I’m still waiting for some snow to make it all feel like December, but we got some help from a handful of holiday parties this weekend, from the “grab some food and go” variety all the way up to the “last ones to leave” kind. The department-we-used-to-be-a-part-of (but still got invited to) party at Dali in Somerville on Wednesday was filled with good food and drink, but the conversation was a little awkward; the department-we’re-now-part-of party on Thursday was just plain weak. The office dvd-swap and holiday party on Friday night at Mark’s house in J. P., though, was pretty great.
We each brought a dvd and had a chinese auction/yankee swap/white elephant exchange to distribute them. Almost everyone there brought a dvd, and they ranged in quality from Guys Gone Wild to a couple of Criterion Collection titles. My contribution consisted of two discs I won at the AMIA Conference raffle, Analyze This and the real prize, the “greatest moments” from season one of tv’s “The Bachelor.” I feel sorry for Steve, who ended up with that. On the other hand, he brought “Guys Gone Wild,” so maybe he got what he deserved. Aimee was one of the few to actually take someone else’s dvd instead of opening a new one, but she did it with good reason: Billy Wilder’s The Apartment, which should be a part of any good dvd collection. Hooray for merging belongings!
The next morning, we celebrated Paul‘s graduation from the Suffolk Global MBA program with a nice brunch at Aimee’s family’s place. The food was delicious, I got some quality time with the niece and nephew-to-be, and we were among the first to receive copies of Paul’s mom’s new book, Good Carbs, Bad Carbs. Time to jack up the praise on Amazon.
After checking out the new BPN offices in Waltham, Aimee and I joined Tim and Mari at their lovely South End apartment for a post-Black Nativity party Saturday night. The celebrants were a diverse group; Aimee and I fell somewhere in between the five-ish to forty-something age range. It was really a great night, with excellent food (homemade hummus courtesy of Mari and her food processor, and addictive peanut butter and chocolate fudge bars) and great company (familiar faces like resident mashmatician Lenlow, with whom I talked a cappellas and the pecking order of the world of mash-ups). It was great to see Tim and Mari again, and we talked wedding plans, the finer points of the Coke “MagiCan” promotion, and the crazy, frustrating world of ESPN’s Pigskin Pick’em (and for the record, it was another disappointing week, as I’m 6-8 so far).
To top it all off, we ended the evening with a couple of musical numbers (with heavy audience involvement) from a couple of the talented axe-men in the house. We enjoyed some excellent finger-picking Dylan and Gillian Welch tunes from Aaron, and some great “Lessons at 507” classics like “Willin'” and “Strange Condition” from Tim. That really made the evening; it’s hard to describe why a bunch of people sitting around and singing is great, and in a non-corny kumbaya kind of way, but it is.
Tim even showed us all the right way to deal with those must-have yet pesky CanWorks flip-lid garbage cans; apparently they were so problematic, the company has changed its name to “SimpleHuman.” Thanks to you, Tim, I fixed Aimee’s up in no time – no more unsightly bag overhang!
Finally, today found us trying out some delicious breakfast burritos for brunch at Miracle of Science. We brought the Sunday Globe so there was no need to check out the MiracleSex wifi network there; maybe another day. After some last-week holiday shopping at the mall (two words: mystifyingly exhausting), we had another in a series of year-end award-friendly movie screenings, with an afternoon matinee of Finding Neverland at the Fenway 13. We’ll be in Alaska by the end of this week; my wish for snow will certainly come true by then. I leave with an excellent ornament from the Alexanders’ tree:
