Oh my gosh, is tomorrow Friday already? Indeed it is.
Most of my friends and/or loved ones will be grilling various meat products and by-products and those that ain’t are usually invited to the back porches of those that do. I certainly hope that you will find yourself on such a back porch this weekend yourself. (Sunday is the day that we’re going to be doing that.) As for the other two days, I imagine that Friday itself will be a ghost town at work and I’ll probably find an excuse to take a half day if I don’t find an excuse to take a whole one, followed by a Saturday filled with the chores and errands neglected last week due to temporary bachelorhood.
All in all: nothin’ special but those are the most special weekends of all.
So… what’s on your docket?
Friday – working 7:30-5, followed by porch sittin’: special I’ve-been-in-Chicago-and-my-house-is-a-mess-so-probably-everyone-will-show-up-and-bring-their-dogs edition (not literally – Jaybird prohibits the bringing of dogs to our house).
Saturday – are we gaming? I forget! otherwise, chores. and sleeping in. and errands. and reading.
Sunday – more of saturday’s stuff + the grilling with friends that Jaybird mentioned. probably a 3-6 mile walk, as that seems to be a thing I do on Sundays these days.
Monday (still the weekend for me, ha ha!) – lunch with a friend, otherwise wide open. perhaps I will spend it LEARNING ABOUT NEW ZEALAND AS I AM GOING THERE TO VISIT IN LESS THAN A MONTH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Which parts of my fair nation are you going to be visiting?
Auckland and surrounds? I mean, I am def. flying into Auckland, and staying there the entire time is a perfectly good default, but I haven’t made my mind up about the rest of it yet. Probably a day in Wellington, maybe some time in Coromandel depending on the weather…
However, it seems that many of the people I sort of know in NZ live in the South Island (seems from the comment below that you might be one of them?), so part of me wants to hop a cheap flight to some southern city while I am there.
As is probably evident, I like to be spontaneous on my vacations :).
Double-check your flight. I read once about a guy who thought he’d found an amazing fare from LA to Auckland until the plane landed in Oakland.
😀 Thanks for the heads up, Schilling.
I live in Wellington, so if you are planning to stop off there, let me know and maybe we can catch up.
Oh, cool! I’m almost definitely going to make it that far and I would love to meet you. My email is marseillaise at gmail etc… if you shoot me an email on there so I know how to get in touch with you, I will do so once I have a firmer idea of things.
I hear it’s said New Zealand is a great place to disappear to.
Comments?
If you want to disappear, for any of a hundred reasons, I recommend Panajachel. Lots of ex-pats without last names running around there. Nobody asks too many questions.
New Zealand is my favorite example of “When it is reasonable to rely on the statements of others without first-hand confirmation.”
You see, I have seen New Zealand on maps. I have seen photographs and read essays which purport to describe it. I have met people who claim to be from there (all of whom seem to have very similar accents) and other people who claim to have been there. Yet I have never been to New Zealand. I have no first-hand knowledge that it exists. Indeed, even were I to board an airplane, I might not be able to know for sure that I was in fact in this place, since it would be easy enough to fly the airplane to some other location for a very long time and have the people present at the destination trained and coached to all speak with that particular accent. Yet it is intuitively obvious that it is entirely reasonable for me to maintain, with absolute conviction, that New Zealand in fact exists.
I am very pleased for you, Maribou, that you will soon be able to join the ranks of those third parties upon whose assurances I thus reasonably rely. Have a great time!
So jealous! I’ve always wanted to go to NZ. Leaguefest 2015, maybe?
It’s my birthday on Saturday, and my parents are flying down from Auckland for the day.
Happy birthday.
Yes, may your festivities be festive and your year ahead full of joy and contentment, James K. (Also, may you feel the need to post a lot, she said selfishly.)
Happy b-day dude!
Happy birthday, Mr. K! Given the time here (12:42 p.m. in California) it’s already your birthday now?
As I post this, it’s been my birthday for 8 1/2 hours.
Happy birthday!
Thanks everyone.
I’m replacing a minivan with another minivan.
Surreptitiously as a prank?
“Since when does this car have cupholders?”
As pranks go, that one’s going to be ranked somewhere in the “pretty lame” tier.
We are swimming, fishing, swimming, and maybe going to the retro arcade down the street… then swimming.
Also the bookstore sometime tomorrow.
While there will be meat exposed to flame and a variety of alcoholic beverages, and perhaps some time playing Bioshock: Infinite, I will also dedicate some time towards making the distinction between weekdays and weekends slightly less relevant, at least for me. If all works out, I will be able to be less cryptic than this in the near future.
Hopefully I’ll be finishing residing a portion of my daughter’s bedroom wall. Old siding rotted by unknown decades of water had to be replaced…in a job that has become cursed. Every day I go up to work on it something goes wrong, and what should be a one day job is only half-done after a series of mishaps on about 6 different days, the latest being getting ill and dizzy while standing on the adjacent shed roof, along the edge next to the paved driveway, to nail in the bottom course. The job is hexed, I tell you, but I’m hoping to finally get on top of it this weekend.
You take care up there, Mr. Aitch. Maybe bring along someone to keep an eye on you. It’s getting up and down the ladder where you can get killed.
Where you get killed is going down while bypassing the ladder.
I’m on my way home from visiting family in CA. I’m hoping to enjoy the last of my 5 day weekend settling back in to life. I’m pretty sure I should spend the next 48 hours burning off all of the calories I consumed in Cali.
So at the moment, I am trying like the dickens to avoid scratching the chiggar bites and listening to five lawyers argue whether or not the croquet ball git the stake or not. I think they are going to come to the consensus that there is no croquet stake as the existence of did stake should be considered inadmissible.
Ugh, chigger bites. I don’t miss them. They can make you really socially awkward, given that they prefer dark, moist places.
GOOD GOD one time my younger brother and I were playing in the woods and climbed into a deer tree stand and got a terrible case of chiggers up to the waist.
THE WORST. I counted 25 behind my right knee alone.
And yeah, the back of the knee is not the “warmest, moistest” place ya got.
1 Did Dickens try real hard at things? Yeah he was a successful writer which implies he worked hard and he knew how to stretch out a story since he was paid by the word. But why is he somehow the patron saint of trying hard?
2 Hell is other people.
Dickens = the devil, making 2 all the more appropriate.
I hung out with my best friend from grad school and saw 2001: A Space Odessey for the first time with another friend.
So I was trying to show Mom how her electronic cigarettes work.
Something went horribly wrong and I just drank the juice.
My tongue is numb. I have the hiccups. I think my tastebuds just died.
I wonder how sleep is going to go tonight…
I ATE THE BONES
I mean, going back to my first experience mastering the “French Inhale” (Stephen King called it “Double-Pumping”), I spent an hour lying on the bed with the room spinning ’round and I wished I could throw up.
But, like, I was totally awesome at French Inhaling after that.
So I was trying to show Mom how her electronic cigarettes work.
“Electronic cigarette” is a funny idea. (I’m sure it helps that I have no idea what they are.)
“Y’know, Mom, just turn the cigarette off and back on and we’ll start over.”
“So you think you’re old enough to smoke? Let’s see how you like smoking this whole pack. Go get the battery charger.”
“New Marlboro lights. Less volts, less amperage.”
“Hey, slick, just start smoking today?”
“Jeez. How did you know?”
“You’re trying to light the negative end.”
I tried to do that cool Charles Boyer thing where you put two cigs between your lips, light them both, and offer one to the girl. Damn things shorted each other out and almost burned my hair off.
where you put two cigs between your lips, light them both, and offer one to the girl.
Oh my goodness, I miss this one.
There’s a Dick van Dyke where he does that and it turns out she doesn’t smoke, and he has no idea what to do with the other one, so instead of super-cool he just looks silly. It’s hilarious.
I have no idea how much nicotine you’ve absorbed but I’d run out and get some activated charcoal and dose yourself immediately. Nicotine overdose is no joke: it can interfere with your heartbeat and central nervous system.
There might be enough nicotine in one of those cigarettes to cause an overdose, bit unless he got it all, it’s probably about what you get from swallowing dip. He should be OK.
The same thing happened to me a couple times with my e-cigs.