Back in the Dirty Dirty

Not much to say about the New Year’s party I attended. What I’d call the “good folks” from my mother’s family showed up, drank and danced, then all drove home. Grr. Couldn’t convince a single one of them to let me or Mother-dear play DD, the sons of bitches.

Mother-dear and I knew it was going to be prime-time to get in some pictures, though. The T family, tipsy and relaxed and not fighting? Gotta have it, particularly since I haven’t seen these folks in at least seven years, and more like ten in some cases. Our camera (an old too-expensive Kodak from before the “megapixel” days; I think my father paid an excessive $700 or $800 for this thing) did surprisingly well in the near-darkness once I upped the exposure time (I thought I’d read that somewhere, but I don’t know shit about cameras). Couldn’t see shit when you took the pictures, but if you knew how to aim blind (which I do, but Mother does not—there are at least three “boob shots” of me where she didn’t aim high enough to include my head), the pictures came out wonderfully.

But Mother-dear and I (and cousin V—who I have a wonderful picture of) chair-danced and held up the walls until about 03:00. Good fun.

Of course, my dumb-ass hadn’t packed, so I was back up at 07:30 Saturday morning to do that.

Mother-dear and I arrived in the Dirty Haute yesterday afternoon shortly after 13:00; I unloaded my shit in my room and the Thorn office and took Mother-dear out to show her the joys of Italian fast-food: Fazoli’s. She looked tired—she drove up on account of me being sleepy—but headed back after lunch anyway.

I killed time doing more homework until I hobbled over on a not-confirmed-multiply-stress-fractured–metatarsals-ridden foot to dinner with Miss Amelia Mae. She cooked up latkes for me to try that were yummy. Then we sat and talked for about three hours. Family, friends, life. Gotta get caught up, right?

(What I “gotta” do is find out what kind of workout I can do that doesn’t involve putting more stress on my foot or donning a bathing suit.)

Then I went over to Luke’s, where we hid out and talked for five-plus hours until I was stupid-tired and couldn’t even count cards well enough to play Euchre. There are only twenty four cards in a Euchre deck, so this shouldn’t have been a difficult task. But I did learn to play Euchre. I think… my knowledge should probably be tested now that I’m capable of focusing. Really, though, it’s just like Spades, but with fewer cards, a simpler scoring system, and “tricks” (haha, I turned tricks) instead of books. And that whole weird trump-picking thing.

(As an aside, this is what happens when I don’t get to catch up with friends terribly often. One to two thousand-word e-mails or three-, four-, and five-hour chats. I’m a glutton for human contact; I’m just picky about who I have it with.)

There are really only about three classes of cards games, in my mind. There are those like Spades: Euchre, Hearts. Luck and a bit of strategy to place decent bets. There are those like poker: poker’s varieties, blackjack. Luck and a smooth face. Then there are the “others”: tonk, Uno (color me cheesy for counting Uno), gin rummy or 500 rum. If there’s real strategy to these, I didn’t pick it up when learning from Mother-dear; these are also the Mommy-Lissa games, where the others were usually taught by my father.

Break is over, alas, and I’m (sadly) not ready to be back. I want to be a lazy bum and study/program all day and spend all night talking with friends. That’s what comes after graduation, though, right? Ha. (Yeah, gotta hold out that hope…)