Friday ramble

It's been bananas ever since I got back, so I haven't had a chance until now to tell you about the trip or anything else. Furthermore, I tweeted throughout the trip, which took away some of the impetus for blogging about it, but I may as well fill you in, too.

First of all, the shout outs: let me know if you need your bathtub refinished, because the guys who did mine were pure awesome even before they started. They were the most responsive and straightforward (at least the ridiculous dude who told me I'd need the whole bathroom redone, at $14-$18k, bothered to contact me; the rest flaked out). But these guys explained what they were going to do, explained the likely and less likely but possible costs, showed up at 8am to accommodate my schedule (I had to leave for the airport within minutes of that time), and did an amazing job. So much so that my bathtub feels too nice to use, but I'm using it because hosing myself down outside with the garden hose for over a week after I discovered the tear got old. One of the take-aways here is that I've really come to appreciate specialists (if you need your roof redone, contact roof specialists rather than general contractors; same with bathroom or even bathtub people). You want people who instantly know what the deal is because they've dealt with it over and over again.

Next shout-out: Bay State Cruise Company. When I decided to come back from the Cape a day earlier (by ferry with Nina and Jameson  rather than Nina's parents, by car, as planned), they gave me the round-trip rate even though I had originally bought only a one-way ticket. And they were really cool about letting us leave our stuff while we explored a bit before the ferry took off.

I have a couple of really cool video clips from the whale watch, but I haven't been able to upload them. Hopefully I'll figure that out this weekend.

But what you probably care about, if anything, is the Russian stuff. I did tweet that Nina and I relish our first-world problems because we're ever so aware that we're hardly a generation removed from no-shit, life-or-death problems. We've each heard our parents say that they're amazed they survived something or other. We embrace our FWPs because we came by them honestly.

Nina's parents food-coddled us for days, and then my dad food-coddled me when I got to Boston. Nina quipped that at Jameson's parents' place it would be the opposite extreme: "hungry? Go find yourself some Triscuits."

Oh, some dude at the beach--as we were getting ready to go--complimented Nina on her facility in switching between Russian and English. She was gracious about it but later we all expressed our bafflement. Most of the world can do that (with one set of languages or another). Really, we may be in the only country in the world where bilingualism is remarkable in any way.

The visit to my parents' was possibly the smoothest ever, interpersonally. She didn't even complain much when I spent time with my friends (though she did call to ask when I was coming home from Martha's.) She also asked about Jason's boyfriend (after I met him). I spent a chunk of time cleaning (decluttering, dusting, and vacuuming) and managed to get rid of lots of hair products from the 80s, as well as food that had gotten infested by moths (my mother always claims that they come with the moth eggs in there, but I insist that even if they did, she goes out of her way to leave them plenty of food to grow on). On my way to the airport, I shoved into my pretty stuffed bag two (unopened) Jews for Jesus DVDs and one book on the same theme; they probably never would have watched or read them, but it felt good to get that stuff out of their house and into the trash

That's pretty much it. I'll let you know when I get the whale-watch clips up.