Did you have a good time? It depends...

My darling has but one weekend a year to forget that he is an uptight corporate slug. He trades in his starched button down shirts and neatly pressed khakis for old gnarly tee shirts, over sized cargo shorts, and turns into a drunken slob hippie for 3 straight days and nights. He rolls around a public park, drinks gallons of draft beer and smokes god knows what from various lit objects that get passed around by god knows who.

He lives for this shit, but it's not my scene.

It's one weekend a year, so I am able to ignore his disgusting smell and beastly behavior and know that the lovely, reliable, non-hippie type guy I married will come home to me. Meanwhile, Comfest has become my excuse to drive to Columbus and spend time with my friends - husband free. I drop him off at the park and head off to the suburbs.

The short version of my trip to Columbus can be described in two words - Laughing Jag. I don't think that I have laughed so much in the last 4 years as I did in the 2 days I spent hanging out with my friends. The long version is described in bullet points below.



Friday:

• Met my friends Becky, Amy and Amy's daughter LBL for 2 hour lunch at a favorite old haunt, a Turkish restaurant in a local mall. If there is a better way to start off your Friday afternoon than with a little babaganoush, a lamb kebab and a lot of gabbing with old friends, I have yet to hear about it.
  
  
• After lunch we did a little browsing around the shops, but mostly we just walked around and made fun of people.
  
  
• Later that evening Frenchie and Nature Boy hosted a little soiree. I brought all the fixin's for guacamole and chopped up everything and made it on the spot, while standing in the middle of Frenchie's kitchen. Awesome. I love to make food while hanging around with my friends.

Saturday:

• I drop kicked a hung over MDH out of bed, reminding him that he had made plans for us to have brunch at a greasy spoon with our friend S.
  
  
• After brunch I rolled MDH out of the car in front of Comfest and drove straight to Amy's and hung out with her until it was time for us to meet Dan and Becky at the movies. We saw The Love Guru and were the only people in the theater. The movie wasn't that great, but we laughed our asses off anyway.
  
  
• Dan, Becky and I headed back over to Amy's and spent the evening eating pizza and chicken wings and watching back to back episodes of Flight of the Conchords. Like I said, laughing jag.

Sunday (in the wee small hours of the morning):

• MDH came crashing into our hotel room at around 2:30am, rudely awakening me from a blissful (sober) slumber.
  
  
• He continued to talk to me at full drunken hippie volume about his wondrous day at Comfest, as if I had not moments before been soundly asleep.
  
  
• As I became more aware of my surroundings and how much I hate hippies, I noticed that the previously pristine and perfect white hotel bed linens had become soiled and brown at the foot of his side of the bed.
  
  
• Now fully alert, I could see that the source of the filth was MDH's giant sandled feet and that he had lain in our bed after apparently wallowing through a muddy cow pasture.
  
  
• I screamed at him to go and wash his feet.
  
  
• After some grumbling and cursing he washed his feet and I allowed him to come back to bed.
  
  
• He fell immediately asleep while I lay fully awake, wild eyed and fuming.
  
  
• I got up to go to the bathroom and when I returned a few moments later found him sleeping spread eagled, hogging up the entire king-sized bed and all the pillows. Even the decorative ones.
  
  
• I shoved him all around until I was able to squeeze in back in, but that's about the time the drunken snoring began. Oh joy.
  
  
• At around 3:15am I packed up my shit, and drove home.

Two clarifications (so you won't think I'm an economy sized asshole):


1. We were planning for me to leave on Sunday without him anyway, just not quite so early. He made other arrangements to get home because he likes to stay for the entire Comfest event. I, on the other hand, could give a shit and was hoping to get home early enough to do some laundry before work on Monday morning.



2. I woke him up and kissed him goodbye before I left.



One realization (about making rash decisions while tired and angry):
1. My decision to begin a 6 hour drive through mostly rural Ohio all by myself at 3:30am was probably not so smart. I realized this about 2 hours into my trip home when it was pitch black, there were no signs of civilization, no other vehicles on the road, and the urge to pee suddenly became excruciating. That crazy astronaut lady who wore the diaper on her attempted murder spree through Florida started to seem not so crazy as I pulled into a dark and empty roadside rest.



One more realization:


1. I probably shouldn't have gulped down a giant cup of gas station coffee on my way out of town.

Gypsies Tramps & Thieves

One of the perks of having no children is that we can just pick up and go and do stuff whenever we feel like it.

Last summer I didn't have a job so we didn't do jack shit or go anywhere (except Comfest, of course). But this summer I am sort of gainfully employed so we can afford a few adventures here and there, and for some reason we seem to have squeezed a great many of them into the next three weeks.

Tomorrow MDH and I are taking off for a long weekend in Philadelphia with my best friend Amy and her husband Ted. I've always wanted to do this kind of thing, you know, the grown up couples holiday, but it has never worked out for me and Ames. I was single for a long time and then she was married to Assface and he never wanted to go on any trips except to visit his family. When I finally hooked up with MDH, he and Amy didn't get along very well (they do now), so it just never seemed to be in the cards.

I'm beside myself with glee. Plus Amy and Ted have totally laid back and allowed MDH and I to plan pretty much everything, which is what we like to do.

The weekend after next MDH and I are packing the car for Columbus because it's Comfest weekend and we never miss that. Well, since we've moved away to the Tundra I pretty much drop MDH off at the entrance to the park on Friday morning and never see him again until Sunday night.

If you don't feel like clicking on the link above, Comfest is a community festival in our old neighborhood in Columbus that has been going on since the early 70's. It's totally free and there are no corporate sponsors allowed - the whole thing is funded by beer sales and volunteers. Basically it's 3 days (from 11am to 11pm) with 5 stages of bands all day long. At any given time there is a band playing on every stage. It can cause some serious conundrums for my poor darling when two or three great bands are playing at the same time on different stages. What is a man who has been drunk on draft beer for 2 days straight to do?

Comfest is special to us for a lot of reasons. For me it's a tradition, but a freakin' kick ass tradition. For MDH it's the entire reason that he decided that Columbus didn't totally blow when he moved there from Boston and ended up staying long enough to meet me. He stumbled upon Comfest quite by accident one afternoon while going for a stroll through the neighborhood and fell instantly in love with my city.

Frankly, I liked Comfest a lot better when we lived down the street from it and I could come and go as I pleased. These days it's a bit of a cluster-fuck and I get a little claustrophobic in a crowd. (I also think I have mentioned before that I'm not a huge fan of the port-a-john.) I pretty much go and hang out for an hour or two and see one or two bands that are old friends of mine and then take off for the suburbs to hang with my peeps like Dan, Steph, Amy, Frenchie and Nature Boy.

It is understood among our friends that if you want to spend any time with MDH during the last weekend of June - go to Comfest and you're likely to run into him. I suggest going very early as his state of intoxication intensifies later in the afternoon and early evening and he is highly likely to already be reduced to a wet, incoherent mess, rolling around on a picnic blanket with the remnants of a broccoli burger all over the front of his shirt.

I'll be at Amy's. Or at our hotel. Where there is running water and air conditioning.

I recently discovered that my company will be closed for Friday July 4th and also the following Monday. God I love that place! So fuck yeah - a four day holiday weekend and what better place to celebrate our country's independence from England than Canada? Yes. We are spending July 4th in Toronto. MDH has a big boner because I finally agreed to take the train into the city.

My baby loves the choo-choos.

I, of course have big issues with the train toilets, but I've got to throw him a bone sometimes. Besides gas prices are outrageous and it's easier to enjoy all the city has to offer without being encumbered with a car.

Anyhoo... What I'm trying to say here is that I won't be blogging for awhile. Not to worry, I'm sure wherever I am, I am having a marvelous time and I hope that you are too!

Meanwhile I will leave you with some random photos of summer travels passed.

My first (and last) Red Sox game in 2004

My first (and last) NASCAR race in 2003
(I am silently mocking everyone within a 20 foot radius of me)

Chatham Bars Resort Cape Cod in 2003 - Swanky!

Waiting in line at the beer tent at Comfest 2005

The Main stage at Comfest 2006 - like I said - clusterfuck

By the way the photo at the top is of me at Comfest in 1999 - my first Comfest with MDH. Ahhh. He asked me to crop him out of the picture - party pooper.