How I spent my Memorial Day Weekend

by
the P@

This Memorial Day Weekend I did lots of fun stuff. [/monotone of child
reading report in front of class]

No, seriously, I did. Granted, most of it was on Sunday, but even so,
I'll now bore you report all the details to you.
Friday
May 27th

Friday afternoon I was allowed to go home early. By half an hour ^!!!^

Alas, on that day I did not have the car. Not that big a deal, as I have
become quite adept at riding the CAT bus (heh. It's too bad that the CAT
bus is not like the cat-bus from My Neighbor Totoro)

So I leave work at 3:45, get to the bus stop around 3:50 and sit down to
wait. The bus arrived at 4:01, but it was the 202, not the 807. The 807
is the "express" - which means that it doesn't stop at every bus stop
along the route, only some of the major stops. The 807 is what i prefer
to take to work and home, as it gets me there MUCH faster than the 202.
However, I didn't want to keep sitting at the bus stop since I didn't
know when the 807 would be arriving, and because it was really fucking
hot that day. Long story short (too late!), I got on the bus at 4pm. I
got home at 5:45. Man. What was the point of that? Seriously. If it's
going to take almost two hours to get home, why bother even leaving
early? I was so irritated.

Oh well. It was the weekend. And a long one at that.

After I blogged about how hot it was (and it was hot), I was going to go
to the store and pick up some groceries. (See the end of the post on the
27th, about how I had to go hunt and gather) Turns out that I didn't go
at all. Stephanie went instead, and ...I think we had pizza that night
for dinner once she got back. That sounds right. Yes. We did. We had
Pizza Hut pizza, along with a Full Description Pepsi. Heh. Full
Description Pepsi. "Well, it's blackish brown. It's liquid. It comes in
a plastic two liter bottle with Darth Vader printed on it. It's the
nectar of the gods, and it contains: Carbonated Water, High Fructose
Corn Syrup and/or Sugar, Caramel Color, Phosphoric Acid, Caffeine,
Citric Acid and Natural Flavors. For more information, visit our website."

We may have watched one of the Star Wars movies that night. Tina lent me
her copies of the original trilogy, and I know we viewed most of them
over the 3 day weekend, but I don't know exactly when.

Anyway, Friday night ended, and then it was...

Saturday
May 28th

You know, I really don't remember what happened on Saturday.

I guess that's because it was not Memorial Day. Heh. Immemorial Day. Or
perhaps I mean Unmemorial Day.

The girls played outside with their friends. I read the rest of my
library book (mostly. It got boring near the end. So for parts of it I
simply skimmed. When did reading become so bromidic? [sigh])
Steph made brownies (yummy!) and pasta salad (yummier!) with olives (eh)
for the Pool Party that was to take place on Sunday.
I want to say we ate chili dogs, but I really don't know for sure what
we had for dinner. Oh! Mac and Cheese. That's right. Because I watched
part of the season finale of Lost (again) while eating dinner.
And now it's time for my Lost tangent.
I have had two Lost dreams so far. (You know a show has become
...something when it gets into your subconscious.) The first one I had
the night before the season finale originally aired. (Odd that it took
that long to finally get out of my car and into my dreams.) That dream
went pretty much thusly:

Dr. Jack was seated at at large throne-like ...throne? Seat? I don't
know. It was a big seat, but it looked to be made of concrete or rock.
Also, his arms, which were resting on the armrests, were strapped in by
concrete. It looked like huge cinder blocks were holding his arms down.
Criminal Kate was there beside him and began to saw the concrete blocks
with a saw. As she was doing that, the concrete armbands holding Dr.
Jack down began to glow blue.

Opening credits.

Which Lost doesn't really have. But in my dream, it did. The opening
credits that the show had was typical of Buffy. It showed clips from
episodes with a bunch of scary, cool, weird stuff going on. Including a
giant bird that should have been much smaller, and that Walt had some
control over. And something else (I don't remember) that should have
been really large that was very small instead. And the opening credits
had the Rolling Stones "Paint it Black" as the theme song. (I think that
might have been playing on the radio alarm clock and was incorporated
into my dream.)

At that point in my dream I turned to Steph and said, "Why'd they change
the whole format of the show?? I mean, it's still watchable (it was),
but it's so ...different now."

The second dream I had over the Memorial Day weekend, and I think it
might've been Friday night/Saturday morning, although who knows. For the
sake of this blog entry, we'll say it fell on this day. Because it works
that way, and doesn't interrupt the narrative flow. (HA!!)

So, yeah. Second Lost Dream:

Me, Col. Orange Peel, Dr. Jack, and Criminal Kate were heading up a
hill. We could hear the monster.

As we climbed, Col. Orange Peel (aka Locke) produced a black and white
blanket that exists in our house in real life from out of nowhere, and
he strung it up, pretty much like a curtain. This was so that the
monster would not see us. Once he was done, we peeked around the edges
of the blanket to peer down at Lostzilla, which seemed to be in some
sort of makeshift cage.

And...the creature wound up being ....an ostrich. A really huge ostrich.
Like 80 feet tall. And it was running around in circles, making the
noises that it does on the show. And then suddenly it stopped, and faced
one of the walls of the cage, where a super sized wall calendar was
hanging. It then pulled out a magic marker (heh. emphasis on the
"magic"?) with it's wing, and begin to write numbers (oddly, not the
Numbers) on certain dates of the calendar.

End dream.

It is weird that both dreams had oversized birds in them. I don't know
what (if anything) that means, but there ya go.

And I could go on about Lost, and how the current theory I'm holding on
to now - not my own, but the one I like the best so far - is that the
'security system' is a swarm of (out of control?) nanotechnology (ala
Michael Crichton's book Prey), but I think I've talked about Lost
enough for now.
[/Lost tangent]

I think we did watch Star Wars Episode 4: A New Hope that night
(which is why my blog entry for that night was a Star Wars quote) after
the chilling raft scene from Lost. And then we went to sleep until...

Sunday
May 29th

8:00am. The phone rang.

I answered, somewhat groggily. The person on the other end said, "Pat?"
and I swear it sounded like Steph's dad, but it turned out to be one of
the newbies from Master Control. Apparently the rundowns for the backup
programming for the game that day were not where they should've been.
(This is partially my fault. I should have double checked to make sure
that Traffic had put them there.) Anyway, I instructed Newbie to make
his own time sheets since the game wasn't going to start for another 5
hours. Newbie agreed he'd do that, and then I hung up.

I tried to go back to sleep. But it just wasn't happening. As my brain's
synapses slowly started firing, I realized that Newbie didn't have to
create his own time sheets, since they are stored in the Traffic
department, he could go get them. I picked up the phone and dialed
Master Control...only to get a "This number is not in service" error
message. Huh?

I hung up and tried again, and got the same result. Well that's
odd. I thought.

Then I went back to sleep. =)

We woke up, got ready, and in the afternoon, we drove to the pool party
that i mentioned in a previous blog entry.

A good time was had by all, I believe. Evidenced by our staying there
for 9 hours. Woo! I don't want to name names of our friends (I've been
bitten by a small case of paranoia lately, and have even thought about
taking out all mentions of the names of the girls from my blog. I know
that M reads my blog (Hi, M!!) so if I get M's okay, then eventually
you'll learn M's name. Not that it means anything to any of the other
Internet Weirdos out there, but...)

Anyway, the point is that M, M's spouse C, and their two children are an
unschooling family, and they are a giant inspiration and a lot of fun.
They're really good people, and my only wish is that we could spend more
time with them more frequently. The same goes for the newlymet P, R, and their DD C. (heh. Initials.)

Also, I wish that I were less socially retarded.

I mean, seriously. Even in instances when I'm around people that I like
(as I was for all of Sunday), I don't interact enough. I'm far too quiet
and don't bring enough to the table. [sigh]

So, yeah. The party. I swam with Saren and Harper, for several hours. I
think my shoulders got a little sun, but nothing too painful. The girls
don't burn at all, they just get more and more tan.

After swimming, we ate hamburgers and hot dogs which were cooked to
perfection. And the girls played and played and played. Yay!

Eventually, the time came for us to leave. Everyone was tired, and it
was nearly midnight by the time we got home.

The two youngest girls were asleep when I pulled into the driveway, and
Saren was soon passed out on the couch. Steph and I stayed awake into
the first few hours of

Monday
May 30th, 2005
Memorial Day (observed)

watching a bunch of nonsense on TV. I don't know why, but neither of us
were tired, despite having had a super long day. Around 2 am, though, we
finally called it a day and went to sleep.

We woke up around 11, although I had no energy for a good portion of the
day. We finished watching Empire Strikes Back - ("How can Vader be
Skywalker's father??" Saren asked) and near the end of the day we
watched the beginning part of Return of the Jedi. ("I'm glad that Solo
is okay." Saren said after he got out of his carbonite tomb. It's funny
that she likes to call the characters by their last names.) We still
have about 30 minutes to go, and will most likely watch that tonight.

During the day, the only real "excitement" was when the girls found an
injured pigeon in the backyard. Apparently Tripod (aka Tiger aka
Se-Beasty aka Sebastian) attacked a small pigeon and left it in our
backyard before the girls chased him away. Poor little time traveler!

Steph helped the girls put it in our shed, with the door opened enough
that the bird could get out (hopefully) but the cat could not get in
(hopefully). I have no idea what the status is on the bird now.

For dinner, we ordered Pizza Hut pizza (again!) along with another Full
Description Pepsi. Which was forgotten by the delivery driver. But! He
came back. With the Full Description Pepsi. And cinammon sticks! So
everyone was happy.

And then it became Tuesday. And I went back to work.

The end.
*looks up from reading the paper*

*sheepishly returns to his desk*