Detached but interesting weekend

Well, now that we're all back from wherever we all went, I guess it's time to catch up.

I had sort of a disorienting weekend with Suzanne. It might be that I'm in a depressive stage or something, but I felt a little detached all weekend, something that wasn't at all helped by her getting me up early on Sunday morning and being that thing I hate worst of all: sing-songy and cutesy in the morning. Just because you're up at 6am doesn't mean I have to be... and pushing the issue is pretty much guaranteed to make me rather grumpy.

And so I was, at least until I recognized what I was doing and stopped it.

We did have a good weekend overall, really... the weather wasn't as horrendous as it has been the last week, we had a good time on Saturday going swimming and playing with many, many kittens at various animal-adoption days. The last of these was at a local garden center where an animal-rescue group brings adoptable animals out on Saturday. There were two enclosures with kittens. The first contained an absolutely perfect little kitten who looked for all the world like an adult cat in miniature, a lot the way Data looked when he was young. She was quite friendly, just incredibly delicate. I figured that this was the sort of kitten Gus would sit on and not realize it.

The other enclosure contained three stripeycats who had been partly feral, and were still a little freaked out by being around a lot of people. They were also rather tired, so they were all sleeping in a big pile, snoring. When I went over and talked to them, they hissed at me, but weren't upset enough to actually get up and arch or anything like that. One would hiss, and then another would hiss because the first one hissed, and then the third one would hiss just so they wouldn't feel left out.

All this was extremely comical. All three of them, by the way, had terrible cat-breath! It's like, go take a kitten mint or something, OK?

Anyway, I got my USRDA of kitten toes and cat interactions. We went swimming and tried to avoid being crashed into by children in lifejackets, and then went to the store and got all sorts of stuff to make for dinner, and I cooked for Suzanne for the first time, a sort of improvisational thing of panfried chicken breast and a sauce of diced shrimp and diced ham, along with red beans and rice. There was far too much for us to eat.

Sunday, after we were done with church stuff, we had lunch at the Stockton Inn, which was quite proud of the fact that they were the "small hotel" mentioned in a Rodgers & Hart song back in 1935. Not sure what its claim to fame now is... the beef barley soup was good, the gnocchi wasn't, the wings were... wings. Fifty dollars for a simple lunch seemed like a lot.

In any case, we then went over to New Hope and Lambertville -- one is in Pennsylvania, one in New Jersey -- and wandered around for a while. In addition to lots of carp in the creek near the Bucks County Playhouse, we found what may be the best ice cream anywhere in the world, a small place on Main Street in New Hope called Gerenser's Exotic Ice Cream. I have had some great ice cream in my life, everything from Sheard's to Ben & Jerrys' at the factory to some amazing stuff Melody and I made a couple of years ago, but this stuff was just unbelievable. We didn't have anything too "exotic" -- I had mint chocolate chip, and Suzanne had strawberry cheesecake -- but the quality was unparalleled and the flavors more real and intense than anything I have ever had. I grow mint, remember, so I know what fresh mint tastes like, as opposed to synthetic peppermint oils and the like, and this tasted like mint. Suzanne's tasted like very good, very real cheesecake with strawberries that could have been picked an hour ago.

A little expensive, perhaps (the cones were $3 each) and the guy behind the counter seemed a little out of it, but overall, this is a place you have to visit. I think she and I will have to go back just for that reason alone. It's about 30 miles from her house, and worth it. I just wish you could buy quarts of the stuff to take home or something. It was amazing.

Sunday evening we came back, I made Suzanne a DVD of her church thing, and then we lounged around before going over to the nearby diner for dinner, and went to sleep.

It was raining this morning.

I should take my drugs.