smacky and bucky

This weekend was pretty good, though tiring. Friday was the 60th birthday of my mother-in-law, so we loaded up the car, grabbed the kid and the dogs, and went down for the weekend (three-hour drive). Luckily the boy sleeps the entire trip in the car (yay! knock on wood...). Her birthday dinner was at one of the few pretty good restaurants down there, a German place in the middle of nowhere, across the street from a tiny municipal airport.
Run by a German couple (husband is the chef), they have cold German beer on tap, served in big ceramic mugs, and bratwurst and red cabbage and a lot of food perfect for a cold fall night when you want to eat heavy food then do nothing else the rest of the night. The boy also (amazingly) decided his car seat was super comfortable and slept through dinner too! When we got home from the restaurant, all I wanted to do was watch the Washington Capitals hockey game I had recorded while we were out, only to discover that the box screwed up and stopped switching channels at channel 6 instead of going to the programmed 642, so instead of the game it recorded 3 hours of CBS shows (delete!). Sigh. At least the Caps won, I read on the web instead.

Saturday we went to visit the recently widowed family friend who lives in the area down there. Her niece and I assembled a storage unit that took up an entire wall. Here's the kicker: the thing had been disassembled and the pieces piled in the garage for years, so (1) the particle board was dirty; (2) the boards were slightly warped in places, making getting the brackets to line up really interesting; (3) instead of instructions, the box with the screws contained a single, roughly sketched, hand-drawn figure (WTF?); and (4) I sliced open the palm of my hand somehow while doing this and it hurt like hell. We finally got the thing together... and it took only 3.5 hours. Oh, and the screws for the thing had rust on them from sitting in a paper box in the garage for years and the dead husband only had a few rusty screwdrivers we had to use to put this thing together (what the hell, was he buried with his good tools? Very strange.).

Sunday we gained an hour, which made the day seem somewhat reasonable, as we had to fit in a 3-hour drive home and the gazillion chores that needed to be done before we could sit down. Silver lining: The Caps had a rather unorthodox 5pm Sunday game scheduled, so I Laura took a nap while I watched the game and held the boy while he slept (he was in one of those moods where he would sleep in my arms but start crying if you dared to try to put him down). The Caps won this game too, so it was fun.

Then we watched the Halloween episodes of Simpsons, Cleveland Show, and Family Guy (way to air them a week late, Fox) and recorded Dexter and The Walking Dead to watch later this week and went to bed.

I would prefer to spend today watching zombie movies while holding our boy, but gotta go to work to get paid.