Wondrous Apparitions, Provided by Magicians.

Get your own valentinr

In other news, spinach pakora = breakfast of champions. NOM NOM NOM, as they say on the Internet.

This, folks, is a moment of wild adoration for my partners. Here's how it goes:

Yesterday, triadruid and I stopped by to pick up his tuxedo for Saturday. It's an old-fashioned cut, with a long cutaway coat, and an ascot instead of the usual bow-tie, and he looks absolutely devastating in it. I mean, really. He hits the perfect balance of elegant and dissipated (this never fails to make me go all wobbly) -- in short, he looks like the best bad idea I've ever had. I sort of squeak out, "Your wife will enjoy that", and try to keep myself from overheating or passing out in the shop.

We move on. He's got a meeting, so I take him up to 75th Street Brewery to meet his group. I've arranged for kittenpants to meet us there, so that she and I can have dinner together. Over the course of dinner and the drive home, we are full of good ideas. We design a Las Vegas casino/resort (we're thinking it'll be The Nautilus, a Jules Verne-inspired sort of place, heavy on the steampunk and aquatic elements, with just a dash of Hindu temple). We invent the sort of male strip show that would cater to us and people like us (they go on two or three at a time, dressed in frock coats and generally foppish attire, and then, they undress each other. It's a simple thing, but we think this is ideal). We decide that nobody else may ever cover "I Think We're Alone Now", unless it's a band like Tool. And so on.

We get home, we do some research about our upcoming trip to Las Vegas (it all comes back around). Then, triadruid comes home. I demand that he should put the tux back on for the edification of kittenpants. Somewhere in there, we had a lovely bottle of wine that kittenpants had picked up to celebrate our engagement a few weeks ago but that we never got around to drinking. I'll spare you the rest of the scene in consideration of your undoubtedly delicate sensibilities. :)

Anyway, these people I have somehow managed to attach myself to, they're fabulous -- clever and beautiful, fun to be around, full of brilliant plans, generous and helpful. I think I should keep them. What do you think?

Well. It's only against the law to *marry* more than one person. You can be engaged to as many as you like.

Party, etc., to follow, once we've had time to sort out the planning. I'm told there will be a cake. :)

EDIT: Right after I posted this, I realized I hadn't pulled my divination for today. My card today: The Chariot. Advancement through bold action, leveraging several different forces for dramatic forward motion. Full speed ahead, y'all.

Newsflash: Smart chicks get crazy laid, says the Boston Globe (and it ain't so bad being a smart guy, either).

More dispatches from the No Shit, Really File, as interpreted by this article's author, and then re-interpreted by me:
- Highly educated people tend to form more egalitarian family/love relationships than less-educated people.
- The level of equality in a relationship seems to be correlated to its stability and the level of satisfaction reported by the partners. (No shit, really? If people don't treat their partners like servants, the relationship is better? Who would have guessed?)
- College educated women both give and get more oral sex than less educated women. (No statistics on how people with college educations and penises fare in this area, but one can imagine, I suppose. Also, this was an example cited by the reporter as "being more adventurous in bed". That alone speaks volumes about American sexual repression.)
- Men are less likely to be misogynistic asshats than ever before. Women are less likely to be tolerant of men who are misogynistic asshats than ever before. (Again, no data on how women treat men, or how men tolerate women, or how anybody who isn't in a heteronormative monogamous gender-normative relationship relates to their partner(s), but hey.)
- Other interesting stuff. Read the article, would you?

Happinesses of the weekend:
- Bought three new shirts at the Gaia Garage sale for .25 each. Some of them even look good on, I hear.
- Got to cut niveus_tigris out of a too-small dress that he very cleverly tried on at said Garage Sale and subsequently could not get out of. Contributed $2.00 (which accounted for all the cash then in my pocket) to Gaia for the price of the dress and the privilege of cutting him out of it. It was a good day to be carrying a pair of scissors.
- On Saturday, triadruid, upon pulling an armload of warm towels from the dryer, came and hugged me with said armload of warm towels. That, children, is love.
- RfB did not suck, even though I had to present a budget that included nothing but the absolute essential things we had to have in order to keep Gaia Community running. Nobody cried. Not even me, and I thought I might do so while we were in process of making the budget. Still, we can pay all the essentials, and that's good!
- Sunday's ritual was accomplished with very little drama outside of that strictly required by the narrative of the ritual. It only sucked in some parts. And now, I am done with it, which makes me feel much better.
- Sunday evening, discovered that kittenpants does not care for the corn on the cob one gets at Chili's. She is more than happy to give me hers, which is good, since that is usually my favorite part of a Chili's meal.
- Also Sunday evening, triadruid and I acquired a bottle of Aberlour a'bunadh, which neither of us had tried before. I like it, even though it has the sherry flavor that I abhor in the Glenmorangie we had lately. For the record, it is a wonderful world that continues to provide me with single malt whiskys that I have not yet tried. We resolved to start taking notes on our whiskys now that we have graduated to the phase of whisky drinking where you can no longer remember what you have and have not drunk.
- And then, there's kittenpants' note from the Dragon*Con folks. Yay for being in the art show! We spent some quality tub-time brainstorming about paintings she could do and enter. This is always good times, because together she and I are much funnier than we are individually, and also because discussion of paintings generally leads to discussion of who among the friend set we might talk into posing sans pants. And really, who doesn't like that?

triadruid drove me in today so that my Floridian ass would not have to be behind the wheel in a Frozen White Stuff situation. If that's not love, I don't know what is. I'm getting better with dealing with snow and ice, but I'm still not 100% certain that I'm qualified to drive on it.

I think I'm getting better about cold, too, as my big ass coat has not seen much action yet this year. So I suppose I am adapting to my enironment, even though I understand that's illegal in Kansas.

I expect I do a number of things that are illegal in Kansas though, so what's one more?

( Also, a quiz. )

Saturday was fabulous. For next Sunday's ritual, it had come to us that we would need 50 - 60 different pieces of stemware, all unique. The budget: $250. So we went in force to the secondhand stores, and came back with nearly as many as we needed, all different. Total spent: About $80. So that means there's money in the budget for ritual snacks, which are possibly the only thing that we ever do in ritual that are universally approved of. You can ask people if they like to sing, dance, make stuff, learn stuff, tell stories, make dick jokes, whatever, in ritual, and you will get people who think it's essential to good ritual, and people who think that it's abhorrent and blasphemous in ritual, but eating, eating is apparently something everyone can agree on.

Following the great buying of glassware, we dropped by the TCP for movies, food, and KURS. We took in a showing of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, which spawned an impromptu drinking game:
- Every time something happens that couldn't possibly physically happen (i.e. spitfires becoming amphibious), drink.
- One drink for each sighting of the following: dinosaurs, dirigibles, pseudo-Nazis, a new type of robot, radio waves, ninjas
- One drink every time you wish Jude Law would deck Gwynneth Paltrow; two drinks every time he actually does it
- One drink every time you wish Gwynneth Paltrow would deck Jude Law; two drinks every time she actually does it
So, as one might imagine, great drunkenness ensued (although I somehow contrived not to have a drink during most of this experience...). chaosdruid had also brought over Hellboy, which we did not watch, which is probably just as well -- alcohol poisoning is an ugly, ugly thing.

This bit of fun was followed by a rousing game of KURS, in which everyone was kissed, petted, bitten, and generally molested to within an inch of their lives. Because, hey, it's not a party if you're not making out with somebody else's significant other, right? We spent the night at TCP, and then spent most of the next day sleeping. I got to spend a fair amount of Sunday asleep on the couch with triadruid's head in my lap, which makes Sunday one of the better days in my recent memory. I'm such a simple creature.