Wednesday, March 12, 2008

How to Have a Weekend

I tried this new thing all the cool kids are doing this past weekend: I had some fun.

Sure I had to stay up till 4:30am Saturday morning to finish enough homework to justify it, but it was worth it. I think it's the first weekend I've had all term that I wasn't super stressed out about finishing something.

It wasn't easy to get out of work mode, but I managed.

Saturday:

Slept until noonish and made Challah French toast for breakfast. Later we met up with Jess's friends T & L to help them with their bike shopping. We met at River City to start. It was a MADHOUSE. I haven't seen it like that since last summer. Turns out they're having a spring sale and it was a Saturday with pretty nice weather. Do the math.

While T & L tried out a few Specialized Globes, I took another spin on the Cannondale Rush mountain bike. I tried this bike out a few weeks ago when I test rode a bunch of stuff. I thought I had my heart set on a Specialized, but those all felt weird and this bike fit the best. Not to mention a large percentage of RC employees own and race this bike. That's a pretty big endorsement, considering that most of them get new bikes every year. Our sales guy was going on his third year with the Rush. The big question is how I'm going to fit another bike into our garage, especially in it's current state of disarray...

From there we went to Urban Grind for caffenation before moving on to REI, where we had one of the most painful shopping experiences I've ever had. I had someone paged to help us (REI is also having a sale, go figure) and he promptly helped someone else ahead of us. Another 10 minutes of waiting got us another employee, who didn't listen, was sort of rude and not very helpful. Then he deserted us and in his stead, brought over a woman who was just dumb. I had to ask the same question about six times and I did more to help them try out the bikes than she did.

Before we left, I used my dividend refund and a coupon to get the last winter item on my list (smartwool base layer shirt) and some new hiking pants.

We decompressed from insane shopping world with a short hike on the Macleay trail in Forest park. I really should go up there more often. Maybe I'll do that in my spare time between 2-4am.

Sunday:

We stayed up late (again) and slept late (again). A game of phone tag with Ru ended in the mid afternoon with confirmed plans for dinner at Laughing Planet later. Then she made fun of us for still being inside on such a gorgeous day.

So I prodded us into going for a walk. I even wore 'summer' clothes, in the form of capris pants and sandals. It was plenty warm when we left, and we wandered south and east towards our friend Rox's house. She and her gf J were in Sunday chill mode and we ended up visiting with them for several hours. R loaned us her car to go to dinner so we could stay longer and come back for J's fire spinning later that night in the backyard. Jess and I both took pictures but as usual, she got the money shot:

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That one is from her new camera on Fireworks mode. My camera doesn't have that feature, but nightscene worked some pretty cool magic as well:

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I have some video as well, which I'm sure I'll upload to Youtube--in my spare time between (say it with me now) 2 and 4am.

It was nice having some guilt-free time off and now it's back to the books for one last push.

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