very different, very good, and covered with tons of oozing cheese sauce.

We sat in a booth first -- that's where I took the picture. At the very beginning, when I arrived, Laney had found a 2-top, but found the speaker directly above it to be too loud, and so we went for a booth. But then two bar stool spots at the counter along the open storefront opened up, and we moved there for finishing our drinks, overlooking the sidewalk.

We talked about a plethora of things as always. The only thing I remember talking about is how, unlike with a lot of other people I know -- even other close friends -- Laney and I really never, ever seem to run out of things to talk about. Which I think is cool.

I then suggested we go to a park or something, because the place overall was just getting too loud to sustain conversation in. That was my least favorite thing about it, but I otherwise liked the place a lot. She suggested we walk back to her place, so I grabbed my bike and we did. We each took a puff off her pot pipe, and she poured us wine. We sat out on common area chairs under a nice little communal gazebo on the inside corner of her L-shaped apartment complex, by the parking lot. We saw a guy taking a shower just inside a large window of barely obscured glass. I don't think people showering in that building know how easily we can see him. This guy was visible from the waist up, and it was like he was slightly more than silhouette -- you could see skin tone. And you could see his every movement. If he were to have sex or jerk off in there, it would be plain to see.

We discussed this with a couple of Laney's neighbors, one of whom was with a friend and had beers he shared with Laney (he offered to me but I declined as I don't like beer). At least two other neighbors walked by and chatted with us. I commented that it all felt very Tales of the City, which Laney agreed with and it was clearly something she really likes about where she lives.

I got pretty buzzed, and I hung out with Laney a lot longer than I expected -- although I'm not sure why I expected any different; this is not exactly without precedent. But, I had biked there, and now it was getting dark. I was even nodding off there for a few minutes, the alcohol was hitting me so bad. I never got wasted, mind you. I can still remember the whole evening. (I know I said I didn't remember everything we talked about, but that's normal when I'm sober.) Soon enough I got my bike out of her apartment and rode it home, which felt dangerous in the dark but I made it.

I waited for both Ivan and Shobhit to get home from work. Ivan arrived first, by maybe ten or fifteen minutes. He had already messaged me about having a work week from hell so I knew he would want to unload and I let him. I guess as he's working in place of the boss who quit, a lot more responsibility falls to him, and for the first time ever he had to send someone home because of a bigoted thing she said ("The worst thing is that she's a freaking Muslim!" -- this lady said about another worker who was trying to train her on something, apparently). He'd had a similar incident the evening before where he had to break up the bickering of two other young women.

Oh -- well, I was also going to tell you about my day so far today but I have to catch the bus to go hang out with Danielle this evening. So that will have to wait until the next journal entry. I know you're waiting with bated breath!