I’m supposed to be reconciling my Purchasing Card for work, but that’s one of my least favorite activities – so I’m stalling.
Anyway, just in case you can’t hear or didn’t listen to the last phone post, Movie Night is on this Friday and we’ll be watching 50 First Dates. Now contrary to popular belief, this is not really an Adam Sandler movie, so please, if you are hesitant to come, I would encourage you to come anyway because this movie is really cute. I showed it to my parents and I wouldn’t really do that with any other Adam Sandler movie. Anyway, if you do decide to show up, its in the normal place at the normal time, and we’ll be watching the normal TV this time around (sorry no 89 inch projection this time around).
I lost my red notebook. It has all the notes for what I need to do to start fixing my novel. I have been wanting to work on my novel some more, but aside from not really having the time yet, I can’t find my notes, so I’m at a bit of a standstill. Please, if you see my red notebook, please let me know.
This past weekend was a bit better than expected, to be honest. Before heading out of town, we filled up on gas and stopped by the Kroger to get Wine and Beer. People look at you funny when you buy two bottles of wine and a 12-pack of beer at 8 in the morning. We drove 8 hours up to Memphis (West Memphis to be exact – my grandparents moved out of the city when FedEx tried to block out the sun) and spent the evening with Jeremy, Christy, Mom, Dad, Nony (my grandmother) and Grandpa. We laughed a lot and drank a lot and generally had a good time. Truthfully, that’s the family reunion I was most looking forward to. Heather was apparently either very bored or very stressed because she drank all but two inches of the first bottle of wine – more than I’ve ever seen her drink in a sitting. I mentioned that I had brought my Geocaching equipment and that we could go out and do a cache or two in our free time on Saturday. When I first started talking about it, my Grandfather seemed genuinely interested, but when I started talking about The Bell Witch, I think he became very confused and somewhat addled.
At any rate, around ten, Heather, Cristy, Jeremy, and myself headed out to the mystery hotel. No one had ever stayed there and Nony just kind of picked it out of a hat. First off, they wouldn’t use the credit card with which the room had been reserved, so I had to bust out the credit card of my own to get the room. When we got to the rooms, they were, uh, functional. I kind of get the impression they’re fixing the place up, but we caught them mid way. The exterior was a mix of fresh stucco and rotten concrete. The main room looked nice, though half of the lights didn’t work. The bathroom on the other hand, while it didn’t look unsanitary, wasn’t necesarily inviting either.
Either way, we crashed out about midnight, resting up for the “festivities” of the following day. My night’s rest was not as complete as I could have wanted as something in my intestines decided it needed out very badly and I spent the entire night getting up every two hours to go to the uninviting bathroom. Without going into too much detail, by morning, I’d gotten up 5 times, gotten a lot of reading done, and was genuinely tired of pooping. I was fairly certain I was doing better when we headed out to find breakfast in this one horse town in Arkansas. After much deliberation (and our first visit to Wa-lMart on this trip), we finally decided to eat at Shoney’s. They had a breakfast buffet on until 2:00 so we had our run of the place. I ate too much grease and regretted it a bit after my nocturnal adventures the night before. We had a 2 hour drive down to Enid and that passed relatively uneventfully. Along the way, I learned that toilets in Mississippi have no locks, bought a lot of bottled water to help flush out my system and rode out the rest of the trip in relative comfort.
We got to the hotel about two hours ahead of time so we decided to actually do one of the Geocaches. Jeremy and Christy had never done one, so when I told Jeremy it was 5 miles “that-a-way” he was understandably confused. We drove around for a half an hour or so until we finally found the set of trails that the cache was hidden within and got to get out of the car. It went really well for having no idea where anything was and really just following an arrow to get where we were going. Christy took a puzzle from the cache and we replaced it with a matchbox car and a glasses case. She got really excited about the prospects of using Geocaching in her Science labs at school and even said she was going to write a grant to get it added to her curriculums. I’m looking forward to hearing more about that. We looked at the time and realize we still had over an hour before we had to be back at the hotel, so we headed off to find another cache but it was constantly just out of reach. No matter what lake road we went down, when we hit a dead end at the water, the beacon told us it was a little further to the east. We finally had to give up and head back to the hotel.
That night we went to a burger cookout at Enid lake for all the people who showed up the day before the reunion. Good food. I got to hang out with my cousins Cody and Bridgit. They’ve grown into very cool and interesting people. I wish we had more time to talk and hang out, but we at least got to chat with Cody a lot. Bridgit was constantly off talking to other people (when she wasn’t biting me or giving me wet willies that is). We got kinda bored after a while and Cody was obviously bored, so we offered to give him a ride back to the hotel and let him hang out in our room and watch TV, but he seemed a bit reluctant. We didn’t push the issue, which probably was for the best when as the evening got on. I was still pretty confident I’d beaten whatever had kept me up the night before – until I had just about finished dinner and my guts started tying themselves into knots. I finally had to have Jeremy rush us back to the hotel (I’d heard bad things about the bathrooms at the lake) and dump me out of the car at the door to the room while they went back to Wal-Mart (the second visit) to get me some happy pink stuff. It turned out that pretty much everyone had given up on the cookout around the same time we had and by the time I was feeling better, we were able to go up and spend some time in my parents room. I did feel a little bad because apparently Heather, Mom, and I all watched a lot of the same TV this past season, so we talked about that a whole lot, which left Jeremy and Christy out of the conversation. There was just some really good TV on this past season, what can I say?
The next night went well, I think I only got up once. The next day we headed out for the official reunion which was fun while being too long and too short at the same time. Again, Cody was pretty bored so it ended up being six of us sititng at a table as “outsiders” for the most part – Jeremy, Christy, Heather, Dad, Cody and myself. We talked and joked a lot, but mostly just grumbled about not knowing anyone and being bored. Dad did mention that he was feeling about like I sounded the day before, and I did see him head up the hill toward the bathrooms quite a few times. I don’t know what hit us, but it wasn’t the best time or place to do so. At one point, Mom insisted that I show her my tattoo. She said it wasn’t pretty – I wasn’t exactly sure how to take that comment. My grandfather, when he found out about it, gave me the same look as he did when I had been talking about the Bell Witch two days earlier. Eventually, my, uh, cousin? uncle? this guy I’m related to brought out the skiboat and I really debated going water skiing. I don’t get many opportunities to do so, and I really enjoy it – besides, the last time he tried to pull me, I never got my ballance, so I kind of wanted to prove myself. In the end, it was too late to do it and I decided that next time I would definitely go skiing. That evening we drove back to West Memphis, drank some more, ate leftovers and finally said our goodbyes. I almost forgot to return my family slides on the way out (we’d been in Jeremy’s car since Friday evening, so I hadn’t even thought of them), but luckilly I noticed them when I started packing our car back up in the driveway.
One more night in the mystery hotel and we were on the way home the next morning. We got about 150 miles in when the Check Engine light came on. Heather nosed around in the manual and decided it wasn’t as bad as if it was flashing, but we still looked up where the nearest dealership was. We found one in Little Rock and made a bit of a detour to get to it. It took them about an hour to fix the car but it was all waranteed so we didn’t have to pay anything. It would have been nice if we were in walking distance of any place to eat (other than a Kroger) since we were there around lunch and stuck not travelling. At least that way, we could have condensed our time off the road. I did get to see the new Subaru Tribeca. Its a luxury car alright – no doubts about it. I decided that if I was forced to get an SUV, it’d be the Tribeca (not the Murano as I had initially intended). I also got to see the new bed cover for the 2005 Baja. It was not big thrills. We skipped lunch (since we were forced to stop for repairs) and got home around 5:30. All in all, it was a good trip and I feel like the driving was worth it. Mom said she’s going to send us a refund for the one night in the hotel that I had to pay for, as well as gas money, so that makes it even more worth while.
Yesterday, my brother called me. It turns out that after talking about WoW while we were up there, he’s got an itch to try it out. If you have a 10 day free pass, I can hook him up with that so he can decide if it’s better than EQ2.
So even though we were on vacation last week, I feel like things have been crazy all over. With the very appreciated assistance of Angela, we flew out to Indiana Thursday to visit my brother and his micro family. We had a great time. My parents were in town to visit for the first few days, so it was nice to see everyone all at once. We got to go to Christy’s mom’s house for a nice Independence Day “meat and munitions extravaganza,” which was really fun and I got, what I think, are some really good fireworks photos (though, I’ve kind of decided most fireworks photos all look pretty much the same). All told, however, we had a good time. We ate good food, got out and walked around, shopped, relaxed, helped with errands and chores. 
