A Super Fantastic Weekend

(Well, almost.)

To begin, I notice that I have not posted since Wednesday. This is due to a particular cocktail of events: a) waves of nausea, b) waves of excellent things this weeked, and c) waves of guilt followed by fruitless attempts to do work. Oh, and add copious hours of movie watching. Truly copious.

Friday evening my housemate held a semi-formal at our house. We all dressed up and such-like. Other than the previously-mentioned nausea, it was enjoyable. We played cards (President) before dancing a bit, and then I walked a friend home. When I returned I found Jon holed away upstairs reading The Giver because...well, I'm not sure, something about the social dynamics downstairs. Anyway, we went downstairs where a drinking game was in progress, so we participated in that. I don't drink, though, so I was simply having excessive amount of ginger ale rather than alcohol, which did not impare my judgement but did inhibit my gastrointestinal well-being. I found "Never Have I Ever" particularly easy, as well as categories, largely because I have not done things like "Finish a drink" or "Drive for more than three consecuitive hours" and because my knowledge of obscure words and species means I don't have to pay attention to what other people are saying when we play categories (there's no chance anyone has said "leafhopper" under insects or "forsook" when rhyming with "took"). That was a late night.

Saturday night I did not feel well enough to go Square Dancing, alas. I did feel well enough to sit around and talk (it was physical exertion that would set me off, as my stomach was feeling over-full and my gag reflex was trigger-happy), so I headed to Jon's to meet for the first time in person Karen (Kay) and the truly inimitable Dave. You can read about that evening over on Kay's blog, of course, but here's what I thought: I met a number of people (Goddard, Jennin--I don't know how to spell that one) about whom I've read and heard. Now I can put faces to all of the names and stories. This is a group of people with whom I felt almost immediately at home and into whose company I could easily fall if things like time and geography didn't interfere. It was a late night, which indicates how enjoyable it was. We also all discussed romantic difficulties and old memories (or old stories, for me) in the sort of emotional round-table that seems to develop around Jon these days. It's funny; there was a sense of nostalgia for me looking on a shared experience I only had second-hand, through Jon's lists of quotations. I had heard much of what they reminisced about already, and so I partook of their old-days-ing in a vicarious sort of way.

Oh, and I have now officially met someone from the Internet. That is apparently 'weird' to anyone who I've mentioned it to, but it doesn't seem strange at all to me. I suppose it would have a few months ago. Things, and people, change.

Anyway, on Sunday I went to Bethel and heard Lew Worrad speak about "The 'No God' Delusion." It was the late service, though; I couldn't get to the early service. Then I had lunch in the cafeteria with Jon, Karen, Dave, Goddard, and Angela (who I hadn't met before), where the conversation was more intellectual and less relationship-driven than the night before. Then I got a little work done before preparing to and then actually cooking for Navigators. I had prepared a roast the afternoon before and let it sit in the crock pot. I also made a vegetable-ladden creamy-tomato pasta, and my sous-chef made apple streudal. (OK, I don't really have a sous-chef; he was assigned to help me by the cooking coordinator.) By this point the nausea had all but gone.

Which essentially concludes the relatable elements of my weekend. I suppose there must have been other parts, but that's all that's fit to publish on-line.

Oh, and about the service: Navigators had complained that Lew's sermon was too intellectual for them, let alone the junior highs he invited to remain for the sermon. The use of 'epistemology' and Kuhn's theories might have done part of it. I think I may have done a better job in my previous posts of dismantling Dawkins' claims, but again what I wrote is likely high-intellectual and not appropriate for a general congregation either. I could rant about intellectualism, but I won't.

So there we go. A Super Fantastic Weekend, minus the sickness parts.

Karen: you did not get an adjective because I couldn't think of an appropriate one. I had "delightful," but that seemed too much of an aren't-I-a-pretty-fixture hostess adjective. I also considered "pretty and individual," but that sounded too much like I was hitting on you, and what does "individual" mean, anyway? I also considered "unique," but that's too often an underhanded compliment, and "intelligent," but that seemed too clinical. Eventually I opted for no adjective at all, in favour of this explanation. Dave gets "truly inimitable" because, well, I think there's no question about that.