I nearly met up with
(Incidentally, if anyone in London wants to use a my-cloud wireless hotspot, there may or may not be a little credit that I can no longer use left on username cyejqiff and password B9wM9 for a few more days. Have fun.)
And so to East Croydon to intersect with
Touchdown in JFK was a few minutes ahead of schedule; immigration, baggage claim and customs were easy and
Meg and I had been counting the hours until meeting again for many days beforehand so I hope Chuck can forgive me for rather sprinting through Port Authority in order to try to get to Meg as quickly as possible, and then to visit a restroom with all possible haste. (We met at the perpetual motion machine on the upper level. The balls that kept going up and around the structure had fallen off it, but the machine kept working, which was poetic.) All told, there were six of us in the party:
After a couple of hours, we decamped to our favourite NY restaurant, Old Devil Moon. The menu had changed for the summer and my favourite dish of steak, pasta and salad was no longer there, but the summer menu offered enough options that I think all six of us enjoyed our meal. (Hat tip to Cassie for taking Meg and others there months back.) A truly lovely day in very pleasant company indeed. After the meal, we rushed off to catch the 7pm Greyhound back to Boston and napped most of the way home before getting lucky with public transportation within town. Long distance relationships can be terrible, but the first few hours after re-encounter are fantastic - a little like falling in love for the first time all over again. (The hours that have followed those first few haven't been at all bad, either!)
Lots of sleep later, we went out for Sunday brunch, then hit Old Navy for clothes shopping. They had a deal of two polo shirts for $20, so I got that three times. Am not sure that I am not overinvested in polo shirts - which are, at least, classic, apparently - but at least my wardrobe is now colourful and comfortable. I also had mango lassi from a food court (unusually strong mango, which is good, but no glorious aftertaste) and enjoyed looking at the official rules of a (past?) Burger King star wars promotion. Apparently 1/3 of the prizes are small drinks, 1/4 of the prizes are small fries, 1/7 of the prizes are very small burgers, 1/7 of the prizes are small burgers and 1/7 of the prizes are bigger burgers. I added up these fractions to see what proportion was left for the bigger prizes, which I was expecting to be about 1 in 5,000 or so, and my arithmetic has those five fractions adding to 85/84, which is worrying. Unfortunately I can't find a rule sheet online to check this but I guess the claimed 1/3, 1/4 and 1/7 must be highly rounded figures.
Yesterday saw a whole lot of packing, plus a trip to our favourite taqueria. Damn, but Boston has a lot of good places to eat - and fairly inexpensively too, thanks to the exchange rate. This lunchtime we went out for a sandwich, but this planned sandwich turned into gazpacho soup (like a soup version of salsa except with more cucumber - summery and pleasant!) followed by steak tips, pilau rice and a salad, with an ice-cream sundae to follow. Er, yes. At some point I may have to cut back a little - perhaps in the work weeks between holidays, I suspect. Anyway, returning to yesterday, we went out to watch Boston's annual Independence Day fireworks among a crowd of thousands tightly packed on a bridge; particular favourite fireworks among an impressive delay were ones which formed distinct smiley faces (orange circles around red eyes and a green mouth!), red hearts (which attracted big female-voiced "ahh!"s from the crowd) and planet Saturns.
This evening we have been out to see
We then played the Lord of the Rings trilogy edition of Monopoly; this has an elegant twist whereby the One Ring visits each of the 22 properties on the board in turn, advancing from one to the next on one roll in six and ending the game after completing the circuit. This keeps the game satisfyingly short to the point where it's unlikely players will get knocked out before the game ends. It also makes the stations ("steeds") particularly powerful - taking 200 in rent from a monopoly of steeds is quite a swing because it's unlikely the hotel monopolies will be developed enough to the point where you'll be getting the big rents. I got a monopoly of the red properties (the cheaper monopoly on third street) and built 3, 2 and 2 houses ("strongholds"); I only managed to get two people to hit to the tune of 90 along the way but it was just enough to win by a margin of about 2,500 to 2,300 to 2,100 to (slightly less). Definitely a fun and quick way to play Monopoly.
Lastly, we played a Vampire Hunter game of the roll-dice-move-pawns-resolve-tiles-fight-m