Ahhh, a nice three day weekend.  This week is short too, which I’m looking forward to.  Last week I decided to take Friday off because we were going to a concert Thursday night, and I thought I might require additional recovery time.  We scored some tickets to the Crossroads to see Seven Mary Three (with Marcy Playground,) both of whom I rather enjoy.  And for free I downright like them, plus it was an absolutely perfect evening for an outdoor concert.  So, we headed down there with our friends Brooke, Fritz & Holly, and proceeded to generally enjoy the show.  Fritz had VIP passes for us all, which just meant we got to stand right down front.  I kid you not, if I had any hair, it would have been blowing in the breeze the speakers were generating.  It was LOUD.  There is a relatively good chance I sustained some level of hearing impairment.  Then again, I am about 1/2 deef anyway so no big loss.  We actually stayed until the very end of the show.  As if that wasn’t late enough for us, we rounded the evening out with a little Rock Band back at the house.  Hmmm, lay off the energy drinks Phil, no good can come of them.  ** Late addition:  I forgot to mention the delicious dinner we had.  The pizza from Grinders was very good, but Donette hit the home run with the “Frito Pie.”  They take a bag of Chili Cheese Fritos, and just open the bag and dump in beef, cheese, sour cream, etc.  In addition to being a nutritionally balanced snack, it got very high presentation marks.

Friday…  Well, we didn’t do too much.  One of our old neighbors, Molly, (Brooke’s roommate) came into town so we joined her down at Jalapenos for lunch.  After that we went to the pool with them for a bit, and then we went back home and hit the couch.  We were supposed to go to a party with them, but we had to own up that we just weren’t quite up to two nights out in a row.  Old age gets the better of us once again.

Saturday we got up rested and in much better shape than the day before.  After walking the dog, we headed down to the pool with Susan for some lounging.  We actually stayed there for several hours, much longer than I can usually tolerate it.  This came at the expense of a rather nasty sunburn though…  Drat.  After we had duly lounged, we headed to the Brooksider to enjoy the weather a bit more on the back deck.  Good times.  For evening entertainment, we went to my big twenty-fifth high school reunion.  Wow…  Twenty five years, I am indeed old.  It was down at the Cashew, well within our geographic comfort zone, so I figured what the heck.  Well…  As probably anybody but myself would have likely predicted, it may have been within my geographic comfort zone but perhaps not so much in my social comfort zone.  Maybe “excruciating” is an overstatement, but there are probably ways I would have rather spent the evening.  Usually I can count on Donette to bail me out in such dicey scenarios, but I think she took a “Hey, this was your bright idea” tact this time.  While I certainly did get to see some old friends, I think I spent the majority of the time sitting at a table trying to recall exactly what I was thinking when I RSVP’d.  Oh, and I came up with my first million-dollar idea:  The reunion tee-shirt.  Everybody gets a tee-shirt with their essentials listed on the front and back:  “Hi, my name is ___, I’m here with my ___ whose name is ___.  We have ___ children, live in ___ & work at ___.”  You get the idea.  Hand out a sharpie to fill in the blanks and boom, you’ve just shaved ten minutes off the front of every single conversation.  Let’s say you talk to ten people that night, you’ve just saved yourself over an hour and a half of excess chit-chat.

Sunday was a pretty low-key day too.  My sunburn had gotten progressively worse, to the point it was really rather uncomfortable.  I did manage to take Gabe on another long walk, which he sort of enjoys.  I say “sort of” because the boy has the lowest heat tolerance of any animal I’ve ever seen.  For being a generally athletic breed, he does not last long at all in any kind of heat.  Around the two-mile mark, he started dragging me over to every bit of shade in sight and would just plop down.  I thought I was going to have to call the sag wagon for a while, but he finally toughed it out.  For dinner, we had John & Susan over for some blue cheese burgers.  We’ve been making those quite a bit lately;  take a 1/2 lb. burger, mix it up with a bunch of fresh herbs and seasoning, stuff it with blue cheese, and grill it up.  Pretty solid.  We added bacon this time too, which topped it off quite nicely.  After dinner we played a round of Yahtzee, which I managed to win despite not having any idea what I was doing.

Funny comment Donette made in passing this morning while I was slathering on another gallon of aloe:  “Hey, didn’t that antibiotic you’re taking say something about avoiding direct sunlight because it makes you sensitive to sunburn?”  Ya’ know, now that you mention it… DOH!!!!