seejanebee

Got up early-ish, packed, threw my stuff in the car and drove north.  Stopped in BN to eat Noodles for lunch.  It’s funny, the food at the Noodles there always seems to be more tasty than the STL noodles.  Hit dense fog about 70 miles from my mom’s, dense like can’t see more than 20 feet in front of you dense.  I slowed down to 50mph which may well have still been too fast, but cars were still passing me going 70mph.  Perhaps this is the advantage of having fog lights on one’s automobile?  That they’re actually useful in fog?  Anyway, fog turned to rain about 20 miles out, I was glad to finally arrive.  JA came over and we had rouladen for dinner, delicious, and then went to an Ice Hogs game.  It was a pretty good game, nothing much exciting happened.  Came home, ate cheese and crackers and my leftover noodles and hung out with my mom.  Tried to call Charlie and there was no answer so I went to bed.  He called back latelatelate and we had a bleary yet cheery chat until we were both falling asleep on the phone.

Did a lot of random last minute stuff today in preparation for going to my mom’s for xmas tomorrow.  Laundry, errands, cleaning the apartment, vacuuming, etc.  Today was pretty much as lame as it comes.  Didn’t hear from Charlie.

Woke up early again to take Charlie to the airport.  Dozed in bed while he packed and sent him off the the warm climes.  Went to Marshalls and did a little xmas shopping… for me!  Came home, had lunch, Charlie called to let me know he had arrived.  A thoroughly non-notable day, didn’t go out because the weather was kind of bleh, wrote and mailed xmas cards, watched some tv, read a bit, cleaned up.  Asked R. if he would take care of the cat while I was gone and he demurred because of something to do with not wanting to be responsible if it expired while under his care.  Annoying.

Got up early to take Charlie to his eye doctor appointment (one of the downsides of his lack of vehicle).  He had apparently been up since 4 after falling asleep at 8pm the previous night.  We did a little window shopping at the mall and went to le Target to pick up a few odds and ends (like draino for my defective shower).  Went back to my place, had some lunch, had an afternoon nap, cut Charlie’s hair.  Got gyros from the gyro place in the loop for dinner.  Hung out with C. and M. in the evening to watch basketball and played Oblivion later on.  Ate leftover chinese food at 2am, came back to my place to feed the cat and returned to Charlie’s apartment to sleep.

I was woken up at 4:30am when Charlie came to sleep at my place after hanging out with the men at the man-house. We got talking and before we knew it the sun was up and it was 8am, so we decided to go to IHOP again and eat more pancakes. I had the carrot cake ones again and Charlie had the strawberry cheesecake ones, which sounded slightly strange but were also really delicious. Then we went to the mall to have a little morning walk, which we did rather sleepily.  After that we went to Charlie’s place and played Oblivion. I only lasted an hour or so before I fell asleep around 11am and started dreaming about his roommate doing heroin. At this point I was so tired so I suggested we take a nap, which we did, and we got up again around 3. More Oblivion, Hon’s Wok for dinner, some sports watching, more Oblivion, Charlie fell asleep on my lap and I put him to bed and went home. I had trouble falling asleep, rather funny after only sleeping 4 or 5 of the last 36 hours.

Slept in til noon when I was woken up by Charlie who had stayed up all night in an attempt to return to a normal sleeping schedule.  He wanted to go to breakfast and so we went to IHOP, because he craved some combination of pancakes and hash browns.  Or perhaps it was the bacon.  At any rate, he didn’t even end up eating pancakes, he had some sort of veggie/egg filled crepes and I had carrot cake pancakes with a side of all the hash browns/bacon/whatever that Charlie wanted to eat.  I was mostly interested in the pancakes, which were amazingly delicious.  Run, don’t walk, to an IHOP and get carrot cake pancakes if you like carrot cake at all.  They were moist, carrot-y, and full of flavor.  I had debated getting the pumpkin ones but I was really glad I went for carrot.  Although, the success of the pan-carrot-cakes makes me think the pumpkin ones might also be exceptionally delicious and now I want to go back soon to find out.  IHOP’s marketing ploy has succeeded!  Then we went to the bank and came back to my place; Charlie took a nap and I did stuff around the house.  In late afternoon the winter malaise took hold of me and I crawled back into bed to nap with him.  He went to basketball around dinnertime and I ate dinner, did laundry, caught up on correspondence, and took a shower in my still non-draining shower.  Must get draino soon!

Slept at Charlie’s, woke up and he made noises about being sick. I went home to feed the cat and eat leftover pizza and whatnot and then decided to walk to the grocery store to buy draino (my shower stopped draining overnight). However, I got sidetracked by the wintery wonderland and ended up walking around the neighborhood instead. I walked to the park a few blocks away and the afternoon sun came at a low angle through the trees and made the snow glitter. There was a dad taking his kid sledding and it made me think that one of the fun parts about having kids would be getting to do all the fun kid-type stuff again. Of course, kids want to wake up at 7am and do all that stuff, which would be the downside. There had been talk last night of going sledding but none of us had sleds and we figured suckmart would a) be the only place open that time of night and b) be sold out of sleds.

I walked back to Charlie’s place since we had talked about going to a late afternoon hockey game and we would have had to get going if we still wanted to attend. Charlie was still making sick noises and didn’t want to go to hockey so I climbed in bed and cuddled him for a while; he gradually woke up and we had a pleasant chat. We got up and had a sad dinner composed of a few meager scraps of leftovers, a shared microwave meal, a shared bag of barbecue soy chips and a couple granola bars. Then we played a video game for like, 8 hours straight. We bought Oblivion for the xbox a couple months ago and just started playing it this week. I have obviously not owned any modern video games systems, but I am absolutely amazed by how beautiful this game is and how complex of a world can be included on one DVD. The other awesome part is that you can wander anywhere on the map, there are no fixed pathways nor any real restriction to the main quest. If you want to spend 4 hours messing around in the woods killing goblins, you can do that – and additionally, you’ll find ruined temples and farms and such to explore. This is my favorite sort of video game, with an entire unknown world to explore and random interesting characters to interact with. Anyway, that was fun for many hours and then we came back to my place and cooked late night food.  I made Charlie a fried egg sandwich with melted queso cheese and it was, I must say, delicious.  I went to bed, Charlie worked.

So there’s a local TV commercial against drunk driving where the drunkard sets off in their drunky-mobile and then the announcer intones in a terribly ominous voice: “NEVER MADE IT HOME!!!”. I suspect it’s the kind of thing you’d need to see to understand why it’s funny, but Charlie and I crack ourselves up over it and incorporate it into related themes. Failed to put on shoes with good traction before walking on icy sidewalks? NEVER MADE IT HOME!!! Didn’t wear a seatbelt for a 40 second car ride? (Hey, it’s cold). NEVER MADE IT HOME!!! Anyway, I don’t even remember why I thought this was worth mentioning, other than it’d be funny to remember for posterity. Charlie slept at my place and we vaguely got out of bed in the mid-afternoon to eat some food and assess how much snow had fallen, but eventually we succumbed to the winter malaise and spent the rest of the afternoon in bed.

At this point the forecast predicted 2-4 inches of snow and about 1 had fallen, I sneezed at their predictions. Our excessive bed-time ended in getting lucky and then as we were preparing to go to dinner, Mac called. He got invited along to dinner and honestly, I like Charlie’s friends (Mac in particular) but sometimes they are so slow to get going. We didn’t head to dinner until about an hour later, at which time a blizzard had developed. Macaroni Grill was our original destination but we only made it to Hanley Rd. before we figured it might be a better idea to choose a closer destination. We headed to Cicero’s instead, where we enjoyed tasty pizza and possibly even tastier alcoholic hot chocolate. Just the thing for blizzard conditions! I think my favorite part of snow is when it’s falling. It’s never as pleasant after it freezes into ice slicks a few days later and gets all grubby in the streets. Then the 3 of us came back to my place and hung out for a while before heading over to the ugly sweater xmas party at M.&L.’s place. Ugly sweater party was fun, I drank some alcoholic cider and ate too many cookies and had unintentionally hilarious conversations about kegel devices with a sizeable group. We lingered there til 3am, Mac and Charlie and I being the last to leave. The snow had stopped by that point, and there was a good 5 inches on the ground.  None of us were tired so we went back to Charlie’s place where we hung out with C., not doing anything interesting. I fell asleep on Charlie’s lap at 4:30am and slept at his place.

Today was the appointed day to return to central IL to get Charlie’s stuff out of his (totaled) car.  We dragged ourselves out of bed around 10 and I discovered that Charlie had gone to Qdoba in the early AM to get us breakfast burritos.  There was a little too much queso involved but on the whole they’re really tasty, and apparently cheaper than the regular burritos.  Drove up there, went to the tow yard and bludgeoned our way into the car.  It wasn’t in that bad of shape, 3 doors opened without trouble but we had to give the trunk a series of vigorous kicks to get it open.  I managed to unscrew the rear license plate but the front one was attached with bolts instead of screws, so we had to throw the front bumper in my car on top of piles of sports equipment and camping goods.  Had lunch at Panera and drove back to St. Louis.  Charlie ditched me to go out with his friends; I was kind of bitter having done him a sizeable favor.  I went to the old navy and then hung out at B&N the rest of the evening.  I talked to Charlie at 1:30 am, he was drunk and stuck downtown at a dance club and wanted to depart, so I picked him up and took him to steaknshake.  It had started snowing with some vigor by this point and it was rather enjoyable to drive through the deserted city with all the snow falling.  Brought Charlie back to my place, got lucky, and went to sleep at something like 4am.  God, my sleeping schedule is so mis-aligned.

Apparently I didn’t do anything of interest today, I know I was awake really late because Charlie came over to my place at 3am and we chatted.  I probably slept until 2 and tried to convince Charlie to get out of the bed and decorate the xmas tree but once again he was too sleepy, wah wah wah.  There had been talk of going to get Charlie’s belongings from the wrecked car but we were both too tired to get up early and didn’t want to go late in the day due to driving in the dark and colder temps = icy roads.  Charlie went to basketball and we both ended up at my place by bedtime.  It’s been cold, winter kind of sucks.  Give me good old 90 degrees and scorchy sun any day.