Saturday night was family night at Tara's house, and Bug made a nice dinner of pasta and zucchini and a salad. Then we watched a very long movie that is a favorite of Bug's and mine, but one that Tara and Bee haven't seen: Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven. The extended Director's Cut runs 3 hours and 13 minutes, but it's worth it over the theatrical version. It actually made a nice follow-up to last week's viewing of The Last Temptation of Christ in the sense that both movies deal with the religious themes, but in very different ways.
Sunday we got up early on Mother's Day so we could all see Star Trek together before Bee and Bug went home to visit birth families. We are all over the moon about this movie, being lifelong Trek fans. The script was one of the best I've ever seen, full of nods and winks and spot-on characterizations for the devoted fans. The action was taut and visually exciting, and they did a tremendous job in creating a new reality without trashing what came before. It actually made me cry in the first 10 minutes of the film - possibly the best science fiction movie to come out of Hollywood since Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith.
After the movie, Tara and I went for lunch at the Riverview Cafe in Elmwood Park and we talked about our birth families and growing up, as I typically do on family-oriented holidays when my estrangement from my birth family becomes more evident. These are some of the few times I opt to take myself out of the moment and think about the past or the future. I choose not to do this often, nor do I wallow when I'm doing it. Tara seems to feel closer to me when I'm showing my vulnerability and reminding her of how I was back when we were still living 1,700 miles apart. But for my part, I choose not to look backward very often because I don't want to miss out on a moment of the life I have now.
After lunch we came back to my apartment and played tennis, only the second time we've done this. I gave Tara my newer racquet to use, and that evened the playing field tremendously, because I used to be a pretty gosh darn good player. We had a nice workout, and then I dropped her off and watched my Rockets game and my DVD of Max Payne, which I checked out from the library.
Monday I went to visit Polina in Staten Island and help her with an abandoned baby kitten her mom found on their doorstep on Sunday. The animal was only hours old, with the umbilical cord still attached, and Polina and her mom had been taking turns all night feeding it and keeping it warm. Polina found a shelter that could take the baby kitty in for foster care, so we went together to the facility to drop the kitty off. Here's some pictures of her holding it:
And here's the shelter worker who took the kitty, so you can see better how small it is:
Afterwards, we went out to lunch and came home to visit with her mom for a bit. Her mom showed me a old copy of Ruyard Kipling's Just So Stories, written in English with a Russian forward, so I could read "The Cat That Walked By Himself" as a way of explaining why Penny's dad was so adamantly against keeping the kitten.
Later in the evening, Penny and I took the bus to the Staten Island Ferry into Manhattan for the Poly Cocktail Hour at China1, which I had attended for the first time last month while she was in Argentina ("Busy start of the week" - April 14, 2009). We got there quite late, around 8:30 p.m. and unfortunately missed our friends Simon and Kyle, but saw Leon and Antonia from Open Love NY, and I ran into Tanisha, a women from my Poly Women's group (which meets tomorrow), Paloma (who is leaving for Europe this Friday) and some other people I've run into before. The poly community in New York (and everywhere else, I'd assume) is pretty small, so eventually you start seeing people over and over.
Between the two of us, Penny and I met just about everybody in the room, and it was loads of fun going around, introducing and being introduced to new people. There were many people there for the first time; in fact, it was Polina's first time at this particular event as well. I think we both had such a good time that we'll probably try to make it a regular outing, our schedules permitting. We were, in fact, two of the three last people to leave the restaurant at about 12:30 a.m. We got a quick bite at a 24-hour Turkish restaurant, and then took a bus back to the ferry. This was my first time riding the Staten Island Ferry, so I took some pictures to commemorate. This is the sign on the Manhattan side at 1:30 in the morning - you can see Penny's silhouette standing under the T and E in "Staten":
The next morning we made some breakfast together and I helped her wash dishes and clean up the kitchen before we went upstairs to swap some music on her computer.
When I got home around 4 p.m. I followed up on some potential job leads, but still nothing definite to report at the moment. I picked up Tara so we could go see X-Men Origins: Wolverine at the free movie theater, but unfortunately, the 7:30 p.m. show was already sold out, so we had to wait for the 9 p.m. show. The upside is that we did get to see the Deadpool Easter Egg after the end credits, although I was a little disappointed with its brevity. However, my estimation of the movie itself is higher upon second viewing than the original reaction I had last Sunday.
