Very satisfying day all around. Slept late, as one should be allowed to do on Sundays. Pottered around, made a stack of tea sandwiches (mostly cucumber/butter/dill but also a couple of egg salad and salmon/cream cheese capers) and hied myself off with them and a box of figs to Ellis Avery's mad, end of summer tea party in Central Park, which turned out to be a huge spread with china tea cups, silver pots, scones, jam and everything else a high tea should have, except, perhaps, clotted cream. I was sorry I hadn't packed the tea sannies with a china plate, but I'll know better next time.
Perfect weather and a really interesting mix of people, and some folks I already knew, including Gretl, Cheryl, & Heidi, who are all friends of Ellis. I was drafted into the croquet game, which we set up on the rather infelicitous wood chips instead of the lawn, so early on there was much landscaping and engineering of the field and a great deal of taunting to accompany it as the guys (who started it, the the more cutthroat women gave in after a while) cut nice little ditches for their balls to follow. (Rather hilariously, we were short a blue ball.) I'd almost made it to the final wickets when I was knocked out of the game, but I thoroughly enjoyed myself. And it's funny: I've been wanting to play croquet again for a while now. We used to have a set when I was a kid and I was wicked at it. It was fun to rediscover that skill, even with the Scottish golf course we were playing on.
And the day ended with flowers from the two girls next door that I helped out last night, though truthfully all I did was let them stow their stuff here, check their mail, and feed them beer while we waited for the locksmith they'd already found. (The full story is that Larissa sublet her apartment to two young women from Montana, one a dancer with an internship at Parson's and the other an opera singer who's going to be job hunting. They were only given the mailbox key and the Parkchester key for the door, not the security lock, so it had to be drilled out and replaced. This after spending three days on a train getting here. What a nice intro to the city. Well, at least they weren't mugged.) But they brought me irises & baby's breath, which was really sweet.
And so to bed.
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