Social Activity
Last week was pretty slow and uneventful, but my weekend was plenty active. Most of the weekend's activity was concentrated on Saturday. Here's how it went down:
For some reason, I didn't get enough sleep Thursday night, so I was tired most of Friday. When I came home that evening, I had no desire to go out or do anything in particular. I did make one grocery run so that I could get a few things. Afterward, I stayed in and watched television.
I had a great sleep Friday night, and I woke up refreshed on Saturday. I spent the morning being lazy. After a while, I got busy in the kitchen baking walnut fudge brownies. In fact, I baked two batches. One was for a party that I had been invited to. The second was so that I would have something to share when I met with my gaming group on Sunday.
Saturday was the birthday of Karen, the lady who I know through my friend Sheila. (She's the person I rode down to detroit with the Sunday before Christmas to attend the viewing of Sheila's mother.) Karen and a friend of her's have the same birthday, so they decided to throw a joint party. I was one of many people that were invited. It was held in a neighborhood common house over in Lansing. I knew nothing of this place or this community, but apparently, this is where Karen lives. There is an area on the northwest part of Lansing in which a group of neighbors have formed a co-operative community. I don't know exactly what that means, but they share a common garden and they have this common house that they use to throw parties and hold other events. Most of the people in this neighborhood are kind of an artsy, hippy-ish, liberal-minded group. I found that most of them work at MSU or LCC or are otherwise employed in academic jobs. They reminded me a lot of the student co-op houses that I lived in for 11 years. I suppose they were like a mature version of my old-co-op house, but centered around a block. There were people of various ages, and some of them brought their children. It was all rather interesting and the group was very friendly.
I mingled and chatted with various people at the party. They had all brought a dish to pass, so there was lots of food. (It was all vegetarian or vegan.) My brownies were a hit. There was also wine, a few beers, and some sangria punch to drink. (I enjoyed a couple glasses of that.) It was a good time. I even made the acquaintance of the cutest girl there; a young lady by the name of Heather who recently finished her bachelor's degree in education, and who is student teaching in the Lansing area. She recently moved into this neighborhood too. Even though I had never met Heather before, she looked familiar to me. After talking with her a while, I learned that she knows a guy that I know from the LCC photo program. This guy is also one of my contacts on Flickr, and he has two photos of her in his photo stream. Later on, I looked it up and I found the photos of Heather on Flickr. Maybe this was where I had seen her before.
Around 10:00pm, I left this party and drove over to Aaron's place. He, I, and another friend of his had plans to meet up and go to the bar. This other guy's name is Nate. He was part of the larger circle of friends that used to hang out with Monika and Aaron. After Monika and Aaron's "break up", Nate became one of the few people that still hangs out with Aaron. When Aaron and I hang out, Nate meets up with us once in a while. This time, he brought a girl with him by the name of Jen. (She's a 3rd year vet student at MSU.) She turned out to be very nice and easy to get along with.
Once we had all met up, I drove us down to the usual hangout in downtown Lansing. That bar was so full that we went to our secondary spot two doors down. After a while there, we moved on to the cigar bar a few blocks away. Oddly enough, when I volunteer to drive down to the bar, I have uncanny luck finding great parking spots close to the front doors of the places we want to go. (I was two for two this night.) We spent the rest of the evening hanging out at the cigar bar. (They had a good classic rock cover band playing.) Even though I had been drinking, I took it easy and made sure not to overdo it. When this place closed, I drove Aaron back home and Nate and Jen to his car. This was the first night out on the town that I had enjoyed since before the holiday break.
We made tentative plans to drive down to Ann Arbor next weekend to do a night out on the town. I'm rather looking forward to that.