Dinner tonight was full of awesome. Andrea ("Tank"), Andrea's friend-from-high-school Cara, and I headed to Elsa's place in Cambridge; I brought homemade blueberry ice cream, and the others made Greek macaroni and cheese (which apparently involves adding spinach and feta). We listened to math songs (Tom Lehrer!) and decided that Matt Ritter and I should start a life coaching consultancy and talked about Elsa's upcoming LOA and boat-building and read a Mo Willems book.
Elsa's bookshelf has everything from Snow Crash to Hofstadter; Andrea has the most hideous fantastic lime-green plaid couch inherited from her apartment's former inhabitants, and when I remarked upon the fascinating fluid dynamics caused by the viscosity of the roux that later became the cheese sauce for the macaroni, everyone immediately ran over to peek and went "oh yeah!" before returning to their chopping / talking about liquid nitrogen / motorized canoes. Oh, and education. Of course we talked about education. And swapped project stories. And generally had an evening of yay!
There's something nice about hanging out with fellow geek girls. Most of the ones I know are Oliners (w00t gender ratio). Most of my closest friends are guys, and given a random group of women and a random group of men I'll probably be more comfortable among the men, just because I grew up interested in things that were predominantly male-populated and I'm more used to that dynamic - but that makes hanging out with other girls who understand this stuff even more fantastic when it happens (which is "not as often as it should").
Also, Greek mac n' cheese is full of tastiness. I've also been persuaded that fried goat cheese is something worth trying to make at some point. Later. Someday. When I have a kitchen. Ian Weller is getting all my cooking-things shipped to him in a box so he can set up our apartment in Raleigh before I come to town.
I can tell from the quality of my writing right now that my mind's still scattered and I'm still tired. But I'm ramping up - summer, as far as I'm concerned, begins tomorrow (though the solstice itself won't arrive until June 21). And I'm clearing all my Marketing stuff tonight so I can truly have my brain be 100% education from tomorrow on out. And summer... will be good. So very, very good.
Tomorrow: Walter, CFS, Andrew, dancing, and late-night driving, roughly in that order. Friday: finally watching one of my favorite scripts on stage. Yes, the math parts get pretty generic-dorky (anyone who's read a Ramanujan bio will groan during one Robert-Catherine dialog), and I could (as usual) skip the whole romantic-subplot-between-Hal-and-Catherine thing, but the tense dynamic between Catherine and her older sister Claire, and Catherine's struggle with the questions of her agency, authorship, and sanity - excellent stuff, excellent dialogue. I've never actually watched a stage production; I read the script many years ago - I think it was given to me in high school back when I was a more active theatre (tech) geek. Melanie's high school is putting on the production, so it is a student show, but... I still remember enough of the script that I'll be able to grok. Saturday: Food Tour Of Manhattan with Colin and Ritter and one of their friends. Sunday: POSSE starts.
Yep. Summer will be good.