it's friday night, and you need to get away
Well, since I have nothing better to do, I might as well tell you about my fabulous weekend. I left work early on Friday--due to no work to do--and took a trip to Henniker to visit the crew at NEC, and also for Pat's birthday. I arrived on campus about an hour and a half earlier than planned so I intended to bust in on the tail end of the NECRA meeting and cause a ruckus, but it had turned out to be a short meeting and hadn't even been held in the library as usual due to some silliness surrounding the NEC President's inauguration. Bummer, but I managed to find everyone pretty quickly--or should I say they plastered themselves against the windows as soon as they saw me walking around, hehe.
A bunch of us went out to Sonny's and crowded our back corner of the restaurant as always. John and I chatted with them about things like Michele Perkins, the new NEC Prez, not allowing students to her inauguration and which staff members were leaving. It was also John's first time on campus since the day he moved in with Pat and Sam in Hillsboro a couple weeks ago, not just mine, and somehow we knew more about what was going on with the campus than a lot of the people we ran into did. I guess we did help head up The New Englander--old habits die hard.
After supper, John and I hung out with Nick, Kristy, and Casarra in Nick's room while he looked for a present for John he'd gotten. It was nice to shoot the breeze with them. It felt like college. We laughed for about five minutes when Nick finally found the gift--it was a can cozy shaped like a Hawaiian shirt, John's trademark. Before we headed back to Hillsboro, John and I hit Erin, Kyle, and David's apartment to pick up Ratchet's journal and ended up taking home a samurai sword and bamboo pole that belonged to Pat, too. We had to gape at Kyle's new computer case aptly named "the mothership" as it was about as tall as a desk and probably 1.5' wide. He was trying to install Windows XP while we were there, and was getting blue screens because there was so much hardware in there, it didn't know what to do with itself. It was pretty ridiculous.
We watched The Forbidden Kingdom with Sam and his brother, Ross, back in Hillsboro before hitting the hay. The three of us were very lazy Saturday morning, barely making it to campus for 1 PM, where I was meeting Neil to by a pretty Epson 2400 printer off him. Thankfully, he had the inauguration to attend so he didn't try to keep me around to ask me about my life. He's not a bad guy, he's just a terrible teacher, doesn't really know all the material he teaches, and has poor social skills. And I just really would rather not deal with him.
Later that evening, a pile of us--Sam, Pat, Kara, John, Jill, and I--decided to go to dinner at the Olive Garden in Concord even though it was packed. While we were waiting outside, we were laughing at Jill who was not-so-discreetly checking out girls as she declared in her naturally loud voice that she didn't want to date anyone crazy or butch. Our waitress for the night, Barb, was probably the best waitress I've ever had. She was hilarious. She razzed us all at least once about one thing or another and thought we were good sports. At one point, she threatened to give Kara her apple-tini in a kid's cup to which Kara was thrilled. She didn't end up getting her drink in a kid's cup, but all the water she ordered afterward came that way. (We tipped her very well.) When Barb wasn't around, we still were a rowdy table and had a great time talking about people we knew and generally enjoying each other's company. I honestly think it was the most fun I've had in a long time. When we got back, we were up for a while longer talking with Sam's parents, Pam and Mark. (You can never go over to that house while Pam's home and expect to leave within the hour. Not that she talks a lot, but you end up talking a lot with her. It's fun.) After a while, Mark brought down some of his WWII swords and daggers for us to oggle at. We were amused.
On Sunday, we had another fun meal at the Tilton Diner on the way to Funspot, this time with Bill and Sarah in tow as well. I love that diner--I have so many good memories of the place--and it was nice to see the two of them since I haven't in ages. Anyway, John and I bebopped the rest of the way to the big arcade to 80's music in my car where we all met up with Jess and Kristina and proceeded to descend on the video games. Jill and I had a great time with a big screen Star Wars game with Jill wearing John's welding goggles for effect when it was her turn. It was hilarious. Kara and I got way too into a stock car racing game, and Jess and I were shoving each other to get the other one to mess up while playing Mortal Kombat. (I lost. Jess' button-mashing fu is strong.) I, of course, had to play at least five pinball games--I'm old-school, I loveses pinball--along with some old Atari games. At one point, John, Bill, Sarah, and I all got in on a racing game that was really intense. Once someone would get ahead, they would end up flipping their car somehow. Needless to say, we were all kind of terrible drivers, with maybe the exception of John who did things like slamming down into second gear to cut across and slam Bill into a wall. I will never be that talented. XD
They had a new Deal or No Deal game near the bowling alley that was just as fun to watch as to play. Kristina was scarily good at it. Somehow when it mixed up all the suitcases, she was able to follow them. But as terrible at video games as I am, I dominate at air hockey. Me and Dad go nuts whenever we go somewhere that has a table, and he's just as vicious as I am. We played a game John and Pat vs. Kara and me, and I hope they had fun and I wasn't too much of a jerk with it.
The time finally came when it was time to leave, only for me to discover that I'd locked my keys in my car because I hadn't wanted to carry around my purse all day. MORON. Luckily, everyone else had AAA cards on hand since mine was locked in the car with my keys, and they were gracious enough to wait around the half hour with me for the guy to show up. It was depressing to watch them all drive off in the opposite direction, but I forced myself into counting down to two weeks from now when I'll see them again. What a fantastic weekend.