rachel, with roses

I feel like a zombie. My dirty secret is that I’ve been playing Baldur’s Gate II: Dark Alliance and Champions of Norrath with Tony. Both of us are pretty busy, but we still manage to squeeze in one or two long nights of “work” every week; last week was particularly taxing because we had to finish the game before my leaving New York! Luckily, each of those games takes 15-20 hours to “finish,” which isn’t so bad when spread out over several weeks. :) I spent Friday night and all-day Saturday in Jackson Heights; Saturday was Haeyoung’s birthday, and a bunch of people — mostly CAAAV members — threw a surprise party for her at Tony and Ai-Jen’s place. I found out the day before that the party was being advertised to Haeyoung as my going-away party. A party for me, and I didn’t even know about it! ;) It was the first time I have been in the company of people playing Pictionary with keywords centered around organizing (e.g. “solidarity” and “imperialism”).

I spent most of Sunday with Joechang and Rachel, which was very nice. We drove around aimlessly in dreary weather for awhile (Rachel wanted to see the Queen Mary 2, which was… well, a big boat. It is pretty damn big, but I wasn’t that impressed, otherwise. :) and ended up back in the UWS in the mid-afternoon. For Rachel’s birthday recently, Joe managed to get her a day of work at a flower shop in the W hotel, so there were a couple of nice arrangements sitting around in their apartment. Rachel was very excited about them — I like hanging out with her because she gets really excited about the ever-growing list of things she wants to do.

I had planned on seeing Vienna perform at Vanderbilt Hall in Grand Central Station, but she called me while stuck in traffic and wasn’t sure whether she was going to make it in time (she ended up pulling up at 4:10pm, putting her hazards on, and running in to perform using a foreign keyboard. someone else had to park her car. :). I missed the show, but Vienna and I met up later on to hang out and to have dinner at Josie’s. I finally got to eat their lemon curd dessert thingie, which both Tony and I had been craving for weeks. Just thinking about its tartness is making my mouth water. The ingredients make it sound like it’s not that bad for you, but I don’t believe it. The thing tastes way too good for it not to be bad for you. [see some photos]