After Thursday night's double header, I felt pretty much awful. The cumulative effects of Tuesday's insane dose of running-around and Thursday's fuel to the fire left me pretty nauseous; I couldn't eat when I got home Thursday and that pleasant feeling continued through most of the day Friday. Blarf. I rallied a bit for a burrito or two on Friday night, but still, it was a pretty crappy way to spend the day. We capped it off by watching Lost and Eli Stone, both of which registered somewhere in the annoyingly incomplete to annoyingly annoying range. Pile this in the death of modern culture heap, right next to the place where I had a student tell me that yes, she's seen The Nanny reality show but has never seen Mary Poppins.
Saturday fared better. Long day at the tutoring factory, but the crush was salvaged when I got a text message from Dan that went something like "Bowling or guitar hero tonight?" I responded that I was sure he meant AND instead of OR. After some emergency apartment cleaning Saturday afternoon / evening, we trekked down to Phoenix to hang with the DC crew. Christina has not only gotten a cute haircut, she has whiled away countless hours at the GH and is now a medium level superstar. I killed Knights of Cydonia, but my skill on the fake guitar falls somewhere under my skills on the real guitar and my skills on the computer keyboard fake guitar. Christina five-starred everything, including "One," and Dan claims it's no longer fun to play with her. Sigh. Dan also says things like "the tomatoes made me like to die," so you always have to wonder what seventh level of English he's using. Still, watching Christina kill the GH was mesmerizing, but could not hold our attentions for long. We were hungry.
Dan drove us to the TeePee, a nice little mexican joint complete with tvs to show all-star dunkage (Huzzah to Superman!) and teenage conversation. Dan and I mocked people whose musical tastes don't match our own, for something new and different, and I may have maxed out on Pitchforkish snobbery when i claimed that you wouldn't get Xiu Xiu if "you were the kind of person who likes melody and/or rhythm." Subjunctive tense and slamming elitism regarding conventional staples of music appreciation: 72 points in the big dork game, methinks. Sigh. After an exceptional dinner accented by margaritas and highlighted by existential comments re: teenage boys' valentine gifts, we headed over to our local trashy bowling alley, which was about 2/3 full.
"Sorry, no lanes available," the counter man chimed. Huh? Christina looked briefly over her shoulder at the twelve empty lanes; Dan speculated that they had been reserved by George Clooney "just in case." The option given to us by counter man (who, in retrospect, may have been politely telling us that we were way too cool to be hanging in an adolescent-laden bowling alley on a Saturday night) was to wait until 10:00 to reserve an *Extreme Bowling* lane which would be available for play at 10:30. Given Beck's Meghan-esque sleeping schedule of late, this option did not strike us as particularly viable. We left for casa DC, taking solace in the fact that if we couldn't get our faux-sport on with some bowling, we'd get our faux-faux sport on and bowl on the Wii.
The bowling was fun; Beck annihilated us. Christina decided we needed characters; Christina and I created reasonable likenesses, and Beck rendered herself as a "Mii" which invokes names like "Brumhilda, Eater of Villagers." We're talking one impressively hideous animated un-doppleganger. Yikes. We golfed briefly with our new selves, and Beck predictably crashed asleep. Said goodbye, and got ready for an "Ethical Brunch" on Sunday.
Woke up at 7 am to clean the bathroom and the parts of the apartment we didn't get to the previous evening. Fun times. Went to Fry's to buy honey, poppy seeds and...
They don't serve alcohol before 10 am at the grocery stores in Phoenix. I know this, because I tried to purchase champagne (technically, sparkling wine, you crazy Wayne's World fans) for mimosas at 8:57 and set off all kinds of alarms at the self-checkout lane. Seriously, the automated voice*, normally so pleasant and kind, all of a sudden blurts out, "Please put down the item. A sales associate is coming to take it from you." WOAH! Indeed, a sales associate laughs his 20 some odd year old ass at me as he takes away the champagne and tells me I can't buy alcohol until 10 am. "Why 10 am?" I ask. He doesn't know. I guess that it's because it's noon on the east coast, and that qualifies as "noon somewhere." He doesn't reply, just walks down the alcohol aisle. Sigh.
* - oh, the automated voice. Separate post.
I went home, cleaned some more and went back at 10 for the champagne (to a different Fry's, of course; don't want my neighbors thinking I'm sort of crazy champagne-obsessed alcoholic). Tim and Wren and DC came over about 11, and we had an EXCELLENT brunch prepared by Beck. Bread pudding, spinach souflee, eggs and bacon and sausage, fruit salad, mimosas, coffee, and topped off with ice cream and bananas glazed in orange rum sauce. Ridiculous good, and a great time; this satisfied our "host a veggie party obligation" and was a nice party, taboot. Naia (TW's daughter) made the trip, and outside of a baby-phenomenon euphemistically referred to as "a blowout" - yeah, that's right, she popped a tire - she had a good time. The dogs didn't even try to eat her, mainly because we separated them soon after T & W entered. Phew. NEhoo, great brunch; the people left at about 2:30 and I headed out to play some Ultimate.
(Blar - I tweaked what I'll refer to as my Roger Clemens muscle pretty much as soon as we started playing. Between that and a charlie horse I received Thursday night, I was hobbling something awful. No fun. I have a game tonight (Tuesday), so hopefully I've recovered to the point where I can function. We'll see).
Leftovers and scrabble Sunday, tutoring and Terminator and the rest of the leftovers Monday. Good times had by all. And now you're caught up. As always, I will try to be more exciting in the upcoming week. But seriously, who doesn't love a story about bowling and brunch???
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