Chris and boys' weekend out.
Friday as a whole wound up being something of a comedy of errors - the first half of the day was supposed to be spent at the dentist's office having stage two of my emergency root canal performed (building up the plastic post, taking the cast for the permanant crown, and placing the temporary), but per usual things started going south. While out running an emergency errand on Friday morning I got a call from my boss - not only had I been re-assigned to another project at the last minute but there was apparantly a pressing need to show up at the site immediately.
Can we say 'uh-oh', kids? Sure. I knew you could.
Thankfully, the second part of the procedure went as smoothly as one could expect: My new crown should be finished sometime next week, and I have an appointment to have it installed next Friday. Unfortunately, the two teeth on the lower right-hand side of my mouth will be worked on as soon as the new crown's in place. I'm not looking forward to this, as one might expect. My bank account is waving a white flag and begging to negotiate with Happenstance, which has thus far only handed one buttock of my bank account's ass over; the rest of its ass is still in cold storage. I don't know if a sling or roll of duct tape are part of the negotiations.
Rather than spending the day killing untold trees by filling out paperwork for the last project and my new assignment, I found myself on the beltway headed for southern Virginia and my next assignment. Still patially numb, with a headache, and fighting the brain-fogging effects of low blood sugar because I hadn't really had any breakfast before leaving the apartment this morning. I consider it an act of divinity (or more likely, divinity's pity) that I actually found my destination with only two false starts. No one has bothered to tell the team in charge of the GIS database at Google Maps that one of the roads has been bisected into a dead-end alleyway and a road of unknown usability two miles farther south.
The hell of it was this: Unbeknownst to me, my boss had called on ahead, informed the team that I wasn't running at optimal capacity, and all involved agreed that I should probably spend the rest of the day recuperating. I discovered this after an hour of travel to the site, bumbling around to find where I had to be, and figuring out who my point of contact was.
I headed home and spent the next five hours doing paperwork and the requisite research for same. Yay. On Friday evening, our friend Chris was due down from New Jersey to spend the weekend. We didn't know exactly when he was going to arrive, however, so Lyssa and I had a bit of time to figure out what was going on. Early in the evening we went on a supply run to Trader Joe's to pick up stuff for dinner and get us through the weekend, and then retired home to prepare dinner ahead of time, clean up a bit, and generally kill time. Hours passed, dinner simmered on the stove, but still no Chris. Later that evening, something in dinner went west - a wrong proportion of salt in the sauce for the raviloi - and the decision was made to go out after Chris' arrival and find a restaurant that would be open whenever that happened to be. This happened to be our local Silver Diner around 2300 EST5EDT. Unfortunately, not much else transpired that evening because I've been trying to cut back my caffeine intake to medically safe levels, and I crashed around 0100 EST5EDT.
By the bye, the hot chicken tender sandwich at the Silver Diner isn't very good. I don't advise getting it.
On Saturday afternoon, Chris and I went wandering around in northern Virginia on a supply run for the boys' night in later that day, partially to kill time until people started arriving, and partially because I like showing people around NOVA who aren't from there. We picked up our libations of choice at the ABC store on the corner and then hit the Unique Thrift Store on route 650 to see what neat stuff had been gotten rid of in the past few weeks. While we didn't find much in the way of equipment or toys, we did raid the bookshelves, and walked away with a couple of tomes each that we'll eventually get around to reading. We rounded things off by dropping off what we needed to, getting the rest of our gear, and hitting up Whole Paycheque to get side dishes for dinner that night. Then it was off to Hasufin's, whereupon I surrendered my keys and walked right into Mika laying out the ground rules.
Easy to follow rules, however: "No drunken jiggery-pokery that can be traced back to the house"; "You summon it, you banish it"; "No event horizons in the living room"; "No seige engines in the back yard." Rules that we can all live by, so long as we're not bored.
At some point that afternoon (I don't know exactly when because I was shooting the bull with Jarin, Jason, Kash (who was in town this weekend), Chris, and Mika), Hausfin fired up the grill out back (first time of the season, in fact) and cooked up a batch of chicken thighs and hot dogs to go along with the home-made cocoa merangue cookies. Jarin started recording quotes of the weekend in his personal Mediawiki install (I didn't write anything down because I was quite looking forward to an unplugged weekend, and besides that the last thing I need is to be linked to an international incident through my .plan file). I discovered on Saturday night that a sonic screwdriver is very tasty, and in fact doesn't taste like it could possibly be bad for you. They do, however, cushion one's consciousness sufficiently to be able to handle truly bad movies without gouging one's eyes out.
I think that Mika put me to bed around 0200 EST5EDT on Sunday morning. I woke up with a purring cat, a wool blanket, and the nagging sense that I was the first to go offline last night. Though it was touch and go for a while, thankfully I hadn't gotten a hangover from the night before. Hasufin was nice enough to make breakfast for Chris, Mika, himself, and myself and we sat around the dining room table until 1200 local time or therabouts chatting and getting ourselves together. Chris and I headed back home; Lyssa hadn't returned yet (she'd opted to spend the night with Laurelinde and her family). After catching a shower we headed out into the maelstrom, for the clouds had exploded sometime on Sunday afternoon, to pick up the few things needed to make dinner in the slow cooker. It took a couple of trips to find everything because there's something of a re-stocking shakeup at Trader Joe's and we couldn't find everything that we needed and had to hunt farther afield.
Dinner was ready around 1900 EST5EDT last night, and after Laurelinde had brought Lyssa home we sat down to a salad and gnocchi with sweet Italian sausage that had simmered in sauce for appoximately four hours. Cleanup was relatively simple, though it was a bit of a trick to find space in the fridge for leftovers. When Chris finally headed out on Sunday night, both Lyssa and I were about ready to fall over, and spent a quiet evening reading and recuperating. Sundays, being what they are, inevitably lead to Mondays, and all that entails.