What a weekend. First Andrea needed some extra time to get all the doggies dropped off before coming up here on Friday night so Amy and I wound up (where else?) in a bar in her neighborhood, enjoying the many things that happy hour at an Irish pub has to offer. This includes reduced price beer, fine fried entrees and the obligitory sobriety-checking upstairs bathroom. We sat there for a long time and were good and tipsy when we left, stopping at an apartment building with a keypad to dial residents there on the street. We called Anna Dong but she wasn't home so we shouted her name the rest of the way back. "ANNA DONG!!! ANNA DONG!!"

When we got to Amy's fine pad, I grew obsessed with her roomate's cat, Otis, shouting "O-TIS!! I've got the fev-ah for the flav-ah of O-tis!' He did not appreciate my admiration. Neither did Anna Dong.

Andrea finally arrived and we made our way to our fine semi swank hotel, where we collapsed for a bit, then went out for Thai food. We had a fine evening, slept late and met Amy for more adventures in the morning, including me buying a lovely music stand, which I carried proudly around Amy's neighborhood. Saturday night, we headed back to lovely San Jose where Andrea took me to see blast! (which was not starring Anna Dong!). We'd seen part of it at Disneyland last winter and I was enthralled so Andrea kindly surprised me with tickets for our anniversary (in addition to the iPod, which rules in all ways). I found myself crying during the first number and couldn't understand until I realized that the last time we saw this show, Alice was still with us, albeit quite ill. I cried during all of the songs that are part of the Disney production (which is about 1/2 as long).

Sunday we did more work on the fucking sidewalk bricks, it's now about 1/ 2 done. Maybe more, I can't tell anymore. I rested until my maroon tryouts. I wasn't really nervous until about 10 minutes beforehand, when some of the green skaters I know started harassing me about *her* tryout, which wasn't an official tryout since she couldn't make the real one. We were nice enough to evaluate her during the green session but since I knew her, I chose not to, letting more impartial folks do the job. I told her this after (after we'd asked her to keep doing a drill during the tryout since she'd decided to stop. She did it for a few more seconds then turned to us and said 'is that enough'? Princess points were awarded to her at that point) the tryout while I was doing my pre-skating lace-check routine where I walk around and pretend that my skates are too loose so I can adjust them one more time. She was going on about how I should have evaluated her because that's part of the process and blah blah the league should be run this way and blah blah. Finally I grabbed her by both shoulders and said 'I need to go now, MY tryout is in 10 minutes.'

At that point I was nervous but went out there and did my stuff. I didn't skate as well as I'd wanted to but had lots of solid passes and good shots. I also thought I was going to puke and got a headache the instant one of my friends chose to tap me on the head. Thank you, lingering effect of my concussion.

I arrived home so worked up that I could hardly sleep, tossing and turning much of the night. When I got up, it marked the first day I thought that I just can't do this commute anymore.