Strong Verbs Are Just Better

So I had dinner with Awesome and her husband, henceforth to be known as the Geek. The purpose of this was to introduce me to the kitty, who hid under the bed as soon as I came into the house. I'm going to be house-and-cat sitting for them at the end of semester, and, as this cat is without a doubt the very most spoiled cat in the history of pampered pusses, such a duty requires solemn induction over an extended period.

Their house is imposing. For a one-bedroom apartment, it is big, and it has big furniture and big empty spaces. Awesome's office consists of a single big desk, facing a big floor-to-ceiling window with a view out to the harbour bridge, and two big bookshelves behind it, and a moderately sized couch, and a big cat playhouse. Everything is exactly in place, and the room consists mostly of empty carpet.
I fail to understand how anyone who is holding down three jobs and, ostentably, writing two books, has an empty surface in their house at all, let alone an expansively empty desk!

I can see me spending three weeks working at the dining table, and venturing into the office only to remove a book from her collection. And touching the books with gloved hands. I am also seriously tempted to sleep on the fold-out couch. The bedroom is big and imposing and everything is all neat and perfectly in place.

Said bedroom also has a pristine hardback L.M Montgomery collection. I did not go on my summer Montgomery binge, so this is a dangerous thing when I have work to be doing.

~

Anyway, I had a fabulous time. I blathered about my Thesis Problem, and Awesome can actually pull off the Teacher Trick, and in the course of explaining the problem to her I was able to pull together what it is that I need to say. I then came home and rewrote four pages while tipsy in the early hours of this morning, and they were much easier to write when tipsy and actually make more sense than anything I've written, sober, for a long time. I'm not sure if this is Awesome's awesome influence or the wine. Hopefully the latter, as wine is more accessible than she most of the time.

Mostly Awesome and I bored the pants off the Geek by talking medieval, but the Geek and I had fun swapping college stories, and I think I vastly impressed him with my knowledge of XKCD. He mistook the product of years of Flirting With Geek Boys for actual geek cred. ;) I explained the difference, and Awesome got That Look In Her Eye and announced that the Geek has a lot of single geeky workmates...
Not until I finish this degree. Not until I finish this degree.

Awesome also agrees with me on the matter of bondage jokes and domination in SGGK. I TOLD you she was the best ever.

Furthermore: you know you're in good company when the question "So what DID happen with you and..." starts out there and ends with a complicated dissection of the different kinds of Angligans in Sydney, and a discussion of what you'd do if you met the Pope. Said conversation having gone via college cliques, the appropriate time to genuflect, dope dealing, fanfiction, Catholic Guilt, and people who break into Women's College apparently to snort coke in the bathrooms.