The weekend before last I joined my friends Marty and Michael, and their new Jack-Beagle puppy Zoe for a weekend in the upstate New York Berkshire Mountains (photo gallery).We rented part of a horse country cabin, cooked, ate, slept, geocached in nearby Massachusetts, and swam in the pool. It was lovely and very relaxing. The only fly in the ointment was that Noel couldn’t come; he’s been so busy lately that I haven’t seen as much of him as I want.

But that problem got some attention this weekend. Noel and I spent the whole weekend together. We sent to a Judy Holliday film festival and saw two very different pictures: It Could Happen to You, and the much less commonly seen The Marrying Kind. Noel is a big Judy Holliday fan (via his mom), while I’d only ever seen one of her films before. She was really something; it’s really too bad she never got to make more movies.

We also saw Another Gay Movie (yes that’s the title), which I thought was vulgar without being funny enough. Funny in spots, but the filmmaker said he wrote the movie when he was pretty angry about what was going on with his previous film, and it kind of showed.

Still, it was great having Noel to myself for the whole weekend. It recharged my relationship batteries, so even if he’s busy for the next few weeks, I’ve got enough to ‘tide me over.’

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Noel and I made a quick day trip to Washington, DC, last Sunday for the 50th birthday of Noel’s longtime friend Bob (co-celebrated with the birthday of Bob’s partner, Alex; both pictured here). The party itself was a lot of fun, and a chance to meet numerous new and interesting people. The same cannot be said of the roundtrip drive from New York to DC and back again — 9 hours in all. But Noel, God bless him, drove both ways (I had a little too much sangria and champagne to drive the return leg as planned). So all in all, a good party.

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