check your sugarcoat at the door

The end of a holiday weekend woes are with me, unlike the Force. I loathe the creep up to the alarm firing off after a few days of blissful late nights and later mornings.

Friday was nice, when my boss allowed us all to duck out early. I was super selfish and came home for my workout before I picked up my kid from school. I know, to hell with me. I actually doubled that workout in anticipation of All The Beer. We had some vague plan shapes that frothed over into nothing when Josh went out to finish the dragon tattoo on his arm. I hung out at home with kid, did some shopping, did some cleaning. A young gentleman got in line behind me at the grocery store with a case of beer. I told him to cut in front and he asked if I was sure. “Come on, you’re obviously going somewhere fun and I’m *sweeping gesture over the cart of lunch foods and dinner ingredients* going home.”

The thing about being home sort of alone on a Friday night is how fucking awesome it’s become. I am thrilled for those wide open weekends with few to no commitments so I be loungey and cleaney and do everything I want according to my watch.

My watch is set like that of most other Pacific time zone dwellers, so I guess I do things according to theirs too but you know.

At one point my mom called and asked what we were doing. I told her Kiddo and I were fresh off a “penis and vagina conversation*,” to which she asked what one had to do with the other. “Um… a lot?”
“Really? Penises and pajamas?”
Choke laughs, snorts and tears followed. I told her what I’d actually said, baffled that she hadn’t put it together on her own, and told Kiddo, “Grammy thought we were talking about penises and pajamas. Haha, go wipe your pajama!”
“No, YOU wipe your pajama, Mom!”

Totally had to be there. Mom got it right when she said, “Yours is the only eight-year-old that would laugh at that.”

*It’s high time she had an educated conversation about those, IMO.

Halfway through a cheap bottle of red and several Chelsea Lately episodes down, Josh came home, showered off the Bactine smell and showed me his new, raw goods. He has had the outline of a “paper cut” style dragon in need of shading on his forearm, which I fawned over and accidentally touched a few dozen times.

Then I touched his bathrobe, over his chest, and he flinched. He opened the robe to reveal a freshly shaved patch of chest with my name BLAZED across in large, fancy letters.

“Oh, you’re not fucking around, huh?”
“Nope.”

This is translated roughly to: “Oh, you’re very serious about us, huh?”
“I am.”

There’s some history here: In October of 2002, eight months after we’d met, he came home to his pregnant, sleeping girlfriend to reveal a small, printed “Jill” on his chest, with a small x dotting the ‘i.’ A few months after Kiddo was born, I took on a scripty little “Josh” on my right hip. Over the years, his little chest piece faded and faded. I asked him to get it touched up but it never happened. Queue epic breakup of 2007, after which I spent thirteen hours (in three sessions) under a needle to get a huge, colorful dragon down my ribcage to my hip, covering his name completely. HA, I scoffed. And then last summer, we got back together. He still had my name, despite having dated others in our down time. If I mentioned touching it up, he gave me that look that says, “Bitch, please. You erased me.”

A (super-cropped) glimpse of the top portion of my cover-up:

Needless to say I did not expect this huge, bold proclamation in place of his tiny, faded one. I’m still shocked when I see him shirtless. It makes me giddy.

Saturday was the day for All The Beer. My neighbor rolled his BBQ downstairs to our common courtyard/front lawnish type area and grilled up some burgers, brats and dogs. We had a number of folding chairs out under an awning filled with friendly faces. Perched next to me was my blue ice chest filled with frosty Coronas, which I sipped on for a solid seven or eight hours, in between dipping chips and smoking cigars. On every rare occasion we get this group together, we say, “Why don’t we do this more often?!” There’s no right answer. It was a really good night that even included some new faces, though I’ve forgotten the names attached to them.

At (my) of the night (11ish) (some others didn’t head home until dawn) came a text message from my friend Oscar, inviting me to a one o’clock Dodger game the next day, which I happily agreed to. Once I was jersey’d and ready that next morning, I found out we were on the FIELD. The tickets retail around $120 each and could have sold for over $200, surely. They were incredible seats, which we toasted to over and over. They were a last minute gift from a rep at our work who I will seek out and hug. I drunk-Tweet’d from said incredible seats.

There are so few things better than perfect weather at your favorite team’s stadium, cold beers and good company. When my plastic cup emptied, I spied a new one in the next cup holder. “A fresh one?!” I asked Oscar. And he said, which will stick forever, “The beer fairy came.”

The girl I’d overheard turned out to be this hilarious, super baked young girl that we laughed with as well as at for about seven innings after we’d shook hands and declared ourselves friends. That’s one of my favorite things anymore; those single serving friends you meet when you let your guard down and stop thinking the world believes you to be a freak.

And today: Kiddo went off to swim with a girlfriend and Josh and I were blessed with a sudden three hour window for an afternoon date. We loaded up on gummy type candies and hit the movie theater for Hangover 2. If you find the first one to be epically hilarious, and you should, this one is worth seeing. It’s not up to the same caliber as the first, though not much is. It is very, very funny though.

Now I’m slow-cooking some chicken and looking forward to some serious ice cream eating in bed with my freshly inked and wonderfully sexy lovah.

-CJ