Going-Away Party
Hmm, it's been another busy weekend, or at least it feels that way. The subliminal stress of The Big Move is going to make every day feel busy for the foreseeable future, I think. Maybe by mid-April or so I'll feel like things have calmed down!
Saturday I finished cataloguing my comic books - whew! It's good to have finally finished that project, which I've wanted to do for some time. I own fewer physical books than I'd thought, but their total value is around what I'd estimated. (No, I'm not going to put numbers up on the net, thank-you.)
Eventually I'll get to my CDs and books, but probably not 'til I have a permanent place in California.
I also watched Friday's Homicide episode, which was okay, mainly focusing on Mulder and Scully Bayliss and Ballard investigating the death of a woman who fell off a cliff: Was she robbed? Pushed? Did she jump? It was not an outstanding episode, but did have a tantalizingly vague conclusion.
Friday morning I received not one but two telemarketer phone calls, so when the phone rang in the early afternoon and someone asked for "Mr. Row-dann" I groaned and switched to my "I'm in the middle of some really good sex and you're bothering me" voice. Bad move, since the caller was in fact from the moving company contacting me about getting me information on searching for a permanent apartment when I get out there. Sigh. I wonder if they get that a lot from people they call for the first time?
Saturday night my friend Pat threw a going-away party for me, which was very nice of her, and was a very enjoyable party. People brought lots of yummy food, and there was a chocolate cake saying "Good luck, Michael" with a big colored Apple in the middle. As I took my first bite I remarked, "Well, I guess now I'm committed to going." (I made the same joke when I got my plane tickets yesterday. Yes, I tend to use the same jokes a few times if I think they're good ones. This bothers the hell out of some people.)
I will hopefully see some of these people one last time when I go to the SF3 social thing on Wednesday, but if not, then this was a nice goodbye.
(Yes, I was pretty self-conscious. It's been a while since someone threw me a party. I expect I'll feel the same way at my goodbye lunch at work later this week. It is a pretty eerie experience, going through the quasi-formalized rituals of departure. In my life, I tend to be the one who sticks in one place for a long time and other people come and go around me. So I'm not quite used to being the one who arrives or departs.)
Much of the afternoon was taken up with watching Homicide re-runs which Laurel Krahn had sent me on videotape. (When you're receiving videotapes through the net, you know you're a TruFan.) I saw the first three episodes of the series (and "Gone for Goode" and "Night of the Dead Living" are both very good episodes), as well as the fifth season episode "The Documentary", which is itself a pretty good episode (and contains a lot of one of the best passages in David Simon's book on which the series was based). And I started watching the actual PBS documentary on the making of the sixth season episode "The Subway", but decided to finish that up tomorrow or Tuesday since it looks like a very intense episode and it was getting a little late for that.
All very cool stuff. I look forward to seeing the fourth, fifth and sixth seasons in their entirety when they come around on re-runs (and assuming my temp housing in California gets Court TV).
I also talked to my Mom for a bit, and called up my ex-girlfriend Colleen and chatted with her for a while, and we made plans to go to dinner tomorrow. I think that when I finish up at Epic on Friday I'm going to spend the next few days in a state where I feel like I need to talk to people fairly often. Being by myself for that whole time will probably not be the smartest thing in the world.
Oh, and it got up over 40 again today (did I mention we set a record high of 61 last Thursday?), so I went for a walk along Lake Monona around sunset. (I basically walked south from the "151" marker on the map in the link along the John Nolen causeway, which heads down to the spot marked "Murphy Creek". I didn't quite get to Murphy Creek, though, since my ears were getting cold.) It was dark as I was walking back, so I got a lovely view of the Madison skyline, dominated by the Wisconsin state capitol as well as Monona Terrace ("The Wedding Cake on the Lake"). Madison really is a pretty town.
So I guess it's been a pretty productive weekend. But tomorrow I need to wrap up some details on my trip to California, so it's going to be really productive.
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