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Been quite the past week and i better get some thoughts and memories down in journal form.

Dan and Shannon drove me up to Grandpa's on Thursday. We got some work done, got a good start on setting up Grandpa's new computer, and Grandpa took us out to dinner at Van Rensselear's, where we peer-pressured Shannon into joining in on the highly-touted salad bar, even though she felt she had enough on order with the main course.

We insisted on cooking for Grandpa the next night, and he very much enjoyed Shannon's masterpiece of sweet potato fries; hand-cut salsa and guacamole with chips; cauliflower and potato curry; and more. Dan has pictures.

H, J, and A arrived on that Friday night, nearly at midnight, after 10 hours in a car together that reportedly involved a lot of harmonizing and A sleep-singing from the back seat.

Saturday, we worked on our various projects, Dan and Shannon headed home to feed and let out Mrs. Tabitha Wiggles, while the rest of us headed to Provincetown for dinner at the Lobster Pot. I brought my whole

J cleaned my laptop, the top around the screen and the keyboard and whole base around it, with Q-tips and then a toothbrush and bleach. Pretty amazing, really, Ebony's gleaming white now and i didn't think she could be cleaned at all.

J plucked the middle of my eyebrows on the train . I finally looked in the mirror a couple days later and told her i looked airbrushed. She said i looked groomed, and there is a difference.

My work habits and discipline at concentrating on what needs to be done has been terrible. Hey, look at me doing this now...

And i really have to figure out how to ask a person out on a date. I've never done it successfully when not already going out.

H has an unbelievable apartment, in a flat that is a whole floor of a building with maybe four times the floorspace of my house's ground floor. The good-sized bedrooms of six or seven people are off to the sides, and there is a common room overlooking the street, then a huge area with a ping-pong table and couches facing a projector, and weight equipment and laundry to the side. Did i not mention the large kitchen, also part of the big central open area? And three bathrooms. I normally feel at home in poverty, but it's possible i could get used to wealth easily as well.

It's also a quarter-block from an awesome 24-7 grocery – the same one i bought the ingredients for a breakfast (and supper) banquet for Genevieve when i arrived in the city on a 3 a.m. train, or somesuch, and i left my stuff by the counter and they kept it from being stolen and told me not to do such a thing in New York City— and then i left my bag and their groceries outside G's Williamsburg apartment in that early morning, while i waited for her to wake up and used the facilities and bought a few things at the bodega on the corner, and they were stolen. Fun memories, actually!

J is lovely, kind, confident, and has so much potential to help make the world better.

*** Livestream below (what tends to happen when i have a journal page open and am traveling– everything random gets written down. ***

Driving past Morningside Park on the way out of New York City at 7:30 a.m., as the sun is hitting the top halves of buildings and working its way down.

Now driving by Amy Ruth's on West 116th which is where Dimitrius took me to eat.

There's a boarded up, dilapidated, faux-white-marble-columnish building on the corner of 116th and Madison, the Public National Bank, that makes a fitting metaphor for the state of banking suitable for non-rich people.

The one piece of broccoli i picked up off the ground from the Union Square farmer's market yesterday, with some of the last of the pepitas i've been carrying around, made a surprisingly delicious on-bus breakfast.

Losing more hairs on the head than seem due in a day. In sympathy with the middle of my eyebrows? Or did i go non-vegan with something accidentally? (Pretty sure no, although the reaction is so long and delayed, who knows.) Or is the stress secretly getting to me underneath it all?