On Friday, I skipped out of work an hour early, just because. I met up with Monty  and her friend Christine at the Value Village in Redmond, where we spent some time debating between bathrobes, and which ones would be most appropriate to wear bowling that evening. I left with a hideous houndstooth-ish, tweed-y bathrobe, and plaid pants, and Monty left with a bathrobe that looked like it had been stitched together from baby seals.

After Value Village, we went to Redmond Town Center, because we’d all gotten postcards in the mail for a week of free tanning, and figured, ‘what the hell? Let’s give it a shot’. I couldn’t get over the feeling that I was in some sort of light-up coffin. 10 minutes of OMGI’MGOINGTODIE later, and I left with rosy-pink cheeks and no color anywhere else on my body. My skin was still translucent and scary to small children. We spent some time making fun of the people at the mall, and it was discovered that every time Monty dropped an F-bomb, there was ALWAYS a child in the vicinity.

It was starting to get late, so we headed back to Monty’s place, showered, put on our Lebowski clothes, and started to bake the cake. I bought a soccer-ball pan, figuring I could make it look like a bowling ball with very little effort. It took much longer to bake than the directions indicated, as when the timer went off, the cake was still liquid in the middle. 10 more minutes, and 10 more minutes, and 5 more minutes, and 2 more minutes and it was finally completely baked. Unfortunately, it was now 10:30, and we were supposed to be at the bowling alley at 10:45. The cake was flipped out of the pan onto a plate, and we started slapping on frosting. The cake was still so hot that the frosting started melting on contact. By the time we arrived at the bowling alley, all the frosting had slid from the top and puddled around the sides. mmmmm, appetizing!

I bowled better than I ever have that evening, actually breaking 100 on the first game. Laugh if you must, but it was quite a feat for me. I do not know if it was the shoes or the hot pink bowling ball that gave me such luck, but I may find out as the shoes *cough* came home with me. I didn’t get too many pictures of the evening, as I was sauced, and all the pictures I took made it quite evident that I was sauced. Considering very few people RSVPd, I was thrilled that so many people showed up. It was quite a party! Next year–Vegas!

I slept over at Monty’s house, crashed in their spare bedroom, and remarkably woke up the next morning with no hangover. We tooled around for a while, and then I put on my best trucker outfit for mxpwr‘s trucker party that evening. For those of you who don’t know him, he cut the workaday shackles of his IBM job and is becoming a trucker. For the first hour of his orientation class, the instructor emphasized the importance of not showing up to work drunk or high. Somehow, I have a feeling that Chad is going to rise through the ranks very quickly. My best trucker outfit consisted of a Moonlight Bunny Ranch t-shirt (that looked like a harley logo, so it was TWO classy shirts for the price of one!) a baseball cap, and stained jeans. I would’ve gotten a big temporary tattoo of a cobra on my arm, but I forgot about it until it was too late.

Around 3 o’clock, Monty and I decided to give tanning a second shot, where we promptly spent too long in the light-up coffins and burned ourselves beyond all comprehension. The burn doesn’t kick in right away, oh no. It waits until you’ve already gone on to your second engagement of the evening before you start to get the ‘burned skin’ chills. I don’t know why I get so tired or so cold when my skin is burned, but I fell asleep watching Convoy, which is potentially the most pointless movie of all time. It’s hilarious when you’re mocking it as a group effort, but probably just sad if you’re watching it by yourself. Toward the end I kept nodding off, and every time I woke up, the “We got a great big convoy, do do do do do DOOOOOOO” song was playing. CONVOOOOOOOOOOY!

Sunday morning I met up with Carrie outside Pegasus, and we drove together into Seattle to have breakfast at Pike Place Market, and spend some time making fun of hippies. We decided to have breakfast at Cutters, and when we walked in and sat at the empty bar, the bartender’s face lit up. “Oh ladies, will you be having breakfast this morning, or a liquid breakfast?” We felt no need to limit our options like that. We started off with two rounds of greyhounds, finished off breakfast with an espresso martini, and the bartender was not yet eager to let us go. “Oh dear, those espresso martinis seem to be broken! The only remedy is for you to let me make you my excellent chocolate martini!”

By that point, there was a crazy woman down at the other end of the bar, having conversations with herself. I pondered aloud about going down there and asking her to ‘cut out the crazy, because you’re starting to scare me’, but that I’d need rocket skates to escape as I was unsure as to whether or not her kind of crazy was dangerous. She eventually wandered down by us and asked to order a new iced tea as she ‘lost hers’. She then started talking down the bar at no one, saying that she didn’t trust them to transmute her back across her astral plane to a new geometry. I was getting ready to ask her to cut out the crazy, had even gotten so far as “Excuse me?” when the bartender said “Don’t do it, rocket skates!” and ran away towards the kitchen. “Eh, are you talking to me?” “No, nothing. Nevermind.” “You know, you look like my friend S-T-A-C-Y.” “…however, my name is not S-T-A-C-Y.” “Yes, yes, but you look like her. C-O-O.”

Did she just spell ‘coo’ at me? Coo as in the lazy speaker’s version of ‘cool’ or cooing like a pigeon? Is that sort of crazy dangerous? Is it contagious? Was it terrible, terrible foreshadowing of the horror which was to come?

We didn’t want to find out. The bill was paid, and we stumbled out into the bright afternoon sunshine, and started wandering the market. We watched buskers, and tried beer jelly, and checked out the brightly colored wares on display everywhere. Carrie stopped to check out some silver bracelets with ‘inspirational’ quotes hammered into them, and while the hippies tried to convince her that they were worth the money, I felt a rather unusual sensation. Sort of like someone had tossed something at my hair. With trepidation building, I tried to get Carrie’s attention. “Carrie? …Carrie? Did a bird just poop in my hair?”

I turned so she could see, and Carrie burst out laughing. I took this as not a good sign. Yes, indeed, a bird had used me as a toilet. I may need to declare a jihad against birds. Carrie was absolutely howling with laughter as she tried to help me clean it out of my hair, and the hippies surrounding us tried to convince us that “It’s ok, it’s like…good for your hair. Cause it’s like…full of proteins and stuff. Like egg whites!”

Whatever, hippy. I don’t see YOU covered in bird poop. Now, of course, I can admit that it was (and is) very funny, but at the time I was only MORE horrified when Carrie managed to get out (between gasps of laughter, that is) “I don’t think I’ve ever seen GREEN poop before.” “OH MY GOD, IT’S GREEN!?!”

We hightailed it back to the Cutter’s bathroom, where I frantically scrubbed at my head, still laughing hysterically. As we left Cutters, still drunk (at least I was) and lightheaded from laughing so hard, I managed to catch my shoe on a crack in the sidewalk, do an awkward, flailing drunken stumble, and while catching my balance, managed to twist my ankle. Because I’m awesome. While limping down the sidewalk, I proclaimed, “My shoe just tried to kill me, OMG, it’s like…a…SHOE MUTINY.”

I ended up passing out in front of the TV at 7pm, liver pickled, skin burned, muscles aching…but with clean hair. All in all an entertaining weekend!

I was walking with my coworker to get the mail today as the SUN WAS SHINING FOR THE FIRST TIME IN 28 DAYS, and, as usual, it was all junk mail. I jokingly told her I kept hoping Publisher’s Clearing House would send us those packets full of junk to fill out and mail back.

I always loved filling those out as a kid. My parents discouraged me, but I was undaunted, even when it became more complicated than just pasting a stamp on something and sending it back. More complicated like, detach stamp A, glue it into box A, detach stamp B, fold it into an origami bird while standing on your head and eating a bug…it didn’t matter. I was determined. And every year I was CONVINCED that after the Superbowl, someone would be knocking on our door to present us with a million dollars, if only because NO ONE ELSE in the United States would go to the trouble of recording yourself gargling “I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy” with Pepto Bismol on VHS, taking out the film and pasting it frame by frame on the back of some tanned elk leather and sending it in. I even made sure my family looked nice for when the camera crews came. Year after year, I reminded my family that if we won, I should get a horse, because if we won, it was ALL BECAUSE OF ME. And year after year it was a crushing disappointment when some 87 year old won instead of us.

But my little kid stupidity pales in comparison to what I’m about to tell you next: when I told my coworker about my not-so-secret Publisher’s Clearing House hopes, she responded with, “Have I got a story for YOU.”

She goes on to say that a few years ago, her sister called her, screaming, crying, absolutely hysterical. She got her calmed down enough to get out what was going on. The sister replied, “I WON! I WON PUBLISHER’S CLEARING HOUSE! I CAN’T BELIEVE I WON!!!!” Coworker: “You won? Wow! So they knocked on your door and gave you the prize?” Sister: “No. They just sent me the check in the mail!” Coworker: “…You didn’t win.” Sister: “Yes I did! I’ve got the check right here!” Coworker: “In that case, I won, too. Everybody gets those.” Sister: “Wow, they give everyone a million dollars?” Coworker: “…I’m hanging up now.”

And then we laughed until tears streamed down our faces.