Today is Bob Winans’ bachelour party in Syracuse. Lots of driving for us today. Dominica and I were up at 6:30 this morning to get ready to go. After getting very little sleep last night that wasn’t the best way to go.
We were doing well for time and were going to be able to leave North Brunswick before 8:00 but as we were getting ready to leave I was leaning on the side of the BMW getting Oreo buckled in when a plastic piece that is a part of the top that goes up and down snapped off and fell into the car. With that piece out of place we were unable to move the roof which could be important should it rain or we need to lock the car or anything. So we spent about fourty-five minutes getting that fixed. Finally we got it back in place and everything was better. Or so we thought.
About halfway from North Brunswick to Ithaca we stopped at a rest stop and when we went to get back into the car discovered that the passenger’s door handle from the outside had broken and there was no way to open the door without getting in from the driver’s side and opening the door from the inside. Later in the day we would discover that there was a part loose from this breakage that was in the door and blocking the window from going down safely. What a day.
We ran into a big accident just south of Binghamton and that cost us a bit of time too. It was a tough journey. All of the way from Owego to Danby we were stuck in the slowest, most obnoxious “weekend driver” traffic that we could never get past. Argh.
It was 1:15ish when Dominica and I arrived at Nate and Tammy Parker’s place in T-Burg. We ate some veggie burgers really quickly and then Nate and I drove north with the BMW while Dominica and Tammy went out to Geneseo in the Parker minivan. Nate and I were running a little late but not too bad. We thought that golf tee time was going to be 3:00 and we were indending to meet everyone there. But it turned out that Bob was pretty sick so everyone was just hanging out at his parents’ house in Minoa (get it, Minoa… Syracuse… Ithaca… it’s modeled after Greece – which is a suburb of Rochester) until he started to feel better.
There were seven of us for golf and dinner – Nate, Zach, Tim, Pete (Bob’s brother), Pete (Bob’s father), Me and, of course, Bob. We just played nine holes then it was time to go get dinner. But on the way we were going to go to Bob’s parents’ house to change the cars around. On the way there was an ice cream truck coming past so I offered to jump out and get Bob some ice cream for his party (he was driving the BMW and I was riding – everyone else was in the van.) I grabbed us some popsicles. I took one lick of the bubblegum flavoured popsicle and before I could react, I had frozen to it. And I am not kidding here, this is serious freezing. I was stuck. It bumped my bottom lip and that froze too. I looked to Bob in a panic and in trying to get him to understand what had happened my top lip bumped the popsicles and my mouth sealed shut! Now I was unable to blow warm air across it in the hopes of melting it and I could feel my lips and tongue getting really cold quite quickly. This is, by the, the coldest food item I have ever encountered.
Bob drove us quickly back to his parents’ house and we ran inside and got the hot water running and poured about eight glasses of quite hot water over my lips to get them open again. After all of that time in the August heat, in the sunlight – probably as much as five minutes – it still took eight glasses of hot water to get it cool enough for me to open my mouth! After that Bob tested his popsicle and determined that it was still so cold that he could not safely eat it either. Now this makes for an awesome bachelour party story!
We had dinner at Zebb’s and then it was off to play some Lazer Tag for Nate, Bob, Zach and I. Everyone else headed for home at that point. I have never played real Lazer Tag before although I have really wanted to every since I was a little kid. It was a lot like playing the video game Quake II but with real people. It was awesome. I had a really good time. It was pretty late and we only managed to play two games before the end of the night. In the first game I had a lot of problems figuring out what to do and what the objective was (it is actually a capture the flag style game but we didn’t know that at first.) So I ended up coming in dead last. But then again, I was the old, fat guy so what do you expect. I am the oldest (I believe) of the four of us and all of us were twice the age of the twenty kids that we were playing against. But by the second game I had figured out the layout of the arena, how the equipment worked, how the scoring worked and what the objective was and then it was game time. That’s right, the old guy won. First place, baby! Those teenagers didn’t stand a chance (I learned from Joel Spolsky’s blog that when firing on people you should run at them because you keep getting an easier and easier target and they are forced to take cover so they can’t take the time to shoot at you.) Our team won as well, I believe. We managed to own (or pwn as they say these days) both of the other teams’ flags and protected our own quite well. I made more points defending our base then I earned taking the others. We had a blast. I have to convince Dominica to try this out for some serious excercise. I thought that I was going to keel over from a heart attack after playing two rounds.
We were all old and decide that we couldn’t really stay out late. We stopped at Tully’s and grabbed some soda and then headed for home. Nate drove the BMW back to Perry and then I drove it to Geneseo. It was about four in the morning by the time that I rolled in and went to bed. Boy was I tired.