Crazy Memorial Day Weekend

Friday
The weekend started off well for me and just got crazier and crazier; I worked 9:30-3:30 at Ukrop's, which went by super fast because it was so busy -- almost a Christmas crowd. As soon as 5pm rolled around, Maria was heading home and we had plans to go out to eat at Don Jose in Colonial Heights. It was a great dinner and a much needed date with m'lady.

After seeing for a while, she started dozing off because of her long work week -- so I headed on out to Friendly's with Thomas, Shawn, Patrick, Matt, Tracy, Lindsey, Emily and a bunch of other peeps. Got hit with a piece of ice at Friendly's and got pretty mad, but just laughed it off later.

Friendly's then led me to Murphy's Law to shoot some pool with THE FELLAS (buds since HS) and a couple of chicks (April and Lindsey). Thomas and I got caught up in the worst game of pool EVER . . . just like playing golf -- took a million strokes to get the ball in the hole.

Saturday
Needless to say, Friday flew by quicker than any other day and I was back into yet another Saturday at Ukrop's. Saturday was pretty busy in the afternoon as the Memorial Weekend stragglers were buying their last minute groceries and the evening was managable. 2:45 - close went by, thankfully, pretty fast.

Sunday
It was 10:30 and time to meet up with Maria and her family for church so I went to church with them and then followed them over to Cumberland where Maria's aunt lived. On the way to church, Maria's dad got pulled over and earned himself a speeding ticket -- clocked going 17mph over the limit.

After churhc, it was on over to good ole Cumberland County. Talk about country.... nothin' touches a country cookout man -- ribs, cheeseburgers, hot dogs with chilli and (cole) slaw, macaroni salad, baked beans, the WORKS!

I learned two things in Cumberland:
1) You can have a COW
2) How to play croquet

I had never played croquet before in my life and had always thought it was a whack game to play, but don't knock it until you try it. For those of you who do not know what croquet is, you basically have a mallet and you hit a ball through arch-shaped plastic/metal boundary markers called wickets. Whoever gets to the end of the course first wins (For a more in-depth explanation see croquet).

The fun begins............
We stayed in Cumberland until about 5PM and I got back home around 6:30 -- from there I went on over to Brent's house where David had worked his magic at the sweet cookout they had to celebrate Memorial Weekend. Thomas, Brent, David, Brooks, and Ben were all over there and had just finished chowing down when I got there.

There was nothing to do so we decided to pop in a movie, Swingers, with Vince Vaughn and we watched that until we got restless. We turned the movie off and were just kickin' it until all of a sudden Brent spoke up:

"Hey, let's go to the beach guys"

This is at like 7:45PM and everyone was like "yeah right! not at 8 at night."

David then spoke up, "Where's the cooler.... let's get that." We thought Brent and David had planned a sweet joke..... NOPE!

10 minutes later we piled into 2 cars and headed to Virginia Beach just for kicks. We ended up meeting up with Lindsey, Tracy, April, and Emily -- they were there already because of the Rascal Flatts concert. We had fun just joking, talking, and strolling the beach and boardwalk. Time passed and we sent the ladies off from their parking lot and started heading to where we parked.

I had been bugging everyone the whole night to ride the trolley, so we decided to take the trolley to about 17th/18th street where we were parked close by (or so we thought). After the awesome trolley ride, we made it to our parking lot finally. But guess what?

NO CARS! Our cars had been towed away from a parking lot where we thought we could park (there was no sign that said NO PARKING). So we basically got screwed VA Beach style with $85 towing fees for each car (we had 2 cars), which cleaned me out for the rest of the week, which had 5 days remaining.

We're mad, I'm broke, and we finally started back towards Richmond around 2AM. We stopped at an Eckerd because Thomas REALLY had to piss and we were all thirsty. By the time we made it to Eckerd, we had laughed off the $85 towing fees -- we didn't let a "measly" $85 ruin the fun and our completely spontaneous night.

Wait.... I wasn't totally broke; I had $0.11 in my change compartment. I went up to the register while Thomas bought himself a drink and a snack and said to myself "What can I get for 11 cents?" Turns out, there was SOMETHING I could buy with that little amount -- an American flag pin, which ultimately rang up at $0.04, so at least I got 1 bargain at VA Beach and a great souvenir.

Monday
Monday turned out to be a beautiful, sunny day and softball was on the menu. Softball was fun and it was great to see we finally had enough people to play a real game instead of just taking turns hitting the ball.

I learned quick why I had played 2nd base my whole life and not 3rd base . . . I wasn't used to such a distance playing 2nd base my whole life so I kept thinking I had to hurry so I rushed myself and missed some routine grounders. Thankfully I moved on out to centerfield.

I had a couple bloopers between 3rd base and left field and even belted an in-the-park GRAND SLAM, which more than made up for my mistakes at 3rd. My team ultimately won and I was forever known as mud butt because I was sweating and then sat down on the bleachers which apparently had red dirt all over them.

Another random thing about Monday was that my roomie from Longwood, Fernando, pulled into my neighborhood as we were leaving to play softball. He followed us to the park, chilled with us for a couple hours watching us play ball, and then headed back to NOVA. It was an awesome random visit from Fernando and Vince was equally suprised and happy about it too.

Oh, and ANOTHER random thing -- my air force friend JP just got back from serving a tour of duty in Iraq and ended up calling us after softball. He came over, we hung out, he left, I ate dinner and then took Maria to see Madagascar, then I met back up with JP and Thomas and we hang out at Uno's.

What a HUGE amount of information. Needless to say, this past weekend was one of the most eventful weekends of my life, and a great way to kick off the Summer.