Long overdue, tonight was Take Down The Xmas Tree night. I set myself that goal for Wendi’s first day in Arizona, figuring that if I accomplish nothing else while she’s gone at least I’ll be able to show that I can keep house on my own. While the kids picked up the living room, I ran a load of dishes, then took on the tree chore.

Wendi had cajoled the children into de-tinseling the tree on Friday, and the ornaments came off over the weekend. Lucky me, I got to unstrand the lights. This wouldn’t have been so bad but for the fact that Wendi had lovingly, carefully wrapped the strands around limbs as well as up and down along the trunk. (I’ll be the first to admit that the tree looked very pretty when lit up. But.)

The job took me forty minutes, folks. I have scratches all up and down my arms, and I smell strongly of pine. Occasionally I considered taking the pruning shears to the light strand that wound along the trunk. Oh yeah, I wanted to. I persevered, though. The tree’s finally gone and we have our living room back. Huzzah.

On Saturday, Lilith and Geoffrey and I travelled north to Seattle. The impetus was a party thrown by the proprietors of the forum called Pool, but as a fringe benefit we were invited to visit some new friends Lil’ and Geoff’ had made online recently. First we stopped there for sandwiches and lots of fun getting-to-know-you conversation, then Lil’ and I took off for the party.

Pooligans, and friends of Pooligans, are some of the nicest, cleverest, most interesting folks to spend an evening with. Jak and Karawynn’s “ReLease” shindig was one of the nicest parties I’ve ever been to, no question about it. I even managed to operate quite far from my normal comfort zone, and yet lightning didn’t strike me dead on the spot. Good times indeed.

Lil’ and I finally started zonking out about half past midnight so we very reluctantly said our goodbyes and exchanged lots of hugs, then trekked back to our hotel room for the night… or morning, if you prefer. After some mild amusement involving the fact that we’d both forgotten to pack toothpaste, we finally conked out.

We hooked back up again with Lil’ and Geoff’s new friends the next day for a tasty brunch (you can not go wrong with eggs, bacon and toast, you just can’t) and another few well-spent hours of chit-chat and comedy. Mind you, at one point early on I pulled a stupid move: I doubled over laughing at a joke, fell over sideways… and conked my head but good on the wood trim part of the armrest on the loveseat I was sitting on.

Ow. Yeah, I gave myself a nice little concussion. The pain went away after about an hour, but I sort of faded in and out of coherence until we were almost home that night. Ow.

Even with the stupid headbanging moment and not enough sleep, it was a fabulous weekend during which I met a number of damned nifty people. Not bad, not bad at all.