Journal Entry

I don't know why I have so much trouble updating over the weekend. Maybe it feels like work, and I'm just convinced I shouldn't have to work on weekends (in spite of much evidence to the contrary). Anyway, here's the weekend's posts.

Friday, August 17th
Friday was my RDO. I planned to take full advantage of that (read: sleeping in), but somehow didn't. I stayed up late Thursday night (probably playing Civ, but I don't remember for sure), then woke up around 9:00 on Friday morning. So, yeah, technically I slept in (I normally wake up at 6:00 for work), but when I think "sleep in," I'm thinking noon. It's not a non-specific designation, as far as I'm concerned. It means "not waking up in the ante meridian," plain and simple.

Anyway, yeah, woke up at nine, and I was kinda thinking that if I helped T-- out with some housework on Friday, good karma would kick in and I wouldn't have to do any chores for the rest of the weekend. So I vacuumed the whole house before T-- got home from walking AB, and then I took out all the trash (including the diaper pail, so that actually counts). After that, I did nothing useful for the rest of the day, so karma didn't really take me all that seriously.

I'm really not sure what I did with my afternoon. I read some and did some stuff on the computer, and played with the baby and talked with T--, and the day just sort of melted away. It was a pleasant one, though. T-- made some really good sandwiches for lunch, and we already had plans in the works for pizza for dinner. She'd been seeing tantalizing ads on TV all week, so how could we resist?

So, when evening finally rolled around, we ordered some pizza from Pizza Hut and tried to watch a movie. The guy at Blockbuster really recommended I Think I Love My Wife as a hilarious comedy, but ten minutes in we decided to turn it off. It wasn't funny. Have you ever seen Bye Bye Love, with Paul Reiser? Yeah.

So we turned that off, and started Wild Hogs, and then heard back from B-- and E-- who we'd invited over (and who sounded like they were having a real hell of a day), and it turned out they could come over after all (yay!), and seconds after that phone call the XBox glitched (that's our story), and instead of resuming the movie where we were, we waited for B-- and E-- to get there and we started it over.

D-- saw it a long time before we did, and said it was mostly hilarious to middle-aged people. While we were watching it, about a third of the way in, B-- said, "So, this is basically City Slickers, no?" Basically, yes. It was good though. Easy fun. Easy laughs. We had a good time, and then we talked for a long time before they headed home. It was a fun night. I love it when those two can come over.

After that...well, I went to my office to play Civ, and T-- went to bed.

Saturday, August 18th
AB turned six months old. We didn't have a party or anything, but the fact got mentioned more than once this weekend, so I'll throw it in. A short paragraph doesn't really cost me anything.

Saturday morning I woke up je ne said quand, and pretty much immediately headed outside to mow. At that point, it was eight days since I'd mowed last, and such dry days that I was thinking I could probably skip it, but I had the whole day free so I might as well get it done. Ten minutes in, I felt a couple sprinkles and thought maybe I should quit. It didn't rain, though. It was brutally muggy, but it didn't rain. Not while I was mowing.

A little later, I got cleaned up and then when I came into the living room (10-ish), T-- suggested that we invite K-- and N-- over for lunch. That sounded fun, and we ended up eating with them around noon and socializing until two-ish, then they went home to take care of some stuff before coming back a little before five. I probably spent the whole afternoon on the computer, though I may have read some.

At some point in there it started raining, full-on storming, and I discovered it was a really good thing I'd mowed. I hear we got four inches of rain in just a few hours. No big deal, at least at the time, but it kept raining all evening and became a major storm sometime in the night.

The thing at five was one T-- has been planning for a little over a week. She invited all her girl friends to go out for the evening. I think only three were able to make it. N-- was one of them, and she dropped K-- off at my place to watch the second Cowboys preseason game while they were at the movie (they went to dinner, then shopped at the mall some, then went to see Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix again). We had AB.

K-- brought some steaks with him, and the makings for Tattoo and Redbulls, so we had the stuffs for a party. We also had two hours until the game began, so I suggested watching the Chris Rock movie again in the hopes that it would turn out to be funny. It didn't. Bye Bye Love, seriously. It was brutal. It had a happy ending, eventually, but it was never anywhere close to a comedy.

Also, my nerves were worn a bit by AB, who skipped her 6:30 nap entirely, opting to spend that hour crying instead of sleeping, no matter what I did to calm her. She finally went down around 8:30, and that gave us a little under two hours to watch the game without her screaming.

Anyway, it was a good game (Cowboys are looking really good for this season -- I'm optimistic), and K-- and I had some time to talk, which was pretty cool. We also had an awful lot of salsa which went uneaten, because nobody came by with chips. But, then, that just means it's still available, and the invitation is an open one. I'm just saying, is all.

But, yeah, we played the last quarter at double-speed on the TiVo while the girls told us about their evening, and then K-- and N-- went home and, if I remember correctly, I went to my office to play Civ, and T-- went to bed.

Sunday, August 19th
I woke up this morning at 6:40 and 7:15 and 8:00 and 9:30, and since church is at 10:30 I finally got up around 9:45. We had some wild storms last night. I don't remember exactly when it was, but I remember lying in bed with the sheets up over my head, listening to the howling wind and just waiting for it to break out the windows. It never did, though, and by dawn the rain was mostly gone.

When we marched out to the car to head to church, I was just putting AB in her carseat in the back when T-- looked over the top of the Honda to our stupid old Saturn and said, "Oh, shoot!" The windows were cracked, to relieve a bit of the brutal heat we'd had for the least three weeks or so, and when we looked inside the car it had several inches of standing water in the floorboards. Yuck.

There was nothing for it at the time, though. We went to church, and K-- and N-- didn't make it (N-- had a headache), so we just went home for lunch which left us with a weirdly-early afternoon. We almost always go to lunch with them on Sundays, so we ate some chicken and veggies that T-- cooked up, and found ourselves home and fed more than an hour earlier than usual. It threw us both off our games.

I decided to spend the hour fixing a drip in our guest bathtub, and spent an hour and a half trying to get the cold water knob removed. I never managed it, either. I know how to remove a cold water knob from a bathtub faucet, this one just didn't work right. I researched it on the internet. I called my parents. I banged on it with a hammer and pried at it with a crowbar. It just wouldn't come off. So I gave up, put everything back together as it had been, turned the water back on (slow drip and all), and put all my stuff away, and chalked the whole thing up as two hours wasted.

Sometime in there, T-- took our shopvac out and completely cleaned out the water in the Saturn, and even vacuumed the Honda just for cleanliness. Jeez. It looks really nice now, though.

Around 6:00 we went over to K-- and N--'s for pizza and Psych, which was a ton of fun. While I was there, I missed a call from D-- on his way home from Wichita, so after we got home (and T-- and I each had a bowl of ice cream and we watched another episode of Psych together), I got back in touch with D-- and we went for a walk.

I keep trying to think of a non-gay way to say, "we went to D--'s apartment and had a bottle of wine and talked." Turns out, there's not one. But we did that (and nothing else), and it was a lot of fun. Then I came home, drank a cold glass of water, and wrote an ass-long blog post. And now, exhausted, I'm going to bed.

Watch Stranger than Fiction, if you haven't. Read The Three Musketeers and all of Zelazny's Chronicles of Amber if you haven't. You'll be glad you did. I'm going to bed.

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