What Happened to the Last Week?
(The Longest Post Ever)

I'll tell you:

All those who read this were probably relieved to see that there was no pub quiz update on Wednesday. I didn't not post one to save you the boredom, it turns out that I went through the whole of Wednesday thinking it was Thursday. Since none of the other pub quizzers heard from me, they assumed I didn't want to go and didn't go either. So when Thursday actually arrived it was triply disappointing to discover that I had missed pub quiz, that it wasn't Friday yet, and that I had to do Thursday all over again.

Thursday (which was distinctly not Friday) and Saint Patrick's Day mostly involved an enormous headache and the discovery that Louis Rich (which is now Oscar Meyer) turkey-dogs wait until 2am, and then mount an all out war on my digestive system. Though to be fair, it wasn't entirely Thursday's fault. I accumulated evidence over the rest of the week's turkey-dog and stomach cramp jag.

Friday was spent driving to Lake Tahoe, or to be more specific, Truckee. Since we left San Francisco at 8:30pm, there isn't much to in the way of Friday news. Mostly it involved packing, driving, arriving, and playing the guitar. My one moment of note was somebody requesting that I play Contemplating Banana Bread. It is always fun when somebody requests an original song.

Saturday began by taking the world's coldest shower. I usually take slow showers, so I was trying to take this shower super, extra quick since 6 of the 9 other people in the house hadn't showered yet. (And I wasn't sure how many planned to.) So I turned on the water all the way to hot, waited a minute, and climbed in. It remained cold. I flipped the dial all the way to the right thinking that maybe this was some crazy backwards knob. The water switched to ice. So I went back to the left and took the most comprehensive shower possible keeping in mind that every time a droplet of water touched my skin it would make me twitch and gasp for breath.

The rest of my Saturday was divided fairly evenly between skiing (9-12) and hiding in the lodge from the weather (12-4.) I hadn't skied in something like 10 or 12 years, and I was surprised to find that I didn't immediately slide down the mountain on my face. In fact I remembered how to turn, wedge (pizza), and go straight (French fries) almost immediately. However, after lunch the weather grew windy, snowy, and icy. Having paid almost $100 for the equipment and lift ticket, I was bound and determined to ski some more. But the ice on the snow made me slide down the mountain on my face twice, and it was waaaay too stressful trying to avoid all my fellow bunny-slopers who had given up and were sitting in the middle of the run waiting for the weather to clear.

Sunday involved cleaning up the rental house, sledding, and driving home which I shall talk about in three corresponding sections.

Cleaning: We cleaned the house and made a bag for random things which no one had claimed including: a set of keys, a towel, 3 toothbrushes, quite a lot of change, a swim suit, and a pair of very small socks.

Sledding: Being all skied out, a friend and I went out in search of a sledding hill. We found such a hill behind the Tahoe City Superior Court building in amongst the trees overlooking a stream. Since the snow was fresh and undisturbed, I went down the hill first on a river tube, trying to blaze a high-speed sled trail of excellence. Unfortunately, river tubes have quite a lot of traction on the bottom, so what I actually did was build up a big pile of snow in front of me as I slowly scooted down the hill, butt dragging through the center of the inner tube. The plastic snow saucers were much faster, though the numerous trees and trail butt-lumps made the trail both overly exciting and jostling. When sledding got to be too bruising, we switched to playing stack the snowballs and then I played shake all the show off a tree. All in all it was an excellent time.

Driving home: We left Tahoe City at 5:30pm and arrived in San Francisco at 12:30pm. That's 3.5 hours to get to Truckee (15 miles), and 4.5 hours to get to San Francisco (187 miles.) Oddly enough, a cooler of beer saved us an hour or two between Tahoe City and Truckee. Our friends behind us decided they wanted the cooler of beer in my trunk. They had jumped out of their car to come look for us in the (mostly) stop (and hardly ever) go traffic, but hadn't realized we were in front of them. So my roommate jumped out and brought the cooler back. On his way, he saw what looked like their silver car and waved. The people in the car waved back, rolled down their windows, and said hello. It turned out to be some friends of my roommate from work. They happened to know the cause of the traffic jam, and a short cut to avoid it that was coming up in less than 50 feet. It was a very King's Quest way to save 2 hours driving home.

Monday was mostly spent being tired because of Sunday.

Tuesday, today, was only eventful because I really had to go to the bathroom. I was kind of dehydrated from the amount of alcohol available over the weekend. (Not what you think: I don't drink, and because there wasn't anything but alcohol to drink, I only had a little tiny bit of tap water and a 16oz bottle of squirt.) So today I bought two big bottles of water and tried to consume them throughout the day. My last pickup was in Napa, and I had to go a little bit when I got there. But I didn't, and drank more water as I set off on the hour or so drive back home. As I approached the bridge my bladder was at about maximum capacity, at which point traffic slowed to a crawl. Drumming on the steering wheel, pushing my legs together, and loosing my seat belt weren't reducing my panic, so I started to look for other alternatives. The only one available: my empty water bottle. I didn't want to use it, I didn't want people in SUVs to be able to look in my window on the Bay Bridge and be able to see me relieving myself into a Safeway Select Refreshe bottle, but it came down to that or wet myself. My choice became clear.

Unfortunately one can only tip a water bottle at a very shallow angle when driving, so I had to stop before I was done for fear of over filling and having to deal with slosh. (A fear made all the more real by the stop and go traffic.) Luckily I seem to have sufficient control, and the operation was completed successfully, complete with still having the water bottle's cap.

The lesson to be taken away from this? Do not take water bottles out of the trash to recycle them. Somebody threw them away for a reason.