We survived another St. Patrick’s Day in Ocean View and had a blast doing so.  We could NOT have asked for better weather for the day - 66 and sunny all day!  We got down to the parade to kick things off pretty early and met up with some friends to tailgate, cracking our first beers for the day around 10am.  We also had a jug of pre-made “red-headed slut” shots to enjoy in between beers during the parade.  We hung out at a friend’s house for a bit after the parade chit-chatting and drinking beers, before heading to our hotel to drop stuff off and check in.  From there, we walked down to Dena’s daughter’s house.  Cristin was having a party complete with kegs, jell-o shooters and FOOD!

After a few more beers and several rounds of jello-shooters, we picked up Dena and Heidi and started the trek down to Greenies for more beer and partying.  Greenies was BEYOND packed this year.  It was CRAZY!  Complete madness and awesome at the same time!

Did I mention how GORGEOUS it was outside?  We could not get enough of it!  We hung out at Greenies for a bit, then made the next trek from Greenies to The Thirsty Camel!  Personally, this is my favorite place to go on this particular day.  I always have the most fun here.

This is where my brother met up with us and the insanity set in.  Billy quickly did a large quantity of shots to “catch up” to us and then had us all laughing our asses off.  This is also where I met up with the Sheriff’s Deputy that was on duty last year and TOTALLY remembered me!  Dena and I spent about an hour hanging out with him in his corner between the bar and the entrance to the outdoor tented area.  We proceeded to ask every person that walked through that doorway to see their ID and told them we needed to pat them down.  They looked at us with beers in our hands and looked at him and he said “you better let them do it if you want to get in…” - AWESOME!  Then he left us for a while to take care of things on our own.  I was DYING.

One of the people that we frisked coming in the door was a woman with Downs Syndrome… who was DRINKING HER ASS OFF.  I was shocked - and I was DRUNK.  Completely shocked… but not as shocked as this:

When my brother challenged her to a dance off.  I AM DEAD SERIOUS.  Who the hell does that????  I mean a circle formed around them and they kept taking turns popping and locking and break dancing, then high-fiving each other.  I was peeing my pants I was laughing so damn hard!

After The Thirsty Camel, we headed to another bar called Captain Ron’s to see a friend of our’s band play.  Nadine, Big Kev and Billy played some darts - very emotional darts.

We did A LOT of dancing… a lot more drinking and then my brother took it to the next level…

We had so much fun.  By the end of the night, my cheeks hurt so bad from laughing it was giving me a headache.  We got back to the hotel around 12:30.  WE MADE IT PAST MIDNIGHT!!!  We were so damn proud of that fact.  Somehow, I got up the next morning at 6am with ZERO hangover, showered, met up with the clan and we all headed to breakfast at the Silver Diner.  Another AMAZING year down in Ocean View.  Cannot wait until next year!!!

Here are all the photos from the day:

This morning on my way in to work, I chatted on the phone with Nadine, like I do every morning… only this morning, right when she said hello, I immediately started singing this song as loud as I could in her ear… “It’s the FINAL COUNTDOWN…” - to which she immediately joined in without skipping a beat “da na na na… da na na na na…”  The reason for the final countdown?  Tomorrow is the St. Paddy’s Day Drinkfest that we work hard all year to prepare our livers for.  It is finally upon us!  You remember last year, right?  How could you forget this:

Which ended in victory for Nadine here:

Unfortunately for poor Nadine… her tea remedy that we discussed on Monday did not work for her and today her Aunt Flow has come for a visit.  SHE IS NOT HAPPY ABOUT THIS AT ALL.  She DOES NOT WANT to deal with that and Porta Potties!!!  To make her feel better about it, I emailed her this when I got into work this morning:

FREAKING HILARIOUS.  I was laughing my ass off. 

Tonight, I plan on cleaning my house from top to bottom, getting as much laundry done as I can and getting whatever else done I need to get done, so that I can drink all day tomorrow and be a hungover slug on Sunday and not have to worry about anything!  Hooray for St. Paddy’s Day in Ocean View!!!

So, Ashton has completely memorized the above Family Guy segment and for weeks now, every time we are sitting for dinner, or sitting quietly in general, he starts in with it, chuckling under his breath…  “Can I see that paper for a sec? Huh, that’s odd. I thought that would be big news.  Well, there seems to be an absence of a certain ornithological piece. A headline regarding mass awareness of a certain avian variety.  Oh, have you not heard? It was my understanding that everyone had heard…”  then he starts in with the “Bird is the Word” dancing, which he has also memorized both the song and the dance moves.  Kaiden cracks up every time, I cracked up for a while, but now, now it is like ENOUGH!!!!  I love that boy, but sometimes his memorization skills are enough to drive you completely MAD!

My family has always made bets… especially my dad.  The bets are usually on football games and they are always for a buck or two… until whatever team my dad picks for the week/game is up in points… then his bets MIRACULOUSLY become twenty bucks or something.  We have gone ahead and taught this competitive spirit to my children.  Kaiden and Kelly have been betting on football games.  Yesterday, Kaiden’s latest winnings came in the mail from Aunt Kelly in Florida.  She got the following note with a $1 bill.

They upped their bet for the Super Bowl from $1 to $5.  Ashton is not betting money yet (that comes with age and the ability to do chores and earn the money you are betting), but he has not ONCE missed out on joining in on the spirit of a good fight… so Aunt Kelly made sure to include a little note for him too…

Cracks me up… Ashton immediately started chuckling and under his breath said “in her face MORE,” then looked at me and said “Mom, write her a message on your phone right now and tell her “IN HER FACE MORE… HER TEAM IS GOING TO LOSE!”

Today I am going to write about one of the best road trips I have ever taken in my life.  A trip that is the perfect example of when the actual trip was more fun than the destination.  This trip was to go see Lollapalooza in Raleigh, NC back in 1994 with a group of awesome friends.  We were all really excited to go to this concert, there were a lot of bands playing that we all loved and who doesn’t love a good road trip with friends.  The lineup for the concert was as follows:

Main Stage: The Smashing Pumpkins, Beastie Boys, George Clinton & the P-Funk All Stars, The Breeders, A Tribe Called Quest, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, L7, Green Day

Side Stage: The Flaming Lips, The Verve, The Boo Radleys, Guided by Voices, Lambchop, Girls Against Boys, Rollerskate Skinny, Palace Songs, Stereolab, Fu-Schnickens, The Pharcyde, Shudder to Think, Luscious Jackson, God Lives Underwater, King Kong, Charlie Hunter Trio, Shonen Knife, Blast Off Country Style, Souls of Mischief, Cypress Hill, The Black Crowes

There were a bunch of us going, so we took several cars, booked a couple hotel rooms for after the concert to share and were ready to set off on our adventure to the Walnut Creek Amphitheater.  In order to fit more people into less cars, I talked my mom into letting me drive her Suburban, which easily fit like eight of us with no problems.  Two other cars full of people followed us.  The trip down was nothing spectacular.. I mean, we had fun, laughing and doing other stuff, but that was not the leg of the trip that made this particular trip so memorable.  The actual concert was SO GOOD.  I remember it being 200 degrees hotter than hell that day, but we had a blast despite the heat.  When the sun went down and we saw The Beastie Boys and The Smashing Pumpkins - I remember us all talking and saying “this will be one of the greatest concerts we ever see in our entire lives” and it was, to this day, it was.  We stayed to the very end of the concert, found our cars, located our hotel, took turns in the showers of our rooms washing all the sweat off and drank until we all passed out.

The next morning, we woke up and found a Denny’s to go eat breakfast at before leaving for the almost four hour trip back to Virginia Beach.  Now… once we were on the road, I cannot for the life of me remember what started the fight between two of the cars… but I do know that it was a fight that none of us will ever forget.  We STILL laugh about this story whenever we all get together.  Because we were broke ass 18 and 19 year olds, we had packed a cooler full of shit to keep in the Suburban.  T.R. and his girlfriend Lee-Anne (now his wife) were in charge of cooler duty.  Lee-Anne was a total hippy, so she seriously filled the cooler with granola bars and freaking wheat bread, which in itself made us laugh our asses off!  She packed bread… and nothing to put on the bread and granola bars.  WTF were we going to do with that shit?  By the end of the trip, of course all the ice in the cooler had completely melted and we were left with a cooler, filled with water, a loaf of soaked wheat bread and some soaked-ass granola bars.  My friends Seth and Kathryn were in the car behind us, his ultra-sweet Nissan Sentra (Seth, Kathryn and I were the three founding members of the Nissan Sentra Club - since we all drove the exact same car in three different colors).  I don’t know if Seth wouldn’t get off my ass or what… but at some point we decided to start making grenades out of the soaked stuff in the cooler, rolling down the huge back window in the Suburban and pelting them at Seth’s windshield on the highway.  Because we had the back window, we could get a direct hit every time, causing shit to go all over the windshield and make him swerve all over the road.  We were DYING laughing.  It did not take Seth and Kathryn long to wise up, start digging through their cooler and try to pass us on the road and pelt our car with food.

This went on for OVER an hour until we ran out of shit to throw at each other.  That is when our car decided to call a “truce” and act like we needed gas.  We pulled into a gas station/convenience store and got some gas, while T.R. and a few others went in and stocked up on the TWO things, that we discussed would win this war for us.  Eggs and Potted Meat.

We did the best we could hiding our arsenal and getting back into the car before continuing our journey home.  We all felt confident that our plan was going to be the better plan… and honestly we were laughing like complete f*cking idiots.  I mean who does this shit on a highway?  They had also gone in the store, and we could only imagine what they had decided to buy… there was this eery silence between the cars.  Everyone knew this was not a truce and gas stop, it was a “re-up” stop for more ammo.  Everyone was back in their cars and we were back on the road.  We got a few miles down the road, when Seth tried to speed in front of me on the highway, cut me off and throw what they had purchased onto my windshield.  What was it that hit my windshield?

A freaking Hostess Fruit Pie.  THAT is what they decided to buy to continue our on-road, vehicular food fight.  That is when we unleashed an attack on them that should have gone down in the history books alongside The Battle of Gettysburg!  We sped in front of them and with much thought and planning, took out the two dozen eggs we bought and specifically started aiming for the front grill of Seth’s car and the cracks around the hood… each hit oozing egg down into the engine of the car and getting into the vent system.  Because of the extreme heat, the eggs spoiled and fried immediately, sending the most foul “egg-fart” smell through Seth’s car.  We had taken out their air conditioning with the smell and they were forced to ride with their windows down for the remainder of the trip home, or be forced to smell the eggs, have cool air and then vomit because of the smell.  Next up… the potted meat.  We scooped this out of the cans, and aimed for the windshield.  When this stuff hit, it just splatted and spread.  When Seth tried hitting the windshield wipers to clear his line of sight… the windshield wipers smeared a layer of disgusting. meaty grease across the windshield.  We had TWELVE of these pots that we unleashed on his windshield.  Seth and Kathryn were DONE.  We had won and it was such an amazing victory, considering that we had seriously almost wrecked like 30 times as we hit speeds of over 100mph and kept repeatedly trying to pass each other and cut each other off to “get the next hit” in.

Seth had to drive the last hour of the trip with windows open, a car WREAKING of rotten eggs and with his head out the window so he could even see the road because his windshield was WRECKED.  His car was covered in wet granola (think oatmeal) and bread, fried egg and potted meat.  My car was covered in leftover sandwiches and stuff from their cooler and looked like it had been hit with a fruit pie machine gun.  I can only imagine what other cars driving near us were thinking.  When we got off the highway in Virginia Beach, we headed straight for a car wash, where Seth and I both pulled in and we all got out laughing our asses off and seriously telling each other stuff like “good battle” and shaking hands.  It took almost two hours for all of us to scrub both cars clean - but it was TOTALLY worth it.  It went down in history as being one of the all-time best road trips in all of our lives.  Epic even.