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This past week and a half has been pretty social. A high school friend of mine arrived in CA (from NYC) last Sunday; she and I had dinner with another high school friend and his husband in the East Bay. I think it must've been Monday evening when I had a nice long phone chat with Beth O. Then Mary Anne visited from Tuesday afternoon through Thursday afternoon. (And we finally went shopping for a dress shirt with which I can wear the cuff links she gave me as an anniversary present a couple years ago.) Thursday evening Kam and I watched Hedwig and the Angry Inch (definitely interesting, and an interesting contrast with Victor, Victoria, which we'd seen and quite liked a couple weeks earlier) and bits of the West Wing season 1 extras disc (mostly Making-Of kinds of things). I had Friday off work; took Kam to the airport in the early afternoon (she was flying down to keep her grandmother company this weekend), then did assorted stuff 'til around 10 p.m., when I drove down to San José for Geoff N. & Andrea E.'s party. Which had been going since about 4 that afternoon, so G&A and Ethan were the only people still there (though later a friend of Andrea's showed up).

One of the assorted things I did on Friday was buy some music at the iTunes Music Store that I'd been planning to get for a while. Including the original London cast soundtrack of Phantom of the Opera, which I listened to in the car on the way to and from the party; thundering melodramatic organ music and catchy melodies bounced around in my head for the next 48 hours or so, even while I was sleeping. Disconcerting.

I was going to write more about Phantom here, but it got long enough to merit an entry of its own, so I'll post that another time.

Saturday early evening I had dinner with the extended Evans clan. It occurs to me that they're possibly the only family other than my own in which I know and like each individual member of the extended family—I'm getting to know Kam's family, and to some extent my sister-in-law Holly's family, and have met and liked various members of other families, but I've known the Evanses a lot longer than most of those and have spent a lot more time with them, and have more common interests with them. Also, having a table full of extroverts is a nice way for me to get to participate in a holiday meal without having to actually say a whole lot myself (which was nice, 'cause I wasn't in a very talkative or coherent mood), though I do feel that I have certain responsibilities as a guest, to be at least somewhat interesting and/or entertaining. I didn't manage to chat as much as I'd have liked with a couple of people there (especially one who I haven't seen in a couple years), but it was fun, and nice. I even got a present: Barbara and Joe gave me The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, which I've heard good things about. (I considered launching a long digression here about presents and my attitude toward them, but this entry is quite long enough already.)

After dinner I wandered over to my sister-in-law's parents' place in Los Altos Hills, and Jay and Holly and Holly's father Carl and I played pinochle for an hour or so. Jay and I struggled valiantly, but Holly and Carl beat us. Alas. I wandered home around midnight.

Unfortunately, I had made a series of not very good decisions over the course of the evening having to do with timing and logistics. Mary Anne was leaving California early Sunday morning; it turned out that it was a lot more convenient for her to catch a cab to the airport from my place than from Kevin's parents' place. So she ended up staying over, but I mishandled the timing of my socializing, and she was asleep by the time I got home. That would've been fine, except that I thought she had said that her cab was arriving at 5:30 a.m., and so around 4:00 I woke up and started fretting about various things. I wasn't sure the cab company she'd called was the same as the one I'd recommended with a similar but not quite identical name ('cause the one she'd called seemed to be based in San José); I wasn't sure the cab driver wouldn't pull into the little area between the condos and honk the horn loudly at 5:30 (I've seen cabbies do that kind of thing around here); I even started worrying about whether she was oversleeping, which was silly 'cause I don't think I've ever seen her oversleep when she's got something important to get up for. Finally it occurred to me that maybe she'd said she had to get up at 5:30, and the cab wasn't coming 'til later. But by that time I couldn't get back to sleep, so I got up and worked on the latest-comments sidebar for M's journal.

Anyway, M got up and I helped her carry her bags to the cab, and then I came inside and did some more coding and read a little of Ethan of Athos and eventually went back to sleep.

Sunday I picked Kam up from the airport; Monday was, as described previously, even more social than all the other socializing I've been doing.

So I'm pretty much at the point where I want to hide in my room and avoid all social contact for about a week. But I'm sure that will pass.