My quite-delayed flight back from Boston landed only an hour ago and I'm now at the office getting caught up on my email and all the other things I have to do as the holder of the best damned job in town. Some quick updates:
  • Country fried steak and beer on Friday night for dinner with Wendy. Country fried steak (a.k.a. chicken fried steak) is an underappreciated American classic.

  • Saturday afternoon wedding ring shopping. Like shopping for a china pattern, it was a yuppified pre-nuptial ritual I thought I'd hate but actually enjoyed.

    I'm going to check in with Wendy before reporting her choice of wedding band. For my own band, I'm leaning towards the two-tone style: a little more flash than typical, but not so flash as to be ridiculous. Something sort of like this, possibly with the colour scheme inverted:

    Photo: Two-tone men's wedding band.

  • Saturday evening dinner with Wendy and "my other Mom and Dad". New Englanders, bless 'em, will gladly eat ice cream even in the dead of February! That's civilized.

    We talked wedding plans with them, and I have resigned myself to the fact that I am not getting shot out of a cannon at the ceremony in September. I'll have to save it for some anniversary when we renew out vows. I plan to get shot out out of two cannons then!

  • Saturday night belated birthday party for Erin Judge! It was held at her friend Lisa's place, a lovely old place with interesting nooks and crannies bristling with Apple and Sony technologies. "Our place will be a lot like this," I told Wendy. I gave Erin the full accordion birthday treatment.

    By the way, allow me to offer my belated congratulations to Erin on her appearance as "Mrs. Lucy Ricardo" on the cover of last fortnight's Improper Bostonian! The likeness is uncanny.

  • Sunday dim sum with the Berkman blogging group. It's always fun to see Jessica and the gang, and I'll never tire of the lobster hat she wears to those gatherings.

  • Sunday afternoon chez Wendy, watching J-Lo and Matthew Modine in The Wedding Planner. which was on TV. You're not going to get smarter watching this movie, but it was fun, and I figure I might as well watch wedding movies, seeing as I have just over six months of bachelordom left.

  • Oscar night! I never watch award shows, except possibly as background sound while doing something else. Award shows I tend to treat like most TV or movies: why watch fictional characters do something interesting when you could do something interesting yourself? I'd rather spent my dotage recalling the fun I had, not the fun had by characters on TV shows and movies I watched.

    Wendy's professor Mika came by her place to watch the ceremonies with us. We were all impressed by Hilary Swank's very backless dress, and Chris Rock did a great job poking fun at everyone from Dubya to Michael Moore (I loved his joke that Michael Moore could've done Supersize Me himself, seeing as he'd already done all the research).

    I like Carlos Santana, but his riffing was overpowering and superfluous to the song from The Motorcycle Diaries. I suspect that they got Banderas and Santana to do the song out of fear that nobody would give a crap about a song in Spanish, but they should've had Jorge Drexler on solo guitar. I guess the Academy didn't get that Elliott Smith's solo performance of Good Will Hunting's Miss Misery was a hundred times better than the overwrought Celine Dion performance of that execrable Titanic love theme.

    It looks as though ther Academy has some sense,after all: they didn't give "Best Picture" to The Aviator just because it was "about time" Scorsese got an Oscar.

  • It's never any fun saying goodbye to Wendy. I'm looking forward to the day when we go to airports for the purpose of travelling together rather than away from each other.
Gotta go get caught up on work. More later!