Recaps, retrievals, redolence

Before I get into anything else, here is the answer to the “One question picture quiz” from last Tuesday: A. My picture is a picture of me doing an imitation of a retarded man who lived two apartments down from us in college. This guy had a really bad speech problem, and generally sounded like the rudest impression of a retard you've ever heard, but a little more snarly and less intelligible. And one day, Randy (we named him Randy after one of my friends-- his real name was Sam) came over and gave us a Van Halen CD, and tried to explain to us that he didn't know who was on it because he couldn't see, and kept putting his hands over his eyes. We made fun of him for weeks behind his back, and never gave the CD back.

Is this true? Yes. Am I proud of it? That’s a stupid question. Does it make me an asshole? Hey, I don’t like your tone. Besides, I was an asshole long before some lonely tard cruised up to my porch and started distracting me from what I was doing, which was cutting class, drinking the morning away and hitting on cute freshmen girls.

Speaking of drinking all the time, my Thanksgiving break was very relaxing, even though I found out Wednesday afternoon that I don’t get paid for skipping work on Friday and if I don’t work eight hours the day before a holiday, I don’t even get paid for the holiday. So that blows. Still, I said “eff it, I’m done,” and left at 1:30 on Wednesday. And got to work at 11:00 this morning.

In the meantime, I hung out with my family in Michigan, reading by day and drinking by night. Here are a few highlights:

We stopped for McDonalds on the way Wednesday evening, and I ate a Big Mac, a crispy honey mustard chicken snack wrap, large fries, a large coke, a McChicken sandwich and a triple-thick chocolate milk shake. My bowel movements were irregular for the rest of the weekend.

On Thanksgiving morning, my dad brought down a deer, a one-and-a-half-year-old doe which I thought was two-and-a-half. I was shouted down, the deer was strung up, the kids gathered round, the fire was near, the bowels were left in (Chronic Wasting Disease fear), the skin was taken off, the carcass was taken apart, the meat was cut out, and prepositions were all about. General merriment, slight disgust, primal satisfaction, and some hunger ensued. We cut some of the more tender rib and tenderloin meat off the ribcage and roasted little pieces on spits over the fire.

My hilarious niece amused us as we stuffed ourselves, referring to hors d’oeuvres as “duverves,” and pumpkin pie as “punkmin pie” or “punkpin pie,” alternatively.

I read two novels in one day (Saturday), which I think is a first for me, though I could be wrong. Tony Hillerman’s “Skinwalkers,” and James Patterson’s “When the Wind Blows.” Neither was that good, but I’d recommend “Skinwalkers” if you like Indians, police, witchcraft or murder.

We read in the paper on Saturday that Thanksgiving morning (when my dad got his deer) a hunter had been shot in the head with a shotgun about ten miles from where we were.

Interesting statistic: there are more men in the woods with rifles in Michigan on Opening Day of the hunting season than there were men in the Allied invasion force on D-Day.

The girls beat us two nights in a row at Trivial Pursuit. No excuses. It is amazing, though, how impatient old people get when they play this game. And disturbing how much toddlers love to put small plastic game pieces in their mouth—not that I’m worried about choking, but that we can’t play when some kid is eating the dice.

Grammy burned the shrimp chowder on Friday. Damn it. I was really looking forward to that, and we just had to throw it all away, a giant cauldron of scorched chowder.

So we came back yesterday, picked up a bunch of gyros and subs and garlic fries and watched the best Bears game I’ve seen in a while. Fanfrickintastic. I think ever weekend should be four days long.