somewhere there is a happy affair, a ghost of a good mood

[Okay, so I'm going through the pictures on my camera... and apparently I took a grand total of TWO pictures on this day. Must not have been in a photo-taking mood. Jane and Ali took a couple pictures of us together, but I haven't gotten them from them yet.]

Well, I had told Jane about the daffodil dress, and when I told her that it was only £5, she insisted that I should buy it. I also hadn’t yet managed to buy postcards. So on Friday morning, while Jane did some work and made lunch, I went out to buy those things, as well as buy stamps and mail a letter for her.

I bought three postcards without any trouble, but the store that the stamps were at, called Pen to Paper, was an office supply store.

With the result that I spent a good forty minutes in there, and left with a new pencil case, two miniature moleskine notebooks, a .3 lead pencil and spare .3 lead, a .4 pen that writes in purple ink, and no time to go buy the dress before I was supposed to be back for lunch.

So I went back. But Jane wasn’t quite done making the lunch, so I was able to run back out and buy the dress.

I would post the pictures I took of me wearing it when I had tried it on the day before, but it’s not quite decent (by my standards) without a wrap, as it’s strapless, so I won’t. But it’s so pretty. Yellow, with a long skirt with a hoop, and the top goes up and down in Vs so it’s like a flower.

And I absolutely adore .3 lead.

And my new pencil case.

We ended up being 10 minutes late to meet Ali, because the trouble with Jane and I getting ready is that the last things we want to do overlap so that we say, “oh, she’s still doing that, I’ll do this,” and then the other person finishes and says, “oh, she’s still doing this, I’ll do that,” and so forth until we’re late.

We had been going to go to the Trout, another C.S. Lewis-frequented pub, but it was a long way away, and on a scale of 1-10 in wanting to go Jane was a 1 and Ali and I were both 6.5, which wasn’t high enough to make Jane go. And anyway it was raining.

So we stopped by "the department" so Ali could use the internet there.

Cool lights in the computer room:

So we just walked to back to St. Anne’s (the college, not all the way back to Jane’s flat in Summertown), and went to the kitchen and had oatmeal tea and carrots and hard-boiled eggs and I think something else but I don’t remember what.

Oh, that reminds me – for breakfast Jane and I usually have oatmeal, except it’s really porridge because it’s made from Scottish porridge oats, and we put REAL brown sugar (that’s not white sugar + molasses) in it, and it’s pretty much the best thing ever.

Then we just sat in the common room and talked. And it was so incredibly lovely and relaxing and like home and like Oxford at the same time. Then Alex, Jane’s friend, came in, and he was talkative and entertaining and interesting and gave us something to listen to besides ourselves.

Ali decided to go on back at about 5:30, so we bid her farewell, with plans for the three of us to meet up again when I go to visit Ali in a few weeks.

Jane and I walked quietly back to Summertown. But soon after we got back, she remembered that there was a check she was supposed to take to Jesus college that day and she hadn’t. And it was for someone else, for signing up for a conference, and she had kept putting it off because she couldn’t decide if she wanted to go also, because she’d have to miss a lot of it because of tutoring, but it sounded really good… all of which sounds EXACTLY like the sort of thing I think/do all the time. So, after she looked again at what she would miss – which was most of it – she decided that no, she wouldn’t go. But of course the check for the other person still needed to go to Jesus college. Which, of course, would be a miserable drudgery of a walk in the dark rain for Jane, who has to walk down that way most every day. It would, however, be a grand adventure for me. Besides which, Jane was coming down with a cold and coughing and had felt feverish the day before. All of which meant that the next thing that happened was a minor argument – during which I was putting on my jacket, shoes, and waterproof – and the next thing that happened after that was me leaving for Jesus college.

And I enjoyed it very thoroughly. I knew where it was, since I’d been there the day before, and anyway I had the map, so there was no danger of getting lost. I ate a banana before I left, and put another one in my pocket, as well as some of my barley-sugars. Jesus College was again “open” when I arrived – with the result that I now think of it as “the friendly college” – and I went up to the window of the office where an official-looking man was working.

“Hello – I need this to get to Donald Hay?” I held out the check in its envelope.

“Okay,” he said with a nod, and took it. He seemed very capable and in-charge, so I left it at that, and went out – even if this seemed like a rather anti-climactic delivery of an urgent missive after all that walking.

Nothing really happened on the way back, except walking in the dark.

I was quite tired and hungry – but in that pleasant after-an-adventure sort of way – when I got back, and Jane had made a most delicious invention of what we had on hand, which was potatoes and broccoli and a packet of Kraft macaroni-and-cheese cheese. And you would not believe how incredibly delicious those things are all mixed together with a little milk into a sort of creamy warm casserole. Ideal comfort food. Jane and I were fortunate in that we share the same sort of inexpensive comfort foods, which made cooking together easy.

After that, we watched Sense and Sensibility, which I had never seen before, though I read the book quite some time ago. About 10 minutes after the movie started, Jane’s friend Susannah came by – we had arranged earlier that she should, but we had both entirely forgotten about it until she appeared. Fortunately, she had no objection to watching the movie with us (and eating Hershey’s hugs and kisses), and we passed a pleasant evening in an amusingly typical female fashion – especially amusing since it is not typical for any of the three of us – with a romantic movie and chocolate. It was extra nice because we all three have the same style of movie watching in a group – occasional talking, but only to exclaim/react about something that’s happening in the movie.

And after Susannah left and the movie was over, we went to bed.