What I did this weekend

So I spent the weekend pretty much wifeless. Not by any plan or any blow-up, but she went to a party in Madison Friday night, had a lot of fun and stayed up until about 7am. She then decided to go up to her hometown and hang out with her folks and her sister (who coincedently lives across the street with the parentals.) They went to movies, went out to eat, did this, that and the other thing, and now plans to come home early this Monday AM.

So what did I do? Well, Friday night after Kel left, I listened to my iTunes and transcribed my diary. (I keep track of every CD I listen to and keep a daily tally, which I call my diary. I started on notebooks and did have them typed onto my computer, but it crashed and I lost 7 years worth of stuff. So slowly but surely I am catching up.) I was going to load the van with all the front porch stuff so we can clear that out and make it into something useful, but I lost time and motivation and decided it could wait until the morning.

Come Saturday morning it was rainy and miserable. Sadly for me, with my current work schedule Saturday is the only day I can do a dump run. So I steel myself and begin loading the front porch stuff into the van while it's coming down ***sheets*** of rain. The nice thing is that after two minutes out in stuff like that, you begin to not notice it -- you reach your saturation point, as it were, and can go on. So I fill up the van fairly quickly, only getting tied up trying to wedge in a cheap wooden cabinet. (Ingenious solution: attack that bad boy with a hammer at the pressure points. Made a lot more room, too!) I drive the van to the city dump, only a mile or so away. I pay my dues, drive to the designated area and start unloading. Now I should mention the back door of our van is wonky so all of the loading and unloading I have to do from the side doors rather than just popping open the back. So I try to back the van up at an angle to the dumpster below to make less trouble for me. (The dumpsters and drive-ups are situated where the tops of the dumpsters are level with the concrete you stand in, so you can throw stuff down and ahead and as long as the dumpsters aren't teeming full, you're OK.) I back up and after a while stop, because my senses tell me I'm dangerously close to the concrete devide. I get out and I'm a good 12 feet away, which causes the fellow using the dumpster beside me to giggle to himself. (When it comes to backing up and parking, I skew HEAVILY towards safe on the safe/sorry axis.) Since I already stopped the engine, I decide to work from there, and of corse the rain just then goes from a meager splinking to a virtual downpour. I empty the van out with a quickness, and hit my work (The Pharmacy America Trusts) as it's on the way and I still haven't had breakfast. My co-workers are amused at how wet and miserable I look and I yap with my buddy and co-worker Rob while I scarf down a Yoo-Hoo and a Honey Bun. I got some money back as I was just short of being able to afford another load, and then went back to the van once the rain let up again.

It takes me a few hours to work up the enthuisam for load #2 (we have stockpiled a LOT of junk on our front porch.) But it gets done, delivered and paid for, and on the way back, I hit the local record store (yes, in Wisconsin we have a chain of stand-alone record stores, and even as the rest of the record industry collapses, they seem to be doing OK.) I see if I can afford anything and find a wrestling DVD I've actually been looking for (New Year's Revolution '06, notable as the pay-per-view where John Cena successfully defended his belt against five other people in a cage-like structure called the Elimination Chamber. Right after that, Edge invoked a "any time, any place" instant title match clause he earned the year before, picking up his first world title in fairly easy fashion.) used for only $6. I head home, watch that while doing little odds and ends around the house. After that, I putter on the compy a bit more, play waaaaay too much Bejewled Blitz (the crack cocaine of Facebook game apps) and by seven, decide I should eat something. So I hit the Subway on the south-west side of town, pick up a few subs and some energy drinks at the connected gas-n-gulp and then decide to hit Blockbuster. Now I normally go to Family Video as they seem to be more reasonably priced and usually closer (and no, I do not do Netflix, but I may one day) but I was in the neighborhood. I found two PS2 games for $7 apiece and rented the Wire season one first two discs. Having suppressed my retail jones, I headed home and watched the first few episodes and ate. I had budgeted an 11pm bedtime, but by the time I hit the sack it was 1:45 am.

So I wake up around 9:30ish and commit myself to a few solid hours of diary typing, which works out well except for all the air guitaring I have to do while listening to the Queens of the Stone Age. Then downstairs for brunch and the rest of the Wire that I rented. I spend a little time downstairs with the laundry and then head back up to compute. I send off a few emails to friends that I need to catch up with, talk to my wife and figure out where she's at. Then I make what is, in hindsight, the worst mistake I made all weekend. I went to eat out at Wendy's.

I still had a little money left over and decided to get a small burger meal, and absolutely nothing tasted good. The drink tasted soapy, the fries were cold, and the burger was grisly and bland. But I have the logic malfunction that dictates that I don't want to throw away the food I had spent good money on, and so I finished every bite, threw it away and headed home. Ever since then -- that would be 8:30ish pm, I have had what feels like the Barnum and Bailey circus performing in my stomach, and NOT doing their best show ever. I puttered around the rest of the night, feeling progressively cruddier. I do manage to make a run to the recycling area to dispose of a few trash bags of plastic stuff. I manage to get about 35 minutes of sleep in, which wouldn't bother me if I didn't have to work a 7 hour day at 7:30am (and do the truck order, which involves marching up and down the store, ensuring all the empty spaces get ordered.) Kel and I also have to meet up with our foster care liason and finish up our licensing late in the afternoon. I am awaiting that with the excitement I normally reserve for extensive dental work (NOT because I don't want to foster, but I know by then I will be flatlining and my body will basically go on strike.) But if nothing else, I wrote this blog....

Seriously, though, Wendy's? Why oh WHAT was I thinking? Wendy's is way down my fast-food depth chart, but I guess I felt I did Subway the day before, it seems like I do Taco Bell and McDonald's more out of habit and proximity, and I hadn't been there in a while. It will be several whiles before I go willingly again. It's one of those stomach sitautions where all that needs to be done is to throw up and the recovery will begin. But that sickness is doing the backstroke around your stomach lining, and refusing to get out of the proverbial pool. I normally do not advocate random violence against fast-food mascots, but I seriously want to fling that fleckled hussy Wendy around the living room by her pigtails. (And before you get a nasty misogynist vibe from me, had Ronald McDonald or the Burger King had wrecked my tum so badly, I'd be just as dementedly malicious towards them. I'm an equal opprotunity mascot mauler in my imagination.) Hopefully I can talk my store manager into giving me a 1/2 day once I do my order. Otherwise, I am going to be one grumpy zombie the rest of the day.