The Green Room

stolen from here

It is very bizarre to read about all the snowstorms in the rest of the country. Our winter has been so mild that when I poked my head out the back door this morning, I wasn’t even really that surprised to see that I already have flowers coming up.

Thank goodness!

If I were on twitter, I would have had to post something last night about wearing a $95 hotel bathrobe. For about the last two months, I’d been planning a surprise night out for Ryan, and yesterday was the night. We went to a schmancy restaurant in the Pearl District (I had pear and dandelion salad and gnocchi with this scrumptious mushroom sauce), and then, Ryan being Ryan and us being downtown, he wanted to go to Ground Kontrol, so we did, and he killed some aliens and then we watched the Rock Band tournament for a bit. Then, the crowning jewel of the whole enterprise was staying at The Nines, which is this fancy hotel near Pioneer Courthouse Square. We ordered ice cream from room service, because we never had before. I’d also never slept in a king size bed before, that thing was wider than it was long! What was really funny though was the room had all this stuff in it, like the bathrobe, and an umbrella with the hotel’s name on it, which I thought it was really cool of them to have all this stuff for you to use, until I was thumbing through the hotel directory looking for the room service menu, and I saw the price list for all the different items in the room. You could even keep the towels! (If you wanted to pay $40 for them, that is.) Fancy hotels are funny. I wish we could go do that again sometime soon, but I booked it through a promotion where if you did 8 hours of volunteer service for a registered non-profit organization you could get a free night’s stay, and you can only do that once. It was so much fun though.

We just got back from Powell’s, where we heard Ursula LeGuin and a man named Margaret Killjoy talk about anarchism and science fiction. Unfortunately, Ursula LeGuin did not stay to sign books afterwards, because I would have loved to be able to shake her hand, and tell her how much I appreciate her always being there for me when I need her, but as she said, ‘when you’re over 80 there are some things that it gets harder to do,’ and I don’t begrudge her wanting to get home early. But oh man, I am so glad I got to go and hear her!

Today I am taking the day off. Tomorrow I will have things to do again, which will involve getting dressed and going outside, but today I am damned if I’m getting out of my pajamas or doing anything more strenuous than watching my netflix and working on my cross-stitch. Today is my day.

Today is the day for taking down the Christmas decorations.

We went out to Indian food for my mother’s birthday last night. All six of us. I don’t know what’s stranger, my family all being adults now, with the wealth of new conversation topics and honesties that implies, or the mere fact of how we’ve expanded. It isn’t just me and my parents and my sister any more, we’ve added my husband and my sister’s boyfriend, and I like what they add to the family, and the way that we interact. After a very rambunctious dinner, during which my father didn’t even come close to being grumpy, we went back to my parents’ house and played board games, and Dad didn’t play, but he came in and watched, and was friendly. Nobody got offended or huffy, even when the game got heated. It’s like this sense of strain that I’ve always had being around my family, even when things were good, just wasn’t there anymore. I think it was the most fun I can remember having with my family, and it only took us 27 years to get there.

My sister now has two sets of shiny metal things in each ear, I acquired a big box of Cinnabons, and we have plans for my mother’s birthday tomorrow. (#62! Go Mom!) Today was a good day.

My first post of 2010!  Except I’m not really crazy about resolutions, and while I’ve enjoyed reading the Decade in Review posts that have been going up around here, I’m not too keen on writing one myself.  There are large parts of the last decade that I have no desire to air in public, and equally large parts that I already have and wish that I hadn’t.  It is, curiously enough, only in happiness that I’ve learned reticence.  The only things it feels like I can talk about anymore are, not irrelevant, but peripheral.  The things in the center aren’t always mine to share, or they’re so big that I can’t even find words to describe them.  Is this why so many people blog about their cats?  Maybe I should go back to quoting Sufi poetry all the time.  At any rate, I would like to start using this space more again.  Part of the issue is due to work.  I am on the computer all day, five days a week, and when I come home it’s hard to make myself get on a computer again, which is why I’m about five months behind in my emails as well.  But I’ve also been putting off talking to people outside of the computer, because I get home and am tired and don’t feel like going out again, or even getting on the phone.  Which means, it’s not just a blogging issue, it’s a cutting myself off from people issue.  Sigh.  I guess I know what I need to work on.  Seems like I tricked myself into making a resolution after all.