Tie Me Kangaroo Down…

What a GREAT weekend…

Friday afternoon, I left work a little early and headed down to the Atlanta airport to pick up nrivkis and acrobatty, who were visiting us from Cleveland to celebrate their anniversary and check out the Atlanta area as a place they might like to move. Traffic was moderately insane, which is not unusual for a Friday afternoon, but I spent most of the drive talking on my cellphone to a lovely lady, which made the trip go faster. 🙂

I got to the receiving area at Hartsfield about 15 minutes ahead of N and M coming up the escalators, where we exchanged hugs and then made our way to my car and back up towards Alpharetta, stopping briefly to look for a florist, but not finding what we needed.

On the way, I heard from telynor, who was checking on arrangments for dinner tonight and our excursion tomorrow, and asking if Ed and folkmew could come along to dinner. “I don’t mind!” I said. “I hope kitanzi doesn’t mind either…” “Do you think that’ll be a problem.” “No. And if it is, I’m the one who’ll be in trouble, so come anyway.” 🙂 I quickly called kitanzi to warn her that we were now expecting another two adults and two children that we hadn’t originally planned, and to thaw out the hot dogs in the fridge to feed the kids with. I’d already made a largish roast in the crockpot so I wasn’t worried about feeding the adults. The World’s End crew descended on our house and there was much merriment and food and we listened a bit to a recordign gwen brought of her recent live show.

Eventually, everyone departed so we could all crash out. We had a busy day planned the next day!

Saturday dawned early and Kit and I got up with the dawn and showered. We were expecting Harper and her son around 8am and wanted to get on the road by 8:30, because we hada very special trip planned.

Since we allowed a fair amount of “get totally lost” time in our schedule, we actually arrived at the Kangaroo Conservation Centre in Dawsonville, GA. What a FUN place! I didn’t even know it existed until Naomi mentioned it a few weeks ago. They have over 220 kangaroos on about 80 acres of farmland, and at the end of the tour was an extensive series of opportunities to pet the animals. They are extremely soft and graceful, and a lot of fun to watch. I agree with Naomi in wishing there had been more petting opportunities, but all in all it was still a wonderful visit.

After leaving the kangaroos, we went back by our apartment briefly and then drove over to Harper’s to hang out and maybe do a little music, detouring only briefly for lunch at the Original Pancake House. Eventually, Matt and Mary, who recently moved to Atlanta, came by as well, and we had a great time eating pizza and singing and talking. At some point, we finally decided we’d had as much non-stop movement as we could all handle, and headed home. I love everyone who was there dearly, but it was nice to retreat to a nice quiet place. We proceeded to have a big backrub/cuddle swap before heading off to bed.

Having had two fairly busy/noisy days, we decided to make Sunday a bit more lowkey. Kit and Naomi and I all went to breakfast at J. Christopher’s and let Manny sleep in, then showed them a bit of our Coupling DVD. Once everyone was tired of TV, we all just lounged about in a big cuddlepile and talked about a little bit of everything until it was time to get dinner together. Matt and Mary came up from Buckhead for dinner, including vegetarian spaghetti and garlic bread and homemade apple cobbler with ice cream and we did a little more music, including using my four-track recorder to make a recording of Naomi’s filk of one of Mary’s songs, sung by Mary. They went home about 10pm, and we all fell into bed.

This morning was hard. We had such a good time this weekend that I hated to say goodbye, but we’ve promised to come visit them in Louisville once they get settled in, and they’ll hopefully come and visit us again. And there’s always OVFF.

Until then, I’ll just have to miss them, and wish they were closer.