Monday, August 2

Ugh!

The last couple of days were almost perfectly sublime, until I was pulling into the garage tonight and noticed that the door hadn't opened all the way before stopping - and looked crooked. After further review and a half hour of pretending I knew how to fix it, I gave up and left the damn thing half open and quite messed up. I guess we'll get to use that home warranty after all, hooray for $45 copays. Since tomorrow = Tuesday = garbage day, it seemed like a good idea to park the trash & recycling bins in front of the partially open door, as if that would stop someone from stealing our his & hers lawn mower set.

About that sublime weekend now... MRJ & Thea showed up on Sunday afternoon bearing gifts of gold, frankincense, and used golf balls in egg cartons. I always thought that myrrh was pronounced "murth" anyways, so a bunch of Slazengers was a beautiful sight. We kicked off the festivities by turning a trip to the neighborhood grocery store into a super-fun adventure, with everyone searching high and low for a laundry list of ingredients -we never did find the tapenade though.

After returning home and limping our way through some margaritadaiquiris, we started the grill - and a bottle of Chardonnay. We formed strategic teams that leveraged the respective strengths of the group (men outside playing with fire, women inside roasting garlic and jibber jabbering), and the meal that came out the other end may have been the best one I have ever been part of preparing. The fresh guacamole and second bottle of wine weren't too bad either ;)

Hilarity ensued as we decided to play Cranium, where Susan and I completely pwnz0red our guests. We settled in for some Bourne Identity, courtesy of my manager's 180+ DVD collection. At some point during the evening, the carafe from our super fancy (Toastmaster) coffeemaker broke, curiously on the same day that we ran out of the infamous Olive Garden coffee? As a result of this strange sequence of events, we had to roll ourselves up to the local Target the next morning and drop another $7.88 on a replacement. Is anyone else concerned that you can buy an actual coffee maker for less than a pound of actual coffee beans?

Before hopping in the car to head for the hills, we explored downtown Stockton's crown jewel and gorged ourselves on Cold Stone Creamery. It was so wonderful to have house guests, and I hope this action-packed 24 hours inspires one and all to come and visit beautiful Stockton, CA at some point in the near future.

I suppose I should get horizontal, as this 3 day weekend is ovah...

Now Playing: Peter Malick Group w/Norah Jones - New York City

posted by Brad at 8/02/2004 11:49:00 PM | permalink | 0 comments

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