Old life meets new

This weekend my college chum Andrea came out to Bloomington for a visit. She's a junior, a few years younger than I am, but we were very close my last year at Smith and she's still very dear to me. There's always some difficulty when one has houseguests to entertain, but matters were simplified somewhat by the fact that she was sick, so she didn't seem to mind a lot of downtime, reading quietly together on the couch or watching Mystery Science Theater 3000.

She got in Thursday evening, so I thought to take her to the Runcible Spoon, where Cufflinks and I always go for Thursday night old-time music, but on this particular Thursday the band wasn't there and in fact the place was dead. Nevertheless we shared a bottle of Cabernet and had a good meal and astonishingly good cake and caught up on all the Smith gossip. On Friday we had a leisurely morning and then went to the IU art museum, which is really quite respectable. There was a large collection of Marcel Duchamp readymades which I particularly enjoyed. That evening we went to the GPSO's monthly happy hour, which was, as ever, packed with philosophers. Afterwards we came back to my apartment and made ravioli from scratch - spinach pasta with a filling made from ricotta cheese, red wine, parmesan, tomato paste, and roasted garlic. Andrea had never made pasta before so I think she enjoyed it.

Saturday we went grocery shopping (always entertaining!) and then spent the afternoon reading and baking an apple pie to take to a dinner party at Cufflinks' house. I'd told him we could bring a pie and then immediately wished I hadn't, because baking a pie to take to a boy's house seems so ... Pleasantville. (Krista and Andrea convinced me that "No one will think Wow, Emily sure went to a lot of trouble to bake a pie for Cufflinks," particularly since, as Krista pointed out, I have a reputation for cooking - apparently the other day over nachos our colleague Sam asked her whether I'd ever made salsa, which Krista was able to say that I had.)

We bundled up and hiked to Cufflinks', pie in tow, and there we had really good jambalaya made by the fiddle player from the old-time band and his girlfriend, and then we all watched Boondock Saints and Coffee and Cigarettes, both quite good films.

All in all, perhaps not a terribly exciting visit, but it was marvelous to see Andrea and I hope she had a nice time.