running with iced tea
What a weekend. I feel better after sleeping some of it off--as I often do--but it was just a roller coaster. Mostly fun overall, but in some respects, it was pretty rough. So good news, bad news.
I was happy about being able to start the weekend earlier than I thought since I finished working at about 10:30 AM on Friday as opposed to 5 PM. I had talked to Becky for a bit before I left, who was just having a rough time trying to get into grad school due to complications with her name change after getting married and not yet having residency in NH, so I wrangled together some people who were in town to get dinner when I got there. It turned out Becky, Cody, and Zach had never been to Que Pasa so John, Jess, and I introduced them to the experience. That was a fun time, and Becky got the social interaction she needed.
Sam, John, Megan, and I decided to play this "board game" called Arkham Horror to take John's mind off losing the promotion. I was a little hesitant at first because it's based off the Call of Cthulu mythos, and the last time we'd talked about something relating to that, I had nightmares. (Me and horror = not friends.) It turned out to be just cheesy enough to be awesome, if almost unnecessarily complicated. Megan and I had to have Sam tell us what to do almost the entire game, but it was fun when you got the hang of it. I put board game in quotations earlier because it really blurs the line between board game and RPG. At the beginning, you draw a random character, a couple random items, and some money which determine how many spaces you can move, how well you can fight the monsters, etc. A big bad monster is drawn that will attack the town if too many monster gates open up, and there's pretty much no way to kill it. Then the point of the game is to team up with everyone else to get all the gates on the board closed all at once to win. It gets complicated when each card drawn at the beginning of each round opens a new gate and causes a weird effect on the town. All in all, very fun.
We spent most of Saturday at Jen and Jay's hanging out and gaming later on. Mattie is incredibly entertaining. I can't believe my godchild is walking already! She's in this stage right now where she likes anything with buttons to push, resulting in a random three hours of Lifetime on their DVR. They took out the batteries so she could play with it, but she was instantly uninterested. (Of course!)
Jen had made me a cake since my birthday was back on the 3rd, and it was fantastic. It was like a giant whoopie pie--two chocolate cake layers with cream in the middle. For those non-New Englanders, think a larger version of those Oreo Cakester things, which is what she was going for. We all know how much I love Oreos. She had even crunched up some Oreo cookies and baked them into the cakes. It was so good, and I think I was on a silliness sugar high for most of the night. That was so cool of them to do that. :)
Jay ran a GURPS game for John, Jen, Caryn, Sam, and I. Jay always runs a good game, but it was a system I've never played, and the fact that I haven't played a non-modern day game in a while made it extra entertaining. It was also refreshing to play a character whose solution to everything was to punch it in the face. I play too many thinking characters!
On the ride back, John and I had a long conversation about serious things. Sharp contrast to the ride there, when we were rocking out to 80's music with all the windows down and loud voices. I'm a professional dance-driver, btw.
I met Mom and Lin in Portland on Sunday since they'd decided to go down and shop. We mostly doodled around at the Maine Mall. Something that was only funny to us: As we were enjoying our $1 McDonald's sundaes, four random guys jogged by heading for the bathrooms. We were wondering what the heck that was all about, especially because Lin pointed out that one of them had a big thing of iced tea--with no cover on it so it was spilling everywhere. We were making up stories about what they were doing: "Maybe one of their friends has been on the can all day and got thirsty, and it's a life or death situation, etc." Eventually, we decided Running With Iced Tea would be an awesome band name. This band would have to be hip hop/rap guys, and all their songs would have to follow the same formula: a line, a line that rhymes with "ee", a line, and "running with iced tea", and it'd be best if it made about zero sense.
YOU CAN SMELL SOME FLOWERS
YOU CAN SMELL SOME FEET
BUT AS FOR ME
I RUN WITH ICED TEA
We were throwing around similar things all night. You can't get the two of us together without silliness happening. Anyway, that was the fun of the weekend, and I'm going to stick to that for now. Maybe the bad news won't look so bad by the end of the day.