Last week was pretty crazy week around my house. Not just for the usual reasons of entertaining too many strippers in too many hot tubs and running out of cocaine AND Triscuits at the worst possible moment…I mean, that’s every weekend, pretty much, for me, as regular readers of this journal will attest. This week I’ve had multiple and various houseguests and weddings and brunches and people in from out of town and it’s made my head spin a little.
Thursday night my mom got into the airport at about midnight. She was very bright eyed and bushy tailed and we had a little mother/daughter slumber party in the cloud room that night. She stopped short of packing me a lunch to take to work but she did drive me there and come pick me up for haircuts and manicures. I can take or leave manicures in general, as they never hold on me and begin to chip the moment the polish dries, but I was pretty happy with my haircut, my last from beautiful Ruth, the best hair person I have ever had ever and whom I am devastated to lose to…of all places…Antarctica. This new hair, it’s very short and it involves more product than with which I am usually comfortable. In fact I have pretty much no product in it today for complicated getting-up-late reasons and I look a little like a boy. Ruth the Antarctic explorer did not mention the gender-bending ramifications of no product.
Anyway, hair (it’s short!) aside, since Mom arrived I have been running a youth hostel the last couple of days. Thursday and Friday Mom was here of course, and also Friday night some silly friends of mine and their dads came up to Seattle to do this silly STP ride and all stayed in the living room with their juggling clubs and helmets and comically tight pants, drinking tea and eating cupcakes and even moving a little furniture for me. Saturday night I went to a great wedding and one of the bridesmaids came home with me (aw yeah!) and slept on the beleaguered purple futon and was gone before morning while I was still sleeping off cake and 2000 different types of Italian cookies upstairs…by the way, if you are planning a wedding and you ask yourself in your heart if you should have approximately 2000 different types of delicious Italian cookies presented fetchingly in little baskets near the cake, and if one of those 2000 types of Italian cookies is going to be an almond pizzelle, you can stop your worrying because the answer is YES. Your guests will love them and they will be dreaming of them the night of your wedding, as soon as they set up the purple futon for yet another houseguest. Sunday night it was technically just housemates there but since it’s been so long since I’ve seen Treasa and since I sort of rearranged the living room while she was gone this past week it was like I had to give her a house tour to reorient her and so it was a little like she was just visiting, too, although I’m relatively certain that she, unlike the other houseguests, at least knows where the tea cabinet is and how to use the downstairs shower.
This past week also involved four separate trips to the airport and one to the train station, and a lot of last minute plans to meet for breakfast or dinner or some other occasion when someone was going to be in town for only a little while and a lot of consulting my calendar and synchronizing watches and driving around getting lost and placing frantic cell phone calls. I seem to be doing this thing lately where I’ll switch off between having a slooooooooow weekend where I take a couple of naps and read a couple of books and maybe watch a movie or something and don’t much talk to anyone who isn’t selling me vegetables or chocolate mints, and then having a more hectic one like this past one. I like both kinds, I think, but I find myself wishing, a little, that I could have some of both every weekend instead of such a sharp dichotomy.
I leave Wednesday for a trip to the Bay Area, which will involve a trip to my beloved Monterey Bay Aquarium with actual members of my actual extended family as well as a long overdue trip to the ABL, where I will participate in a very small and humble way in a glorious project literally years in the making and about which I hope I get some security clearance to discuss publicly here. And then the rest of July is pretty busy and now that I think about it August is beginning to fill up too and then it will be fall and who knows who I’ll go to visit, who will come to visit me, what kinds of weekends I will have then.