Vacation Recap, PART 2

okay - where was i? oh yeah....bitching and moaning. i'm in a better mood now (i guess not being at work will do that to you). so, i'll pass on the warm-up heartache for now and just get to the recap. let's see....

day 1 (saturday, the 4th):
the wife and i met up with saul and rhonnie in frederick, md to help them drive down. my dad-in-law had shoulder surgery a month or so back (he's doing fine, thanks) and we all feared that being stuck in a car for a long time wouldn't do him well. so we helped break up the trip for them. suze drove with him for awhile and i had mom in the car with me. good conversations - baby, work, family, etc.

we packed it in for the night in fredericksburg, va. fredtown. home of my almameter. so i took the obligatory trip down memory lane with the wife and visited the old haunts. wow is that a small campus. mary washington college, or the university of mary washington as its known today, is a lot smaller than i remember. granted there were only 4k students when i was there, which is probably about where it stands today, but it just seemed bigger back in the day. i guess my universe was much smaller then so it just seemed larger. anyways, it was great to walk the campus (10 minutes from end to end and back!!!). it was nice to see the school again. why is it that whenever you visit a college campus, you want to go back to learn? or at least, that's how i tend to feel.

day 2 (sunday, the 5th):
woke up in the morning and drove the rest of the way to corolla. there was a little bit of trepidation in that we wanted to arrive to the house first, but because dave packed up his family and left the 'burgh around 3am, he might beat us there and steal the best room! we worked around that by meeting up at hardee's for lunch. if you haven't eaten a burger there, you're missing out. it is surprisingly a great fucking burger.

HIGHLIGHT OF THE DAY: GRAVEDIGGER!
okay, its not that big a deal, but it is still great to see how fucking redneck one can get. nothing says southern loserville more than monster trucks!

we get to the house, everyone unloads. i've never seen a fridge with more vegetables. imagine you're back in college and you load up the fridge with beer. not the mini-fridges that everyone had in their rooms, but full size. not a single chunk of space for anything else besides beer - and maybe a few condiment bottles. now imagine that same amount of volume. but with veggies. it was a lot. you see, dad-in-law loves a great deal and he has befriended some vendors at the stockyards in pburgh. as such, he gets crates of shit (peppers, onions, avocados, etc) for pennies. and since its such a great deal, we HAVE to consume it all. my logic tells me that if its cheaper than usual, then you can loosen up on your thrifty ways and throw some shit out if need be. but alas, its not me that works the deals at the yards.

i play a little pool with the wife. she has to cut it short to take care of babykeira, so dave finishes up the game and then we play some more. interesting games. i suck. he's actually pretty good. but not that good. he talks the game up - calling shots for everything, "walking the ball" down rails and such. i knew that it was all an illusion when he sinks the 8 pretty early on for a loss, but rather than counting it in my win column, he looks up and says something like "reset the 8?" come on! that's no spirit of competition. so when it comes down to it, i should hand his ass to him. i grew up with a table and should be good. however, i suck nowadays. i blame it on my foureyes. so, i'm keeping track of the win-loss situation and end up falling in the hole something like 3 games to 7. and my wins are with scratches on the 8 or some sad win like that - in fact, i don't actually winning a game for real. i'm sure i grabbed a few w's by putting away the 8, but my performace was so lackluster that i don't remember anything. fucking pathetic. after the trend continues into tuesday, i don't play another game all week.