Saturday, February 3, 2001

Well, I just had the loveliest brunch I’ve had in years.

Through various and sundry contacts, I signed up to be part of a book reading club that meets on Saturday mornings. They just started, and they’re going through Charles Haddon Spurgeon‘s All of Grace, which is a wonderful salvation tract. Today was their second meeting, but the first one that I’ve attended.

We met at The Tea Cozy, a charming little British-style tea shop in Old Town Alexandria. Nobody showed up except for me and Suzie, one of the co-creators of the group, but we chatted happily for two hours anyway, munching on delicious scones (with real Devon cream, no less), sipping tea, and shooting the breeze about politics, college life, our spiritual beliefs, and all sorts of little things.

This was particularly delightful for me as a result of some personal issues I’ve been dealing with lately, having to do with my inability to form really deep connections with people at work. I’ve been wanting to get to know people, but I’ve had real problems with starting and maintaining conversations with them. Today, I discovered that I actually can keep up a conversation like this, so at least that’s not the fundamental problem there.

After brunch, I fought traffic all the way back to the post office, where I mailed a Be T-shirt to Eugenia Loli (who helped me out a lot with Mozart) and Saalon (who can use a few now that he’s doing the About.com BeOS site). I also bought a bag of bird food and five cakes of suet for my side garden. I’m definitely a birder at heart.