In better news, I had a really splendid time this evening. Honestly, it was a pretty good day overall. I mostly wrote steadily until 5-ish, with a few breaks for cooking (which ensured that most of the cooking was completely done by 6, letting me be beautifully relaxed when my guests arrived). Roshani stopped by around 5 and we chatted for a bit about her job interview at U of C (which is what she was doing all day today), then she fell asleep reading in one of our chairs while I worked some more. She wandered home around 6:30, and at 7:15 (when I was taking a tv break), Michael and Angeli (I was spelling it wrong in previous entry) arrived. I turned off the tv and put the rice on and made coconut sambol (five minutes) while chatting with them over wine (and water). We only had a glass of wine each, 'cause we're light drinkers all, but the conversation was sparkling and freely flowing throughout.
Really, Michael is one of those guys who would have been constantly invited to dinner parties in earlier days (when one was often looking for a spare entertaining man to make up the numbers (so you'd have paired men and women) at a dinner party). He's really good at keeping up a constant flow of entertaining conversation. I did, at one point, go off onto a long tangent, because he asked me to tell the Bryan/Elissa story, which involves a lot of Kev's and my old history, and usually I can tell that story pretty quickly, but maybe because Michael was there for many of the original events, all these usually forgotten details came back and I swear poor Angeli had to listen to at least half an hour of this story. But it's a good one, so hopefully she didn't mind.
Anyway, they just left, and I would gladly have had them stay longer (and usually by this point in a dinner party, I'm kind of wishing everyone would go home, which probably has less to do with the company than with my general bad habit of cooking frantically up until the last minute, making me rather exhausted by the time the guests arrive). Yay, friends in Chicago! And apparently, they've just started airing Babylon 5 on the Sci-Fi Channel, and Michael's taping it, so I may actually start watching with them regularly -- I pretty much missed the show entirely the first time around, and I rather think I might like it. We'll see...
(I realized, reading over this, that it sounds like they're a couple. They're just good friends. Michael's gay, and has a boyfriend, John, who is out of town this weekend on business. Hopefully it's all clear now. I should probably draw a chart someday...)