1827 Home and Catching Up

Wednesday, May 28, 2008

I left home Saturday morning, and got home about 11 pm, last night. I should be tired, but I'm not.

I met the Man in NJ on Saturday, and we drove another 7 hours or so to a southern city, where he had a tournament on Sunday.

We had planned to go out after checking in on Saturday, but we found that there was a major festival going on, and our bay-side hotel was smack in the middle of it. Streets barricaded, bumper-to-bumper traffic, impossible parking, dense crowds on the sidewalks. Saturday night was apparently a big hip-hop concert, and after noting that half the males on the street were wearing plain white T-shirts with baggy black pants and half the females looked like hookers, he decided we weren't going out on those streets that evening. (Yeah, ok, that's the drug dealer uniform, but that doesn't mean EVERYBODY in black and white is a dealer.) And we couldn't go anywhere else, either, because it took like a half hour to go the last three blocks to the hotel, and we didn't want to go through that hassle twice more.

Damn if I can remember what we did do. Seriously. I do remember that it was a nice evening. Probably talked a lot. We talk a lot, and it's always enjoyable.

Sunday we went to the tournament, and then Sunday night the streets were still crowded, but it was a churchy crowd - something big going on in the church across the street - so it was ok. We had dinner at his favorite restaurant (I cut my steak with my fork and the asparagus was incredible), and then went to a huge arcade, where we raced our horses.

Yeah, raced horses. There's an arcade game called "Derby Owner's Club". You breed your own foal, feed it, train it, gain its confidence, keep it happy, and race it against computer generated horses and other players' horses on a wide screen. I've got a really good horse, a gray male sired by one of the Man's horses out of a computer dam. He's still young, but almost always comes in second (to the Man's horse, of course) and once we even beat him! By a nose, but hey! That race was long and so exciting that another couple who also had horses in the race were cheering on MY horse! He got a lot of praise and a big bunch of bananas for dinner after that race.

Monday we started home. The seven hour drive took 12 hours, because the major highways were parking lots. The Man kept getting frustrated, leaving the highway to try to find a less crowded parallel path. We wandered around a lot. Got back to northern NJ at nearly midnight. I wasn't as tired as he was, because I wasn't driving, and was able to wiggle around in my seat, but he was concerned about my driving the last 1.75 hours to my home, so we ended up staying in NJ.

Tuesday morning, he went to work and I went to visit Daughter, introduced Clyde to them, spent the day there, and got home at 11 pm.

Today I spent catching up on mail, and nursing a sunburn (two days in a convertible will do that to you), and walking a bit to make up for all the sitting over the weekend. My mailbox (the one at the end of the driveway) was packed so full the mail lady had tied the door closed, and both email in-boxes were choking.
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