onwards and upwards… northwards?

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.

 

RIP honda

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.

 

home again

Wake up and have received a text message from T. inviting me to delmar lounge at 2am.  Weird.  No response from Charlie, I wonder if everything is ok.  Call him and wake him up, he says everything is fine.  Head home around noon, hit snow around the IL river.  Stop in Bloomington to buy a new windshield wiper since mine are shit.  Call Charlie to say hi, he is driving somewhere and I ask if he wants to hang out when I get home, he says sure.  Snow stops shortly thereafter, turns to rain.  Traffic goes through Springfield at approximately 5 mph.  Charlie calls sometime later and says he’s going to dinner at M.’s and he has guys coming to watch basketball and I can come to that if I want.  I finally get home after 6 hours, I try to get gas but the lame-o dinosaur has closed early.  Once home I eat thanksgiving leftovers for dinner and try to get the apartment in order.  Screw that watching basketball crap.  Charlie calls after basketball is over and we go to his place to play FIFA.  I sleep over there.

 

downtown

Went for swedish pancakes with P&R and then went on a downtown loft tour with my mom.  A couple of unimpressive apartment type buildings and a couple of really cool ones, especially one owned by a Swedish couple who had IKEA all over the place.  It made me wish I had a camera with me.  Seriously, one looks at the IKEA catalogue and says ha, no one’s houses really look like this but their place looked like it could be featured in a magazine.  Picked up my sister and went to a depressing play.  It wasn’t supposed to be depressing, merely nostalgic in some manner I found the attempts to force the audience to feel certain emotions to be depressing.  Went to dinner at the thai restaurant, tasty as always.  Tried to call Charlie to say hi, no answer.

 

very little shopping involved

Hung around the house with my mom in the AM and helped her do yardwork. Lots of raking and putting stuff away for the winter and whatnot. Picked up sandwiches for lunch from Mary’s Market. Went out to Borders with my mom in the later afternoon, which was pretty busy but not frenzied. Stopped by Target on the way home to look for tights for my grandma, no luck. Had thanksgiving leftovers for dinner and went to an Ice Hogs game. They moved up to the AHL this year and it was a good game to watch, even though they lost. Called Charlie to say hi, didn’t get hold of him.

 

usually the mashed potatoes are my favorite, but my sister ruined them

Woke up early-ish, headed downtown to soup kitchen. I was in the carry-out department as usual and we handed out upwards of 530 carry-outs, which is the most I can remember doing for years and years. Went home for an hour or so to change and whatnot before going to Pam’s. My sister and I helped her finish up the cooking and then we ate: turkey, corn pudding, peas/carrots, sausages wrapped in bacon and the aforementioned potatoes. My sister insisted on mashing them (we always fight over it) and used an immersion blender instead of a masher. They were WAY overmashed, more like the consistency of thick potato-leek soup instead of mashed potatoes. I did not find it appealing, and was a little bitter because I would have made them much better. Stuffed ourselves and followed it up with pie, watched Christmas Vacation and played some board games. Headed home and to bed, I talked to Charlie for an hour or so.  We had a happy conversation where we talked about the conversational bizarrities of other people and how he likes me so much because I can talk about lots of things on multiple levels.  Was glad to hear him being cheery and affectionate if stuck by himself for thanksgiving.

 

heading north

Slept at Charlie’s, although I’m not really sure why since he stayed up all night with M. doing god knows what.   FIFA, probably.  He asked if I wanted to go get pancakes at 8am or so but I preferred to sleep at that point.  It was agreed that he would get me pancakes to go so I’d have something to eat before I hit the road.  I went back to sleep and was woken up at 10 by Charlie and pancakes.  Ate those, went home, showered, packed, replaced wiper blades, got going.  Paid $2.99 for gas which was annoying as it was 10 cents or more cheaper a few days ago.  Drove to my mom’s in miserable weather, it rained pretty much the whole way, and my new wiper blades didn’t work.  I had purchased the kind intended for winter weather, where the whole wiper is encased in rubber.  Turns out that acts as a mini aerofoil and lifts the blade off the window at highway speeds.  F– to winter wipers!  Got home, helped cook, had dinner with my mom, talked to Charlie a little while my mom went to get my sister from the bus stop.  He was happy to hear from me, said he’d slept most of the day.  Nothing much else exciting other than first snow in northern IL.  Brr!

 

i don’t like indiana

So we woke up all bright and early to get going!  See the city! Do fun things!  The nicest Days Inn ever had a free breakfast buffet in the restaurant, so we went to that.  It was kind of gross, hehe.  The eggs were scrambled wet (ick) and the texture was funny.  Sausages were tasty except they’d been doused in salt.  Oatmeal was probably the worst oatmeal I’ve ever eaten, it was gluey yet watery and had no flavor.  The struedel was good and the juice was decent! That’s all I’ve got to say about that.

Fortified, we headed to a park to play disc golf.  Problem: park was in ghetto, roads didn’t connect, park was very hard to find.  Once we got there we couldn’t find where the course started.  We left in annoyance to go to the state park that’s right downtown and contains museums, zoo, etc.  Sounds like it should be good, right?  Alas, there was no signage, we couldn’t find the zoo, we didn’t want to go to the NCAA museum and there was a canal was full of seaweed that smelled really bad.  We walked along the canal anyway and found a map about half an hour later indicating where the zoo was.  But we were irritated and didn’t want to pay for the zoo and didn’t want to go to museums and honestly, most of Indianapolis smelled bad.

So we left and somewhere before Terre Haute we were almost run off the road by a semi.  Charlie and I were in a very bad car accident a couple years ago so this incident gave us the shakes.  We stopped somewhere just across the border in IL to have lunch at a pizza hut $5 lunch buffet which was quite awesome.  The pizza was fresh and tasty and they had a dessert pizza which was deliciously apple pie-esque.  Plus, only $5!  Cheapest buffet ever.  And the employees were really nice and offered us frequent buffet-eater cards which we sadly had to decline, since I doubt we will ever eat at that pizza hut again.

I drove and Charlie slept since we were both tired.  We’d managed to stay up pretty late the night before for no good reason.  We headed to the Centralia IL disc golf course, but only Charlie played.  I was too tired and just wanted to walk and take photos of the fall foliage.  He got a -2, which was damn impressive.  We headed home and had a nap at my place and when I woke up my kidneys hurt.  Bleh.  Charlie went home and I felt mopey but he called shortly thereafter and invited me over for video games and distraction from suffering.  So we hung out and watched NBA basketball and played video games and I eventually went home to sleep.

 

it’s vacation time!

So, today we went to Indianapolis to see a NBA game. Charlie slept here; we were going to get up early and go to jiffy lube but no dice. Finally got up, he went to his place to get clothes and I got ready and then we checked the oil in his car. It was tragically low, so I dumped in the remaining portion of a quart of oil I’d been toting around in my trunk since 2004. Good to go! I drove to Terre Haute where we stopped to eat linner at an Olive Garden. Now, I know the OG is the restaurant that foodies like to make fun of in terms of suburban bastardized ethnic food (if Italian counts as ethnic) but I was prepared to think it was good. I hadn’t eaten at one in at least a couple years.

The salad, as I remembered it, was quite good. Not groundbreaking but I like the dressing and there’s always a lot of tomatoes/olives/onions/whatever. We shared a chicken breast stuffed with meat that came with pasta in creamy tomato sauce, it was one of the current ’specials’. (We didn’t want to deal with leftovers while traveling). It was on the better side of decent. Not great, not wonderful, but not too bad. Which is really a pity, because meat stuffed with meat? Hello, should be pretty awesome. The chicken-y part was fairly good but the pasta was those funny little hat shapes and it and the sauce were pretty taste-free. The breadsticks were really salty (I remembered that part) and would have been alright when fresh (if not for the salt) but meh after they’d been sitting 20 minutes. So no, I don’t think I’ll be Olive Gardening again anytime soon.

While in Terre Haute we stopped at a Burlington coat factory to see if they had any winter coats. They hardly had any knee length wool ones in size 6/8 and most of the store seemed to be other types of clothes/shoes/who knows what. Pretty lame for a store with “coat factory” in its name. Charlie drove the rest of the way and we decided to head directly for the game, even though we were an hour early. It was a good thing we did, because signage downtown was lousy and it took a little while to find parking and the civic center or whatever it was. As we were heading to our seats we saw a game on a monitor and realized it was the game that we were currently attending – already started. Oh yeah, Indiana doesn’t believe in daylight savings time. Or else we had crossed into the eastern time zone. It would have been nice if there had been highway signs announcing either of these facts. Fortunately Charlie’s desire to get there early meant we only missed the first 4 minutes. It was fun to watch basketball live, doubly so because Charlie knows a lot about the game and the players and could impart all sorts of interesting info.

Afterwards we wandered around downtown. We thought about getting a drink but I figured I’d just as rather walk around after doing a lot of sitting all day. There was a rather impressive war memorial and a fairly lively downtown for 10:30 on a tuesday night.  Then we drove out to the beltline to find a hotel.  None of the usual suspects like motel 6 had wireless internet.  It seems that Al Gore has not brought the internet to Indiana yet.  We decided to go for a driving tour and found the speedway and managed to get back downtown again.  We then headed back to look for hotels again and ended up at the airport Days Inn, which was the nicest Days Inn I’ve ever stayed at.  And I lived at one for a week in 2004 so this is something I know.  It was the quality of your average Hampton Inn, even though I don’t think Hampton Inn exists anymore.  Whatever, it was nice, other than its location right next to the highway and airport.  Good thing noise doesn’t bother me or Charlie much.