so my cat should be drawn and quartered. here's why.
friday we got the car packed and drove up to free beer weekend, mikey's offering of free beer, turkey, and a place to pop your tent. it's about a 2.5 hour drive, give or take with road construction. had lots of fun friday, ate the owens' wedding reception leftovers, which were quite tasty, and sat around the fire until quite late drinking the proffered free beer. the beer in question was mikey's home brew, and while lacking in carbonation, was quite tasty all the same.
there was talk of bears, wolves, and deer--none of which but the bear were scary sounding, as it sounds as though they're just not too afraid of humans. eep. so friday we go to bed (in the tent! yay! i love my tent!) nice and toasty warm under the new sleeping bags, and comfy on the air mattress. i can't sleep because i keep having to pee because of the beer. yay beer. and the later it gets, the more paranoid and overtired i get about the freaking bear.
i think i got up about six or seven times to pee. dan should be sainted because i kept waking him up to make sure there was no bear. and all through the night, no bear. i HATE outhouses. outhouses in the dark: fifty times worse. you laugh. i weep. (;
so we all are up and off the land by 830 or so to grab breakfast at the buckthorn in gordon proper (which is about 3 miles east of the cabin, has the greasiest breakfast ever, but is cheap and very appetizing...go figure). after breakfast everyone suits up (which takes about an hour) and by 11 we're all running through 5 acres of land with paintball guns.
that was quite theraputic. and warm. the players in this group keep their guns turned up so that it will leave a welt if you get hit. for the most part, that means lots of padding. cathy even wore a type of body armor vest. i just didn't care. i figured, if you're getting shot you should have it hurt. so i wore jeans and a t-shirt, and over that a thick fleece jacket, which eventually got traded out for a camo jacket. despite the fact that at the moment i can't afford a gun for myself, or camo wear, and borrowed a mask as well (thank heavens, because i got pegged twice in the mask!), and add to that that i didn't hit ANYONE but a plastic bottle, and the fact that my borrowed gun kept bursting paintballs when they were chambered and had to be cleaned out not once, not twice, but three times...i had a literal and figurative blast. can't wait to try my luck again. i'm hoping that by next year i will maybe be able to afford my own gear, instead of borrowing. but you never know. those guys all have way too much gear for one person to use anyway. so we'll see.
like i said, i only got hit twice, in the facemask. then i got hit once in the left boob, and once on the hand; neither left a mark. dan's got a couple welts on his arm, but nothing horrible, and nothing life-threatening. none of the ones that hit me broke open except for the ones on my mask. paintballs are water soluble, and apparently just break down when it rains, so the fact that the forest was decorated with sprays of orange, green, smurfy blue--not a problem. especially with the amount of rain we've been getting lately.
anyway. why is my cat going to die. let's get back to this.
so we showered, not at chrissy and mike's cabin, that's an outdoor and mikey didn't want to have to get it going and cleaned out, but at some free beer weekend folks' place down the road. quite possibly the smallest shower i have ever been in. but a shower all the same. it felt good to get rid of the deet and sweat, and check for ticks. i think i found a total of three wandering around, and then when we got back from showering, a teeny tiny one on my right hand that was determined to be one of the "bad" ticks--the lyme disease carrying fellas. once they start feeding you have to get them to back out--usually the only thing that works is a match. you light the match and blow it out, hold it to their hiney and they freak out and move back. of course, no one had a match (yes, camping without matches--everyone has lighters of some type; mikey was using a propane torch.) so darin picks up the torch and says something about me doing it. i was like, you have GOT to be kidding. so we find a little stick and he holds the torch and i try to get this pin-sized bug to back out. of course the stick, just smoldering and not even burning, just killed it--it was too tiny, and the stick was too big.
at the same time, darin's focused on the tick, and all of a sudden i realize that my other hand it hurting--because the propane torch is burning it. luckily we got it moved in time, and nothing serious happened. i have a small divot on my right hand, where the end of the stick was pushed on the teeny tick and burned not only the tick but also my hand. yay hand.
free beer weekend always has a fried turkey, too--which are amazing, if you ever have the chance to taste one. the oil locks in the turkey, so it's almost like it's steamed on the inside. so tender...and probably horrible for me. but at that point i'd had beer, and too many cookies to count, etc. so free beer weekend was definitely not fat free. but what can you do, other than starve? *sigh*
thunderstorms were supposed to move in last night up by gordon, and no one who was tent camping want to be there for them. so corpse, darin and cathy, and dan and i packed up the tents. eero was sleeping in his jeep and also decided to head home. by about 415 we were on the road, and made it home by 7. got almost everything put away right off the bat--food and supplies, mainly. still have to unpack the duffels but that's not as pressing as getting the cheese cooled. (;
dan slept for a while in the car, driving home. i ended up napping around 8 or so. then at 915 darin, cathy and corpse showed up and we went to the 950 showing of the latest installment in star wars...star wars: revenge of the sith.
it's first of all a foregone conclusion that anakin ends up being darth vader, and that the jedi go into exile. you already know that anakin's wife, padme, is going to have two kids, luke and leia. you're supposed to want to see the film to see the downfall. of the three prequel films, this was the best. but that's not saying much because the first two were schlock in my opinion, and the third was just a bit darker but still schlock. hayden christenson and natalie portman had better chemistry when they were offscreen from each other thinking about each other than they did when they were both in the same room. gag me with a spoon. the emperor, darth sidious, had horrible makeup. they spent a fortune on effects, and we end up with the emperor looking like a cross between whorf from star trek and bram stoker's dracula, as imagined by francis ford coppola. either was better defined and more believable than the dude on screen portraying the baddest of the baddies.
the other bothersome bit was anakin's downfall. it just didn't fit. the whine factor was so far off the screen that i could feel my teeth shaking. he's not an intelligent bad guy, and you can definitely see where luke gets his genetic innate whine. but it doesn't make for good movie making. you don't care enough about the good guy before he turns bad--you just want to laugh and tell him to suck it up. the final light sabre duel between obi-wan and darth vader goes on far too long, and is so fantastic that i dozed off.
could have been the drive or the lack of sleep the previous night. not sure. could have been the movie, too. i'm going to blame it on georgie lucas' horribly written dialogue and action scenes that were just plain old ridiculous. have ONE battle, in ONE place, and call it a day.
oh! oh! oh! and darth vader's helmet. i just about burst out laughing when the put the whole thing on--it was a nice sequence and all, but when the helmet actually got put on, there was a small thump, as if air was compressed out of the area between helmet and skull. it sounded for all the world like tupperware, and all i could think was, did they burp the air out of his helmet. and secondly, was that whole suit manufactured by rubbermaid? cause it would explain a lot...
so after the movie we went to perkins to discuss. home by 2 and in bed shortly thereafter, sleeping happily under covers and in the same building as FLUSH TOILET. it's the little things, really...
at some point in the night the door closes. i think i closed it because shiva was being such a pest. this is around 7, i think. dan hears her scratching and whining and lets her back in. she doesn't bother him; only me. i keep pushing her away, but it was a losing battle. the door had shut again, this time because we had the window open and i'm sure the pressure just pulled it shut. at any rate, she was trapped in the room with us, and hungry to boot--so i woke up by degrees for two hours--too tired to get up and just shut her out of the room, or give her the half a tin of wet food she wanted. (i'm not starving my cat, trust me. she's just a bitch about getting the wet food in addition to the dry food in the a.m.)
thus i am awake. unhappily watching my cat, now stuffed on ill-gotten iams turkey and giblets, watch the birds outside on the patio with unconcealed glee.
i should go shower. dad's having surgery tomorrow and i've got the day off, so i might drive up and see if mom wants company tomorrow, or help getting him home. but i'm not driving up until much later, because i'm sure that after i shower and eat lunch, i'm going to want a nap.
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