I felt bad using potential chatting time to blog, but Bart is such an easygoing guy that I felt ok with just chilling on his couch while we both watched sports and I puttered on my computer and he finished the book he was reading on his Kindle. Occasionally we would pop our heads up to make some comment about the TV or about what we were doing, but otherwise we just comfortably did our own things - it was nice. I got in touch with my friend Katie, and when I got to a good stopping point I said goodbye to Bart and headed off to Fairfax to see the Brown's.
You know you've arrived someplace special when you hear cheering when you ring the doorbell, the door is already unlocked, and the father who answers the door greets you by saying "Do you ring the doorbell when you come home? No, you just bust on in, so bust on in," and then gives you a big hug.
Katie and I became friends in college through mutual friends - she says that she remembers meeting me first year because she remembered noticing my blue hair. I had forgotten about meeting her at that point until she reminded me, I remembered noticing her fantastic jewelry, layered and flowing fashion sense (always with one of her many many scarves), and her glowing smile and presence. And the ukeleles and all the snakes/turtles/hampsters ;) Bonding over ER visits and crazy class schedules (I only survived Health Care Economics by the fact that I sat next to her and the teacher assumed that since she was so smart and contributing to the discussion, I must also be smart by proximity), I also got to know her family over the years and I absolutely adore her parents. Katie and her boyfriend (the fantastic Christopher, aka "Toph") live in an apartment 20 minutes north, but were staying with her parents for Thanksgiving while her sister Annie was home from her PhD program at Dartmouth. We had a great time eating turkey leftovers, watching TV, and talking nonstop until 1am when we decided it was really actually time for bed. Really.
Saturday was a fantastic slow-moving day, perfect since I was now entering the "normal voice but annoying dry back-of-the-throat-tickle" phase of my cold and was drinking copious amounts of water and tea to stop from coughing on everyone all the time. We all slept in and enjoyed rounds of breakfast as people came downstairs, watching 80s movies on TV and predicting the endings. Katie, Toph, and I went to their apartment to tidy and shower, then returned home in time for dinner. Katie and Annie were going to a gathering of high school friends, including Lisbeth, who went to Wellesley with my high school friend Janine - small world! Papa Brown was at work, so Toph and I were hanging out with Mama Brown, watching movies while I tried in vain to make the printer/scanner do my bidding so that I could scan copies of my college transcripts to attach to my applications. Katie had taken the car so I drove Toph back to their apartment, which worked out perfectly because he was able to scan my transcripts as jpeg files instead of pdf's - one site had a maximum upload of only 600KB, which is very very small when it comes to a scanned document. I got back to the house and spent another hour fiddling with them until I finally had them as gif's in a Word document working in Open Office - by 1 am I was successful and had managed to press the "submit application" button for both schools. What a relief!
And then I took cat photos ;)
Seagull :)
Charlie (Charles Darwin, actually)
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