(And a day late HAPPY BDAY shoutout to best brother man Aaron, who turns a terrifying 26, AND to the PGOAT, who turns asdfasdugvrfuag). Come on shake your bodies, babies, do the Conga. I know you can't control yourself any longa.
First, the aforementioned promised pictures.... um, none of which came out. I was fooling around with catching shots from the back of the dark club, which apparently doesn't work. Or at least I needed a fast shutter / wide aperture combo that I was not smart enough to set my camera to last night. Regardless, here's how the Panda turned out...
Which is clearly craptastic photography on my part. I hope I make up for it by posting the following video, which is a (relatively) new song - at least it isn't on either of their albums I have - called Desperate Dub that they played at Harper's Ferry. This performance comes from 2007.01.17 (dated like a true PhishPhan) in Rochester:
Sweet. In fact, just play that and let it be your blog-reading soundtrack. Alright then. Seriously serious, the GPGDS have upped the ante. Big things. I am pumped to hear them the night before the EVENT.
Alright, just to lie and catch everything back up diary-style, Wednesday the Beck and I went in for more dancing coaching and a little bit of swing instruction. Things are getting there. Wednesday I also went running, about 4.75 miles, and dig this, I also did another 4.75 on Thursday, 6 on Friday and another 4.3 with the birthdayGOAT on Saturday. Rockin'! We are getting ahead of ourselves a tad, but I just wanted to throw out that the exercise effort has been ramped up the past two weeks - I have run and/or played Ultimate on 9 of the last 11 days and been trying to shrink my tux-fitting body. I've tipped the scales a hair under 200 the last two times out which is still fairly meh but okay, all things considered.
Anyhoo, tutored Thursday and came home for a TV evening, pretending that things are still Must See (they're not). Friday, the Beck and I trekked down to Natick and dropped me off for some schoolin' as she went to pick up her wedding dress in Foxboro. I had a whopping 9 of 17 show up on time, so we abandoned the planned plan and went with a video on the "New Medicine," i.e. hypnosis, stress management and the like. The kids, the ones who were there, liked it. Yay. I tutored later (Russian History - which I know exactly nothing about - but I helped the kid organize his notes and such) and then got ready to be picked up by the Beck at 11 like we had planned. And waited. And waited. Ah - a near wedding dress emergency (thankfully resolved) caused the whole day to be thrown off by a few hours, so Beck showed up at about 1:20 or so. She had a lunchdate at the Naked Fish with the PGOAT and the Explosion-Pending Mound, so we blitzed back to Westborough and I headed home.
Only I forgot to leave the Beck a few dollars so she could buy ice cream. Have I mentioned that Beck is certifiably crack-level addicted to Cotton Candy Ice Cream from Swirls & Scoops? Well, she is, interventions be damned. I think she has roughly a fifteen day streak going. She contemplated going *twice* yesterday. Egads. So I figured I would kill two birds - i ran up to S&S, dollars in my socks, and did not find Ali & beck, so I ran to CVS and got some water, then ran back to S&S, waited fifteen minutes, and they still didn't show. So I then ran home. Six miles all told, and it turns out that the Vet ladies went up to school to take care of some graduation details in lieu of ice cream (Don't worry, I took beck to get her fix later that evening). Burritos for dinner and later we headed over to Gringoat's for good times and a movie to be reviewed later...
And now Saturday, the whole point of this entire post. First, beautiful weather - mid sixties, no humidity to speak of, sunny and just altogether gorgeous. next, my tutoring was canceled, so I slept in for the first time in WEEEEEEEEKS until 10:30. Awesome. At about 12:45, Beck and I headed down to East Bunnysville (Read: far away) to attend a graduation party thrown by the parents of one of Beck's classmates, Nellie. Emmy, Dave, Cindy, Jason, Steve, aka a lot of the old crew - Beck's friends from the pre-clinical years - were there, as were Christophe and his near pressure-capacity wife Sarah. The Mound, it turns out, is giving the graduation speech for the Vet class of '07, which makes for all kinds of hilarious water-breaking scenarios. Anyhoo, beck and I did manage to show up to this party 2 hours late and be among the first to leave, so we are either big jerks or exceedingly stylish. Afte some beers and hot dogs and a conversation that generally centered around the "people are morons/evil" theme, we agreed to meet back at the S&S for yet another dose of cotton candy flavored heroin.
(At this point, Beck got us lost. We argued about whether it is prudent to print out a map and directions for your destination instead of just writing the directions there. In conclusion, I am right).
We decided to call the GrinGOAT en route as it was Ali's birthday (again, happy DOB anniversary to both her Goatness and to the Aaronster). And by mere coincidence - THEY WERE ALREADY THERE! Which, as Sarah quickly pointed out, isn't really all that amazing when you go every day. Whatever. Laura, Beck, Ali, Ben, Sarah, Christophe, and Nyet made for a formidable 7-wheeled ice cream devouring machine, and we even managed to not scar any small children while sitting at the stand for half an hour. Yay us, and yay for impromptu birthday parties.
We followed up the beer and hotdogs and ice cream afternoon with a run along Ali's favorite route. Ben is still having foot pain so he opted out to work on Ali's PDA (the handheld device, not her proclivity to kiss ben in crowded rooms) and Ben, I feel your foot pain, that stuff sucks big time. But the remaining triumverate made the 4.3 mile trek with food bouncing in our innards and felt the better for it. Yowsers! I sprinted the last .2 miles or so and celebrated at Ben and Ali's by drinking a supersaturated electrolyte bath of gatoradey goodness. I continue to phosphoresce today.
Beck and I drove home to allow Ali to go on their birth-date and we headed down to the basement to dance. Thankfully, this was not a terrible One Tree Hill episode, so no psychos were involved. We just turned on the portable iPod player and practiced out foxtrotting. We are awesome. Cleaned up, ate dinner at the newly fancy (and argh-pricey) Grafton Inn. I had some top notch Chowder and a steak, Beck had mussels and a salad. The good life. Capped off the evening by watching a couple of episodes of Mr. Show, which to me is incredible but to Beck is merely mildly amusing. One was the episode about Imminent Death Syndrome, and since Beck did not find this hilarious this pretty much confirms that she does not know what is what. Sigh...
That was a fantastic Saturday. So we have two weeks (give or take a couple of days) left in New England and a lot of packing to do, but yesterday was done right.
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