More company, back at the track
Our merry go round of company continued this weekend. My brother-in-law & sister-in-law and my neice were down to visit for the weekend. We have never had a toddler in our house before. She is 14 or 15 months old. On Friday afternoon they drove over from Miami. We decided to just cook out on the grill and hang out. For whatever reason I drank a lot (for me) I think I had about a six pack. I wasn’t stupid drunk but it made me very tired. We were watching Matrix and during the last third of it I was passing in and out of consciousness.
On Saturday I was happy to hear that my brother-in-law was into going to the dog track. It was a good time. I started off hot on the first race. A 2 dollar quinella bet hit for 32 bucks. Yes!! I then hit an extended dry spell and only hit one small bet for the next 6 or 7 races. Then I caught on fire and won on the last 6 races. In the end I turned my initial 20 bucks into 75. A good day in my book. I REALLY like the track. The funniest track moment was after one of the last few races, the winning dog was out on the track after all the other dogs had left. It looked like his trainer was trying to take his muzzle off. Closer examination revealed that the dog had ripped one of the pacer rabbits off the pole and had a death grip on it. Finally the trainer got it away from the canine. It promptly went after the other rabbit that was still on the pole and attacked it. It was funny as hell. Evidently the dog has a deep hatred of “Sparky” the pace rabbit. No wonder he won.
Saturday evening we went to a restaurant we were never at before. I made a bad choice for an entre but everyone else liked their meal. It was a nice enough place, but pricy. I always have a hard time justifying spending a fortune on a meal. Eating just isn’t a big enough turn on for me for it to make sense. My brother-in-law paid for the meal. I felt bad because I knew it was steep. I had the least expensive entre and we used our entertainment card to get one of the meals for free, a small consolation. This is always one of the tough parts of having company down. When you go out to dinner there is always that uncomfortable moment when the check arrives when the “I’ll pay, we”ll pay” stuff starts. I really hate that. It would be much simpler if we could just agree to go dutch and each couple pays for their stuff. Then there is no need to keep mental score of who spent what and it would just make things simpler. Oh well that is unlikely to happen.
Sunday was a low key day. We spent most of it hanging out by the pool relaxing. Usually for me, a “day” spent at the pool means I hang out there an hour or two. We were out there for the better part of 5 hours, a record for me. As a result we all got a bit toasted. It is always a weird thing to me that after a day spent doing next to nothing lying by or in the pool, it can actually make you feel tired like you actually did something. We cleaned up, went to dinner at Snook’s where we had a good but not outstanding dinner. Our waitress wasn’t great and by Sunday we had caught up about most things so most of the time was spent paying attention to my neice. I picked up the check this time since I was in a dinner “deficit” because they paid the night before. We came home and were all tired. They left early this morning.
Like I said earlier, this is the first time we have had a baby in the house for any period of time. She is very cute but I can’t honestly say it turned on any feelings that I suddenly wanted a child. My sister-in-law basically spent 99.9% of her waking moments making sure the baby was content. Having a baby in the house sort of has an oil spill effect. Baby stuff slowly spreads everywhere. Going anywhere is quite laborious, all the supplies have to be loaded, checked, maintained and carried with you at all times. It also seems that the parents become primarily servants to the baby’s every need and most other aspects of themselves get pushed into the background. It definitely was an eye opener. We have one more scheduled visitor next month and then we will be back to normal.
3 day work week then up to PA to play in the Rumble. For whatever reason, my bad knee must know the Rumble is coming because it has started to ache on cue. Annoying. My big test is tomorrow so 2 more days of cramming is on the schedule.