So, here's a funny story that I think my readers will enjoy...
Yesterday after brunch, the Utah girls hit the road and Genevra and I went back to her place for a leisurely day of sitting & talking (two of my personal favorite past-times, as we all know). About 7:00, Genevra Lynn dropped me at the airport, in plenty of time for me to walk onto my 7:50 flight. Oh, except that my flight was delayed (apparently, rain in Vegas is a
big freaking deal, because a good chunk of the flights were canceled, and ALL the flights that weren't canceled were delayed.) I didn't leave until closer to 9:00 NV time - which put my get-home-in-AZ-time around 11:30. Because my friend Christine is a saint and an angel, she waited up so she could come and get me and take me home. That having been said, I'll do the rest of the night in a time-line-outline (it's easier - and will be less to read - than if I did a narrative blow-by-blow of the entire night).
11:28 - Christine picks me up at the airport. I'm exhausted from my rockin Vegas weekend. (I say this tongue-in-cheek, because everyone knows that I all really did was eat & sleep - but whatever.)
11:34 - We pull in to my apartment complex and I realize that I don't have my gate card to get in after dark. (This is a fairly common occurrence. I leave ALL THE TIME after dark and have yet to remember to bring my gate card with me.) Christine pulls over so we can wait for some other poor sap who isn't home by midnight on a Monday night to pull in, so we can follow them in through the gate.
11:38 - I'm so tired that I tell her that I'll just use my literal gate key and let myself in and then walk the 100 or feet to my building.
11:39 - Christine pulls over to the actual gate/gate and I pull my keys out, but then we get to talking about ... well, who knows what, actually and before we know it, it's after 12:00 and we're still sitting there chatting, when someone (FINALLY) pulls in who has their gate card. She whips around and follows the dude through the gate and pulls up as close as she can get to my building.
12:17 - We're still sitting in the car, chatting away... I'm still yawing a little bit, so Christine's telling me that I need to get out and go upstairs and get some sleep, but we were in the middle of something and I didn't want to cut the conversation short.
12:55 - By now, I'm not yawning so much and we've moved on to another topic.
1:42 - Yup, still sitting in the car, chatting away. (Have I mentioned that the car has been running this entire time?)
2:19 - Christine looks at the clock in her car and giggles and says "look, it's my birthday!" - which changes the topic of conversation back to her birthday, which is Thursday this week, and the reason why we're headed to California tomorrow... So she gives me the run-down of her birthday wish list - what rides she wants to do (Splash Mountain, Pirates and Peter Pan, if the line's not too bad) and what she wants to eat (Pineapple Whip!). And we proceed to map out the Disneyland day... that was all the adrenaline rush I needed to not look at the clock for another hour.
3:10 - I say that I need some fresh air. Chris agrees, and she turns the A/C down in her car (yeah, for you Utah readers, she turned the A/C
down to 69 - from 72 - in the middle of the night, in February). I rolled my window down, too, so we had a nice breeze going.
3:33 - I realize that I haven't eaten in 12 hours, so it's no wonder that I'm hungry. Christine asks if I want to go to breakfast - she's pretty sure there's an IHOP about a mile away. I tell her, no, that I really ought to go upstairs and just go to bed. She, of course, agrees (esp since we'll be spending 6 hours together in a car on Wed & Fri this week - with a full day at Disneyland sandwiched in between)... and then we proceed to just keep on talking.
Oh, yes, and the car's been running this entire time...
4:14 - I say that I'm so hungry I'm getting light-headed (never mind the fact that I've been awake for almost 24 hours and that could be why my body's weirding out), and that maybe breakfast isn't such a bad idea...
4:34 - We decide to just go and get food - we both need to go to bed, but by this time, we know we'll need something in us in order to stay asleep. So, we head off for the IHOP that Christine knows is close.
4:47 - The IHOP is sooo not where Christine thinks it is - which is HILARIOUS to us (mostly because it's the middle of the night). We get completely turned around (because we all know that I'm no good with driving and/or directions even when it's the middle of the day and I'm lucid) - somehow we skip Main and go straight to Broadway before Christine knows we've gone too far.
4:58 - By nothing more than a stroke of luck, we end up taking a bizarre turn that lands us directly in front of IHOP.
5:00 - We head up to the door of the 24-hour-IHOP, only to see that they're closed until 5:30 am. (We later found out they had to close so they "clean the wood". Random, right?)
5:01-5:23 - We stand outside IHOP (in the rain, thanks), waiting for them to open - laughing at ourselves that we've been up all night, and at our luck that the place isn't open.
5:23 - The manager comes and lets us in (so we can get out of the rain), but tells us that he can't feed us for another 20 minutes or so. He offers us fresh coffee - I tell him that we just need some fresh water - Christine and I giggle uncontrollably - he gives us some water and some menus and just walks away... (Not a bad decision on his part.)
5:45 - Our super-perky-ridiculously-peppy waitress comes out and takes our order. Christine gets an omelet - because she loves them. I order the Rooty-Tooty-Fresh-&-Fruity (because the name makes me giggle, and because I love to eat little piggies... and it comes with sausage AND bacon).
6:00 - The food comes out and we literally TEAR INTO it like we've never eaten in our live-long-lives. About half-way through our pancakes we take a break to sing "Good morning, good morning... we've talked the whole night through" ... and then we bust into giggles. Christine says, and I quote, "You'll have to tell your mom this story... she'd
love it!"
6:33 - Breakfast is over, we're still giggling like 12 yr olds.
6:47 - We've paid and we're back out on the street, discussing that this time when Christine gets me home, I need to just get out of the car ... not because we couldn't keep talking (because we know we could) ... but because if she doesn't head home right away, she's gonna get stuck in rush-hour traffic and that's not somewhere she wants to be (esp when she left home at 11:20 PM the night before in order to make a 6 mile round-trip drive).
6:53 - She drops me off and we both make a big show of saying good-bye quickly.
7:00 - I am upstairs and ready to hit the hay when I get a random text from her saying that she's a block from home and her "empty" gas light just lit up... Considering that she came to the airport at almost empty and we sat and idled in my parking lot for 6+ hours before we drove through Tempe looking for IHOP, I figure that's not too bad...
Yeah, so... I go on vacation so flippin tired that all I can do on Sunday is lounge about and drift off into naps all day long. Then I come home on Monday and pull an unintentional all-nighter talking to a friend who I'm gonna be with Wed, Thurs AND Friday. Seriously, I'm such a retard... It's a good thing I have today to rest up before we head to Cali tomorrow, right? (And yeah, I'm so taking sleeping pills with me so we don't have an unintentional repeat of last night whilst we're on our little trip. Honestly... I could talk for DAYS when I'm with my girlfriends. Geez.)
I do love my CB girls! :-)
Over 30 years and still going strong...
