4th of July Weekend

Well, the wedding was decent. I couldn’t take advantage of the open bar as I had hoped, since I was running on 4 hours of sleep. I physically can’t drink a lot without feeling sick if I’m really short on sleep. Pretty lame.

I talked with some people from work (two of the owners) while I was there and that was very edumucational and entertaining. After they left, Aaron’s friend Mark showed up and we chatted with some folks. The dance floor was, um, jumping, but I wasn’t in a state to take advantage of that, so I just watched some fools. A few people tried to get us to dance, and Mark had the perfect response for them; “Hey, when something looks this good standing still, I can’t really justify moving it.”

After the wedding was over, Mark, Christa, and I went out to the Stevens Point bars. Stevens Point has a local brewery and I’m always up for trying a local beer (at least once), so I ordered a “Point”. I quickly realized this beer was absolute shit. Just as I was finishing it, we were joined by 3 of Christa’s friends who did a quick scan of the table and got us all another round (read: they got me another shitty beer). I thanked them politely and choked it down. Half way though the second beer I began thinking of what my next drink should be. “Honeyweiss…that sounds good. I’ll get that when I come back from the bathroom”, I thought. When I came back, I found another point beer on the table. At first I was confused, thinking it was the bottle I had before. I stared at the bottles, questioning my sanity, thinking “No, this can’t be. Not another. Please God, no.” But yes, yes it was yet another bottle of Point beer. I drank away. Finally, one of Christa friends asked “Are you from Stevens Point?”. “No”, I replied. “Oh, then why are you drinking ‘Point’?”, she said. “Well, I bought one to try it, and then you bought me another two.”, I replied. “Oh, I’m sorry. I thought you liked the stuff. We hate it– we call it ‘Ex-lax in a bottle’”. Great.

My stay at the Super 8 was super. The kwality of the bed didn’t matter much. Since I was horribly short on sleep, I could’ve slept on concrete quite comfortably. I checked out at 10:30 and joined Pat for the world famous Shoney’s breakfast bar. I frequented (went twice) to Shoney’s on my Deep-South-Spring-Break-Vacation in ‘03, and enjoyed myself thoughrouly. Since then, I had been craving Shoney’s. You can’t find a Shoney’s close by — for some reason they’re only dominant in the south. Well, as luck had it, the only one in the North is where? Stevens Point. So we went. Pretty disappointing really. The charm of Shoneys is lost when the place isn’t filthy and filled with fat and loud black ladies. Oh well.

On the boring 4 hour drive home, I nearly fell asleep and also nearly got pulled over twice. That makes for 5, count ‘em, 5, very close calls in the past 3 weeks. I’ve been going 85, or 90, I coming over a hill, my fuzz buster goes wild, see a cop on the right side of the road facing me, I drop anchor, commence swearing up a storm, and have my heart sink to my feet envisioning my insurance rate rise, and having to make a check written out to “Police officer’s doughnut fund”. Miraculously, though, all 5 times while driving the speed limit for the next 5 miles and waiting for the other shoe to drop…it never does. And I thank god. My car is amazing – nobody wants to pull it over. *knocks on wooden desk* … *realizes the desk is metal* … *looks for wood* … *finds door on other side of office* … *walks to door* … *scans area for witnesses* … *sees no one* … *knocks on door* … *scurries back to cube*.

After returning to my Minneapolis home, I collapsed on my bed and took a much needed 4 hour nap. At 6:30 I hopped in the car and drove to Mankato to join Sam for a 4th of July get-together-type-thing. I didn’t realize it’d be Sam, his family, and me. I felt a bit like a fifth wheel, but I dealt with it. We lit some fireworks, drank some beers, and sat around chit-chatting. It eventually ended with Mat, Sam and I sitting around in the dark on the driveway lighting off fireworks and b.s’n. We also blew up a grapefruit, which wasn’t nearly as entertaining as it sounds. We left, and I was going to go home, but I then realized the bars weren’t closed yet. So I wandered for a bit looking for people. I found no one, but then received a text message from Emily. We ended up loitering at Embers for the better part of the night. “You don’t mind if we loiter, do you?” “No, not at all”. Ah, Embers.

All in all, the weekend was pretty sweet.

Returning to work today, was not, though. For the first 45 minutes, I had to pull out my other personality – you know, the one that thinks all my boss’ jokes are funny, and the one that actually gives a damn about what he’s yapping about. Yeah, that was a little bit of a shock to the system. I need to name that personality. Hmm, does anyone have any good names for him?