I had a lovely weekend.

I feel like I’ve been slowly returning to society for the past couple of weeks. I’ve been reconnecting with old friends and carving out time to make new friends and have adventures. I’ve been quite pleased to discover that I haven’t lost my fun side. I’m also thrilled to report that in spite of being terrified that I’d never make new friends, that was a silly fear.

On Thursday, I saw one of my cousins perform in her school play. They did “The Rockin’ Tale of Snow White,” a darling adaptation of one of my favorite stories. After, I went to meet Jacob at a bar downtown to watch his friend’s band play. (I saw them play last week, and they’re great! But then again, I’m just such a huge fan of keyboards, so I might be a bit biased.)

Friday night was my “do absolutely nothing” night, followed by a busy Saturday full of babysitting (we had our first Kool-Aid stand of the year. The four-year old wanted to sell the cups for 11cents, so the mom told her that for every cup she sold for 10c, she’d throw in an extra penny. It was cute.) laundry, my brother’s birthday dinner, drinks with friends, and dancing at my favorite goth/80s bar.

I had a reverse-gay moment on Saturday. There’s a funny thing that happens: often, when someone is meeting a gay person, they’ll say, “I have a gay friend! You would just love him!” as though they’re matchmaking and as though all gay people are just “going to love” each other. So on Saturday night, I was out with some friends in a mixed-group, and I got really excited to tell the only straight guy there that I had a straight friend who he would just love. I even asked him if he liked baseball. Ha.

Sunday was brunch on the patio at a cute place in Capital Hill (bottomless mimosas, yes, please!), with an afternoon of Cheeseman Park lounging after.

This stick is the “Talking Point.” Jacob and my new friend Ben carry it around with them whenever they lounge in the park. It serves as a sort of marker/flag. We decorated it with plastic flowers (as Ben said, “For $2, you can carry beauty around wherever you go.” He also mentioned that you must have the confidence to pull off carrying around fake flowers, but I think they’re great.) and another stick. I wanted to get more sticks and create a teepee, but unfortunately, large sticks are hard to come by.

I’m so happy that it’s almost summer. There’s nothing I love more than afternoons in the park. (But oh man, sunscreen is so expensive!)

I was all excited to tell you about the lukewarm water week that happened at my apartment, but now I feel like an ass. A couple of weeks ago, a water heater in our apartment building broke and we were left with tepid water for our showers. (And there’s nothing I love more than hot water. I hope they never invent time travel – I’ll refuse to go back past the dawn of reliably hot water.) My landlord assured me that we’d have hot water again as soon as he got the new hot water heater, and sure enough, it’s been wonderful. I was on the phone with him today, and he said, “How’s the hot water, dear?” I was a little embarrassed by my enthusiastic response. But last night, Mike had to watch a documentary for one of his classes about poverty around the world. (I liked it and it’s streaming on Netflix, if you’re interested: The End of Poverty? It’s a good history of globalization/the rise of such severe poverty and it attempts to argue against privatization, although I’m not sure how effective the final argument is.) As I was watching, I was remembering how little hot water we had in South Africa and I feel like an ass for complaining about clean, running, just-not-hot water. I’ll take that over no running water any day.