bits and pieces

This weekend, we had house guests whom we had never met before. There's a huge New England folk festival every spring (oddly enough, called NEFFA -- I think the A stands for Association). I signed up with the housing authority, and we ended up with three guests. (There were originally six guests scheduled, and half of them dropped out.)

We weren't really sure how to manage the whole thing, so we decided to supply breakfast and leave them on their own for lunch and dinner, which they could get at the festival. We had two very pleasant mornings with our guests, and they seemed to have a great time at the festival. It always feels good to perform a good deed like this.

And of course, this being a very small world, we had tons of friends in common. In fact, the guests we had are on a dance team with a favorite friend -- I saw him briefly, and we laughed that his buddies were staying at my house.

We ended up at the festival for a short while, but not to dance -- Robert hates crowds, and there were hordes of people there. Our dance group ran a food booth, and we worked a short shift there. It was fun. Most people were fine, and some were over the top weird, as always. I was cashier, and I did fine, mostly, except when I was in the middle of a calculation and someone would interrupt. Then I felt like Sequential Man -- I'd have to start all over again from the beginning. But people were fairly tolerant of my slowness and stumbles, and I think the booth's food was fairly popular.

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At work, we've been interviewing a few people for a job opening we have. I'm one of the rare people who loves interviewing, and I love being on either side of the desk. That is, I'm equally happy to interview people or to be interviewed, myself. We've had really nice people come through. I haven't felt like anyone was terribly desperate -- just looking, which gave the whole process a happier flavor.

One guy, though, who was really sweet, just didn't seem able to get it together to be interested in our work or in the job. It was kind of sad that after 45 minutes of talking, he had run out of his two stock questions (apparently, he asked the next person exactly the same questions) and had nothing more to say to me. I'm sure he was capable of doing the job, but he somehow just hadn't done his homework or didn't care. These types of candidates make the choosing process much easier, alas.

I'll look forward to seeing who we end up with -- this is always a fun process.

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I'm having trouble getting back into the swing of swimming. I have been swimming, but I don't always go early in the morning, and I haven't been swimming as much every week as I would like. So I need to work on that.

On the other hand, I've been having great fun with cooking. My class has inspired me to try some of the recipes I've learned and just to be creative with other cooking endeavors. I'm trying to cook a couple of times a week, and the other nights, we typically eat leftovers or something we put together that's fairly quick. (And out of long habit, we typically go out two nights over the course of the weekend. It's kind of our date night.)

I especially appreciate the opportunity to cook for someone else I care about, and I'm lucky that Robert's tastes and mine overlap nicely. So I even have an enthusiastic, if somewhat captive, audience.

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Yesterday I received news that a friend's mother died recently. Unfortunately, this same person lost her husband a year and a half ago and her daughter is about to go off to college next fall. That's a lot of loss to contend with; I hope to see her when she returns from her "funeral and closing up the house" trip. Ouch.

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Spring is here; in fact, a friend reports that winter is officially over, and I assume he is a reliable source. We often get one last "hah" snowstorm, but we seem to be in full gear here. Some of the early bushes and trees have turned yellow in anticipation of blooming, and our crocuses are now up. On warmer nights, the peepers have started gathering in their singles bar, and a few evenings, I've fallen asleep to their trilling. Birds have come back, and I've spotted our local cardinal a few times. This is a happy and hopeful time.