How was YOUR weekend?

Good morning one and all. Over to your left there is a picture of me taken just a few minutes ago with my new "Cartoon-a-camera," an invention that's in beta test mode but that I think does a pretty good job of capturing the overall feel of a moment in time, except for the "humorous" addition of the ladybug in my hair.

Note to self: inform camera manufacturers that clients may have phobias, and that the camera settings hould allow for adjustment of tolerances.

Also, my feet aren't NEARLY that big.

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Moving on then, How Was Your Weekend?

I was Here. And Over There. And then back Here again.

Eeeyep - I was a travellin' gal this weekend, with a scenic tour of the I95/I85 corridor between NC and DC as the big doin's.

It all began when my Mom decided to have her knee replaced, you see. She made a decision to find out what it would be like to walk more than a couple of hundred feet without pain, and being as how the FIRST knee replacement went so swimmingly a couple of years so, she thought "hey, let's just go for the second one so that maybe I can enjoy life again." That's my Mom, always thinking of herself.

Heh.

Anyhow, because Mom was going to be hanging out "in hospital" for a few days, I thought I'd wander up there to pay her a little visit and brighten up her days. I'm a giver like that, you see. So Saturday morning-ish I hopped in Tinkerbell and wended my way north. Stopped in at my younger brother's house first, because that's where I was staying, and we motored on over to see Mom, who was just getting done with physical therapy. FYI - You DO know that they day after you get a new knee they want you to WALK on it, right?

(I'll wait here a minute while y'all get done being squicked out by this.)

So bro and I hung out with Mom once she was done with the physical terrorist, then older bro stopped in, and we had rather a jolly party up there on the fourth floor. Well, it was pretty jolly. Semi-jolly. It would have been a lot MORE jolly if I didn't keep thinking about that woman who was laying on the gurney out in the hallway with bags of all kinds of fluids (one of which was suspiciously blood-red) leaking into her and who was looking very much like someone who was immediately post-surgery and who was, did I mention, RIGHT IN THE HALLWAY??? This took a tiny bit of the jolly out of the gathering, but maybe that was only for me. Everyone else seemed pretty happy, and it WAS nice to be with my brothers all together with Mom.

Once dinner was served (to only my mother! hrmph) was served we decided to hightail it out of the hospital and find our own food, which took us back OUT to younger bro's neighborhood and the corner bar/restaurant, where we were joined by one of my brothers' good friends (a guy my older bro has known since HS and who was in the band so I knew him too) and a couple of younger bro's friends, and many large Sam Adams Oktoberfest beers were quaffed and stories told and several hours spent in true jollility. Also, there were nachos.

But the fun did not end there - for younger bro and I went back to his house and we broke open the bourbon and played around with downloading music. Until 2 in the morning. Which was accompanied by what was probably a little too much party, but hey, I only see my younger brother one or twice a year, so pour another one dude and let's rock ON!

Ouch. My head.

Yeeeeah.

No time to moop about though, for the next morning I was to be at a friend's house in Alexandria, so up I got, into the shower I stumbled, up my bag I packed, then for my keys I searched. And searched. And searched. And just as I was thinking on how I was going to rip apart air molecules in search of the missing keys (having looked everywhere else), I thought "hey, look behind the furniture where your bag was sitting, dude!" and there they were. Hooray!

I got to my friend's house only an hour late, and her oh-so-grownup 10-year-old twins served breakfast and coffee and a couple of wonderful hours were spent out on their patio sipping coffee and eating pastries and chatting about so many things. I've known this woman since I was 14 years old, and would STILL want to be friends with her if I'd never met her before. She and her entire family are charming and fun, and flexible in their scheduling so as to allow time for a goofy old friend to invade their space on a rather delayed manner.

You'd think that'd be enough excitement for one weekend, but you'd be WRONG, for I left Alexandria and motored back to the hospital for a quick visit, only going down route 95 accidentally for a FEW miles before realizing my mistake and turning back. Spent 45 minutes of so with Mom before her PT showed up for the afternoon torture session, and thus I made my way back down Souf, where the doggies were waiting for me to pick them up while the Things and their Dad are on vacation at the beach this week.

Except Route 85 was hating my guts and wanting to put me to sleep, what with all the straight roads and long stretches of nothing but trees on either side. Honestly, long miles of that highway are very much like a 1980's video game....with the same daggone scenery all around because the programmers ran out of imagination, or time, or coding skillz. I had to divert travel onto Route 1 much earlier than usual just to get something to LOOK at to keep me awake long enough to make it home. By taking the slower way home though, I went through many towns I'd only ever seen exit signs for, which was kind of nice. Yeah, it took me about a half an hour longer to get to the house than usual, but so what? I now know that Henderson actually IS a town, and not just a stop on Route 85. To my mind, that's plenty of payback for a few extra minutes of travel time.

It was coming onto dark by the time I got the dogs, who were very happy to see me, though perhaps that's only because I rescued them from the garage and they were needin' the bafroom in a major fashion. The schizo dog (Australian Shepard, anyone??) yelped and whined her way through the 15-minute ride to the Tiny House, and I thought I might have been permanently deafened by one particularly LOUD "yipe," while the hound just settled in to the ride, like a good ol' hound dog oughtta.

By 8 last night I was busy cookin' dinner, washin' dishes, facilitatin' the establishment of a relationship between feline and canine denizens of the household, and sippin' a cocktail.

By 10 I was dead asleep.

It was quite the weekend.

How was YOURS??

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Also: Holy cats. Give it a couple of minutes, when things really start to rock. Yowza.