Monday Monday 1.11.2009

Hi Everyone,

After spending about 6 weeks on the road (the time between Thanksgiving and now), I finally made it home to South Carolina for a couple of days. I picked Maggie up at the Charlotte Airport on the way home from Annapolis and the weekend officially started rolling. We were up until 1:30 AM unpacking the car, revisiting the Christmas gifts that had been sitting in the car for two weeks, and organizing our house and life – a project that would take all weekend to only partially complete.

Should have used some SPF-35
Maggie gave me an Aloe plant for Christmas and from everything that I’ve read online, the only way to kill this plant is to intentionally do so. Well my plant didn’t take too kindly to the constant movement around the country and the sudden, drastic, and continuous changes in temperature as I moved it from room to car to room to car to house etc. Hopefully the transplant performed on Saturday will help the plant recuperate and become healthy again.

20 Frames and We Still Look Bad
We have a bowling alley down the street from us, but they somehow found a justifiable reason for charging $4 for shoe rentals. This outrageous and unethical taxation of my bottom line prompted Maggie and I to request bowling shoes for Christmas, and my mother came through for us. I put on my best bowling shirt (or the one bowling shirt that I purchased four years ago and never found the proper occasion to wear), grabbed my shoes, and headed to the lanes on Friday night. Our new shoes did nothing for our game as both Maggie and I managed to bowl two absolutely miserable games. Now that I have these new shoes, perhaps I will find the time to practice my game a little. Scotty (our roommate) and Gerard joined us and bowled just as poorly, but at least they could blame the rented shoes or something. Actually Gerard appeared (next to us) to be quite good, but as he would say “that was just luck.”

I’ll take that Medium Rare
With some residual Home Depot and Lowe’s gift cards in hand, Maggie and I decided to leave the house on Saturday afternoon to do some shopping. I wanted to find a better way of organizing my expanding collection of tools as my shed sitting out back does nothing but leak water!! I managed to find a pretty slick big mobile tool box thingy that holds about half of everything I own, but the highlight of our little excursion to the domain of manliness included the purchasing of a new Gas Grill! Oh yes my friends, it was originally $130 marked down to $50 and purchased with gift cards . . . making it free! The new grill doesn’t have any amazing bells and whistles, but I imagine that it will perform any culinary duty that I request of it.

Aside from all of that, we had a relatively quiet weekend.

Best Wishes!!

Ryan