Weekend Review

So I had a very eventful and jam-packed last few days. Here's the recap, along, of course, with my running commentary, the usual musings of my quirky brain:

Thursday Night: Body Worlds 3 exhibit at the Saint Louis Science Center

Good exhibit, waaaaay tooooooo loooooong, not gory at all, informative, well worth seeing. Once. Get the audio tour, as after awhile all the little placards start to blur. Several things hit us: we had to keep reminding ourselves that these were/are real people, because they really don't look like it. We're glad we're not, nor have ever been, smokers. Especially after seeing the black lungs next to the healthy ones. I'm also glad I now exercise every day, after seeing the overweight body slice next to the healthy body slice. If you go, have in mind what you'd really like to see when you walk in. Because if you do what we did, and stop to read every little detail and scrutinize every specimen, you burn yourself out about 3/4 of the way through. Think to yourself, "I'd really like to see the digestive tract, the reproductive system, and some neurological stuff." I know it sounds weird, but trust me on this. If you want $2 off coupons, I have them, just let me know. Also let me know if you want to know why you pee so much when you've been drinking, what causes a hangover, and how to avoid brain freezes. Oh yeah, and why foot fetishes happen. I love the Science Center.

Friday Night: Boogaloo and The Darkness with Michelle and Ryan

Boogaloo in Maplewood is a fantastic place to go if you're into trying new foods and drinking the best damn mojitos in town. It's even better when you're hanging out with people so cool you can't believe they're family (or family-to-be). The four of us stuffed ourselves silly with eight different items off the tapas menu, and then stuffed ourselves into M's little car to hit The Darkness haunted house downtown, near Soulard. A few little tips: pony up the extra $7 per person to skip to the front of the line. The wait Friday night was 2.5 hours. My time is worth a helluva lot more than $2.80/hour and trust me, so is yours. The Darkness is fantastic and is chock full of all kinds of high-tech creepiness, along with your standard scary folk jumping out at you with chain saws, table saws, and other various assorted power tools. We made Ryan go first this year, and let him run himself into walls this time. Girls sandwiched in the middle for maximum protection, of course, and M bringing up the rear. At one point, these creepy swamp people materialized out of the mist and scared M so bad he actually let go of me and went rebounding off a wall. It was so funny even the swamp people were laughing. You know it's bad when you crack up the zombies. We finished off the night with a quick stop at Ted Drewe's, about which all I have to say is, "Can I help someone? Can I help someone? Can I help someone?" Ryan and Michelle know exactly what I mean, and are probably laughing right now as they read this.

Saturday: The Great BAS Move

M tackled the garage while Zozo and I went to The Lodge to play at Tot Caaaare and work out. We came home to find almost the entire contents of our garage emptied onto the driveway, but amazingly organized into piles. It looked like the mother of all garage sales. Zozo went down for her nap and I pitched in. After lunch we got ourselves cleaned up to a presentable state and headed up to PARINTS for their 10th anniversary celebration. PARINTS is the group of infertility nurses who helped us when we were struggling. There were blow-up activities and an ice cream truck and kids running everywhere, and in the middle of all that fun I found myself with tears in my eyes. It hit me how all those children were prayed for, hoped for, wished for, fought for. Becky told me they've helped with the conception of over 700 children in 10 years, and to her and everyone at PARINTS, I say "thank you" and "God bless each and every fiber of your being."

After that, it was back to tackling the garage/BAS project. In the morning, I had asked M, "So, how much do you think you'll get moved over today?" His response: "Yes." The man was on a mission. A mission so dangerous, so fraught with peril, so critical, only he could accomplish it. His mission was to park both cars in the garage for the first time since January.

I know this doesn't seem like much to you, but to me, it's huge. I wish I'd have taken before images so you can see just how much work M had cut out for him, but frankly, I was mortified that our garage ever looked like that. So you'll have to be content with viewing the finished product, taken this morning with my BlackBerry camera on my way out the door to go to work, when I realized that I'd be posting a big long recap with absolutely no photographic evidence to speak of. Lucky you, for getting a shot of my garage taken with a cell phone camera on a Monday morning. The dark right side of the garage is M's spot, but he was already gone for work when I snapped this, so it just looks like a big dark hole. Which is great, because up to Saturday morning it looked like Santa barfed Christmas in there.

Sunday: Zoe makes another leap

Yesterday, Zozo decided to learn a new word, that word being, "NO!" Oh...boy. She decided the first deployment would take place in Shop 'n Save, after we requested her to stop doing something like throwing Hoot on the floor or insisting that she hold each and every addition to the grocery cart on her lap. The first time she said it, we were absolutely stunned and shocked, and it took every ounce of willpower to not laugh our asses off. We both had to turn around because we were laughing so hard and that behavior is not exactly what we want to encourage in our two-year-old. The "NO!" was so much fun for her, she decided to try it out in every octave, at various pitches, as we continued wheeling her through the store. "no NO no NO no NO no NO no NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!" We also found this quite amusing and had to stifle laughter.

The no's soon gave way to her old favorite: COOKIE. Cookie came out about halfway through Shop 'n Save, and then was resurrected for nearly the entire Sam's trip later that afternoon. She starts off low with, "cookie," then builds in a symphonic crescendo, higher and higher, until she's shrieking "COOKIEEEEEEEEE!" over and over again and jars are breaking four aisles over. At this point we lost any shred of dignity we had left and ceased to become embarrassed about loading the world's largest bottles of Bailey's Irish Cream and Tanqueray gin into the cart.

Last night we watched Cleveland fall to the BoSox after a 3 games to 1 lead, and it brought back painful reminders of the '04 World Series. I hold a grudge, and have National League loyalties, so I'll be rooting for the Rockies this year. M is a little more divided, as his new boss is a die-hard Sox fan and therefore he has that whole fan-by-affiliation thing going. It's the same reason I root for Stef's Tigers (when they're not playing the Cards, of course).

One last thought from the weekend (and this is where the completely disjointed ramblings of my mind are evident): since when did "fried chicken" turn into "crispy chicken?" I noticed this at Crazy Bowls & Wraps last week, where you can order "grilled chicken" or "crispy chicken," and then again last night on a commercial for Jack in the Box. Somewhere, a marketing clown decided that crispy chicken sounds healthier/better than fried chicken. Which, technically, it does. Sneaky. Don't be drawn in by the marketing trickery!